Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software posted a follow-up to his previous article on VentureBeat in which he asked several new questions, and this time the theme was around managing an entrepreneurs time and priorities.

“If you were forced to hire someone today, how would you define her job such that she would contribute enough revenue to cover her expense?”
This is a great question, because it removes the knee-jerk, “I can’t afford to hire anyone” excuse. Instead, it requires really considering what it would take to make an employees role pay for itself. It may not be possible just yet, but defining what this would look like is a huge step to getting your business to a position where it’s possible.

“Which of your business operations do you hate?”
I particularly like this one because it’s an important reminder that some things we spend time on are such energy drains that they actually will bring down our overall productivity, even on tasks we enjoy. One of the things that entrepreneurs need to understand is how to manage their own energy levels in order to effectively manage my time.

“What initiatives could be done half-assed without significant impact?”
This is a great question because it’s the type of thing that no one ever wants to admit they consider. And yet, to Jason’s point, it’s something that we always need to keep in mind. Every task has a ‘point of diminishing returns,’ where the time and effort you put into it starts to exceed the value that you will get out of it. It is always important to be mindful of that threshold, because otherwise it’s easy to get caught in the cycle of perfectionism that will consume your time with no return.

“If you could get one solid hour of advice from a guru you respect, what would you discuss and what would be the goal of the meeting?”
This question is well-worded because, again, it is forcing you to consider how you are spending your time. It’s not, “If you could ask them anything, what would it be?” It is specifically, “If you could get one solid hour…” Period. Prioritize.

No one has endless time and resources. The people who are most successful are the ones who figure out how to maximize what they have, and work around what they don’t. And one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to remember is that the single most scarce resource you have, is usually you.

Item number one:

The Shift to Contingent Workers Turns Employees into Entrepreneurs: Employers large and small are shifting from full-time employees to part-timers, freelancers, outsourced services, partnership arrangements and other forms of contingent workers. They are doing this to save money and increase business flexibility. Despite the economic recovery, 2010 will see the contingent workforce grow as companies continue to limit hiring of full time staff. Many of these contingent workers will create or work for small businesses.

Item number two:

Personal Businesses on the Rise: Enabled by the Internet and low-cost information technology, the number of personal businesses (one employee businesses) has grown twice as fast as the overall economy over the last decade and exceeds 22 million. With the unemployment rate remaining high and traditional employment options limited, 2010 will be another year of strong growth in the number of personal businesses. The growth in personal businesses will also result in an increase in overall small business formation and numbers in 2010.

Clearly I’ve written about this issue before, and it’s something that always stirs up a lot of controversy because it hits a lot of hot buttons for many people. Personally, I love these trends. Even more than that, I think these trends are ultimately beneficial in ways that most of us currently don’t recognized.

In the 17th century, to whatever extent workers were organized, it was on a guild model that was discipline centric. Whether a person was a blacksmith or a cobbler, their “peers” were other professionals within the same trade. In the most literal sense, they were competitors who had comperable skills and offered similar services. They were mostly what we would now call ‘freelancers’ who were responsible for their own independent businesses, from stem to stern.

With the rise of the Industrial Age, the shift moved away from individual contributors with specialized skills, to collection of skills brought together to work collaboratively as part of a larger enterprise. Because of the financial investment involved with building these enterprises (factories being the most obvious and common example), the rules for workers changed.

A paternalistic model emerged, where large businesses had to lure people to them. Companies would make long-term committments to their people — pensions, healthcare, education for the kids, mortages, and more — and the people would develop long-term (and sometimes even multi-generational) relationships with the company.

Now that was are in (or even past, as some claim) an Information Age, the employee model needs to be re-examined. And while plenty of people don’t like the idea of a contingent workforce (and I understand why), the fact is that is an employment model that makes far more sense for the rules that come with an information economy.

Geography is no longer the end-all-be-all of meaningful and well-paid work; large companies no longer have to stockpile human talent like cord wood in the event that the right spark of creative genius will occur for them if they just have enough people thinking big thoughts; and small motivated teams in garages are just as capable of creating lucrative, innovative ideas as multi-billion dollar corporations.

The reason I think that these trends are particularly valuable for entrepreneurs and small businesses is for one simple reason: this change is much harder for large businesses, with large investments, and large real estate holdings and enormous legacy systems (both techical and policy-based) to evolve to match. Small businesses simply have less baggage. This gives entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses an edge that the Fords and Proctor and Gamble’s of the world do not have.

Yes, there are always going to be employees who are simply looking to punch a clock in exchange for a paycheck: not everyone is cut out for the entrepreneurial life (and the fact that our education system is designed to funnel people into an employee role doesn’t help). The number and types of those jobs are going to continue to change and dwindle over time as ideas like Results Only Work Environments continue to gain momentum. But for entrepreneurs the value is in the flexibility.

Knowledge workers are not unlike tradesmen: we think nothing of assembling a plumber, an electrican, a carpenter, a roofer and a painter to build a garage. This is valuable work, and the individuals involved are often ‘freelancers’ who are each specialists in their fields. They have partners they like to work with, but they are individual contributors who must work together to accomplish large projects because it is unrealistic to assume that any of them would have all the skills required to do the whole thing themselves.

Knowledge workers are much the same: if you combine a project manager, a developer, a designer and a systems engineer to build a website, that is a valuable association of individual contributors who come together to deliver a project bigger than what each of them could do alone. Even better, unlike a construction crew, a web team is not hindered by geography, weather or super expensive equipment investment to get started.

Naturally, there are downsides to that model: once one job ends, you need to have another one lined up or money saved to wait out the time in-between work. This model requires developing different skills and exercising fiscal discipline in ways that may not always be necessary when working for someone else. This model also requires a dash of realism that many people who cling to the fantasy of “job security” are reluctant to give up: after all, your company could lay you off as soon as your current project is over with, too. The days of ‘guarentees’ are long gone.

Learning to be flexible and take advantage of what the information economy can offer will make the difference betwee those who succeed in the new era, and those who flounder. That is, of course, why even USA Today has called this The Era of Small Business.

It is not uncommon to hear small business owners discuss this problem. And just as common is an assumption that this problem is biggest when it comes to dealing with other small businesses. Yet, according to a recent article on BusinessWeek, it’s actually large companies (with 1,000+ employees) who are most commonly deliquent paying their bills.

Quoting the results of Experian’s Business Benchmark Report for December 2009, BusinessWeek’s article discusses some of the reasons that it is not uncommon for larger organizations to be the worst offenders when it comes to paying the monthly bills. The short version is pretty simple: because they can.

While I have no doubt that is at least partially true, I think there are other factors at play as well. And from my time inside enterprise environments, there are several other steps I make a habit of doing specifically to help manage some of the risk involved.

Payment Structure
Instead of charging by the hour (which is usually not the best solution for entrepreneurs, anyway), charge by the job. Forget hourly accounting and daily charges if at all possible, and simply bid the job. Obviously that’s not always possible, but if it is, then the advantage to you is that you can change the payment schedule.

Charge one-third at the time of contract signing, one-third at the time of a specific (ideally based on a project milestone), and one-third at the time of completion. There is, of course, still risk in this, but setting up a payment schedule that includes a large first installment does help mitigate the danger.

Invoice Due Date
Tighten up your due date on your invoices. Even if you are on net 30 terms with your client, put the invoice due date 15 days out instead. Many places prioritize invoices by due date, and if you are on net 30 terms, many of them will not even think of moving you to the top of the To Pay stack until day 29.

Get Contact Info
One of the things that the BusinessWeek article didn’t mention is that a common problem with large companies is a lack of personal accountability thanks to complex processes, systems and diffused responsibility. The best way to get around this is to get a name: who should you speak to about your invoices? And then build a relationship with them. Start with an introduction — in person, if possible, but over the phone if nothing else. Do it long before the first invoice is due.

Introduce yourself and start off by asking them if there is anything they need from you. Double-check with them about their process, and make sure they know who to reach if they have any questions. While the phrase “it’s all about relationships” has been extensively over-used in recent years, the fact is that it’s true. So take advantage of it.

Late Fee Schedule
When all else fails, be sure that your contract includes a late fee schedule. A client not paying you on time damages your business, and can sometimes drain your bank account, so make sure that you are getting some compensation for that on the back-end, even in the worst case scenario.

Write it into the contract that the lawyers approve and everyone signs. If you decide to waive it as a show of good faith at some point, that’s up to you and part of your relationship-building. But at least if you’ve included it, you have a leg to stand on if the client leaves you holding the bag for too long.

The truth is, there is no easy way around it: clients who pay late cause a lot of pain in small businesses. And while BusinessWeek’s story only discussed a couple of reasons that it happens, the bottom line is that it does happen — and small business owners who count on contracts with large enterprises need to make sure they’ve covered their bases. And the time to do that is, as always, up front. Not after the fact.

Prior to meeting him, I hadn’t specifically thought about either entrepreneurship or leadership in those terms, but since meeting him, I’ve started to realize that the key to most understanding and development lies in uncovering the right questions to ask. And as I look around me, I see that questions are a common theme for entrepreneurs as we get 2010 off to an entrepreneurial start.

Getting Started

For new or prospective entrepreneurs — especially those who know they want to start their own business but who have not yet figured out what that could or should be — StartupNation offers a list of questions to ask yourself to find your passion.

Passion is a favorite topic among entrepreneurs, and for good reason: starting your own business takes a lot of time, energy and sacrifice. Loving what you are doing, believing in the value you are providing, and finding meaning in your goals can sometimes make all the difference between doing what needs to be done, or going out and getting a job at Starbucks just to have health insurance again.

Never underestimate the importance of passion. It’s not something you can fake. And being passionate about what you are doing is how you find the mentors, partners, collaborators and customers who are going to be necessary for you to grow your business — because people want to be inspired and motivated, and that can only happen when someone is passionate.

Building Your Business

If you’ve got a startup that’s still getting underway, VentureBeat has a list of questions for entrepreneurs to ask to help get through the difficult early stages of a new business. With a focus on the types of things that new businesses, new teams and new products need to keep in mind, VentureBeat’s list focuses on getting your venture out of the crib and up on its feet.

Growing Your Business

For those who have been running a business for a while, Business Know-How identifies the questions that are cricital for any leader to ask themselves. Think of these questions like hitting the ‘reset button’ and clearing the decks. They are designed to help you stop, think, remember and evaluate where you are, how you got there and what you need to do to change course based on updated input.

One of the hardest things for human beings to do is change habits. Yet, as entrepreneurs, sometimes our habits can kill our business. It’s often too easy to forget that what worked yesterday may not work today, and probably won’t work tomorrow. Often times, the entrepreneur is so used to handling day-in/day-out activity of the business that they lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Stopping, asking these questions, reconsidering your previous assumptions and then examining what has changed around you are all important steps for an entrepreneur to take to make sure that both you and your business remain relevant and competitive.

In reality, of course, no matter what stage your business is in, each set of these questions has value. After all, over time it’s not just our business, competitive landscape or customer base that can change — but our passion and interest as well. One of the hardest questions of all for an entrepreneur to answer may simply be, “Is this the business I want to be in anymore?”

Either way, the real lesson in all of these questions is: Never assume. Always ask. And start with yourself.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas

In the end, though, I always end up advocating one thing: valuable content.   And while I often get a lot of ‘yes ma’am’ head nodding around that topic, there is a single critical reason that I continue to make that point: the world of search is on a roller coaster at the moment, and trying to play the SEO game with the current set of rules is only going to get you a short-term win (if that) without putting your focus on strong, valuable content. This is a great untapped opportunity for entrepreneurs, because they are better equipped to move faster than large businesses, full of teams of people whose job would be in danger if they were not longer perceived as critical.

People who are unfamiliar with the online search space often do not understand what I mean when I talk about the imminent changes to the the industry.  Today I’ll cover a few examples, thanks to some new releases that Google has just made. (Examples from Google’s official blog.)

• Personalized search
• Real time search

What is “personalized search“?

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

What is “real time search“?

Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

These are two great examples, because they demonstrate why having relevant content on your website is important.  Focusing your SEO energy (and budget) on building link-backs and fine-tuning your keywords has limited value in the long-term, because search engines are going to increasingly focus on other things to establish relevancy.

Just these two changes alone mean that two different people can type in the same keywords but get different results, depending on their personal search history and when they look.  And, if you factor in the increasingly popular localized search, what city those users are in could also impact their results.

What excites me most about these changes is that it further helps in taking the focus off the means and onto the end: your web presence should be about engaging your customers in a meaningful way, finding new customers and enhancing your existing relationship.  Far too many people focus on jockeying for a good SEO position in spite of their content, instead of focusing on the content first and using it as a foundation for successful SEO.

The tidal wave of changes in the search space is going to make it increasingly hard to duck the real question for all businesses on the web: are you saying anything worth paying attention to?  If you are, then these updated techniques will only help you.  If you are not and have been playing SEO-peek-a-boo, then these changes are going to expose that.

I see far too many entrepreneurs who have been taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous “SEO consultants,” and one of my chief missions is to help prevent that wherever possible. So before you look to hire SEO help, ask yourself if you are prepared to actually create (or pay for) good content for your website.

In the modern web-based business world, there is an updated version to your grandmother’s old saying:  “If you don’t have anything relevant to say, don’t say anything at all.”  These new changes by Google will continue to make that point.

(This post is part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series and was originally published on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.)

Think about your normal daily experience: if you need to deal with your bank, your insurance company or your utility provider, you call an 800 number, where you are greeted with an automated message, a phone tree that routes you through a series of menus, as much automated information as they can possibly prepare, and then — if you’re problem is too complicated to automate — eventually you may get a person.

And then what happens?

You have to repeat your account number, despite having entered it already (at least once); you have to answer questions to validate your identity (or, worse yet, you don’t, which always begs the question: who else can get into my account?); and then you can get around to your question.

In many cases, by the time you get to speak to a real person you are dealing with a call center on the other side of the planet, non-native speakers (who sometimes struggle mightily with English), and in worst case scenarios, people who are clearly reading from a script with very little real understanding of either the nature of your problem or how best to handle it.

And when it’s all said and done, how often do you go through all of that, and get off the phone feeling totally confident that your issue was resolved? Rarely. More often than not, most of us get off the phone feeling like we just got the run around so badly that we need to double and triple check our next round of statements to make sure no one messed anything up.

All in all, because of the economic needs for businesses to automate and off-shore customer service functions, the general state of Customer Service is often crap.

This is where small business owners can be Superman. Seriously. For most small businesses, we don’t have the volume to go through all of that expense and hassle. Our customers often have our direct phone number. They know where to find us, how to reach us and what our specialty is. And while that may not always be great for our daily productivity (and it can certainly be abused at times), it gives small business owners the chance to leave our customers with a far, far better customer service experience than the one they just had with their credit card company.

We talk so much about business that we often over-look the most important fact of all: business is conducted between two or more PEOPLE. Sure, there are functions that can be automated and there are often good reasons to do it. But when you leave your customer feeling like less than an actual person, you’ve just provided a lousy customer service experience. Small businesses, because of logistics, have a built-in advantage. And it’s one we should all remember to take advantage of.

This is part of a much broader issue, though, and it’s one that is a constant struggle for most small businesses: how do we keep new sales coming in the door, when that’s not our background?

I find this to be a particularly big issue in the web space. So many of the entrepreneurs that I meet come from a development background, and they have started their venture with the Field of Dreams theory: “If I build it, they will come.”

And more often than not, nothing could be further from the truth. And even worse, is that all too often, a new entrepreneur will build a product with no thought to marketing or sales strategy until they are done building, and then they will shift their attention to client acquisition, as an after thought.

Often times this doesn’t happen until the entrepreneur is out of money, so hiring the right help is almost never affordable, and the entrepreneur is running so low on their savings that they are watching the clock tick down before they have to give up and go get a J-O-B from someone else.

The horrible reality is that marketing and sales is where most entrepreneurs drop the ball — and that is true whether your business is a product or services business. People have taken the democratization of data (the “Google effect”) to mean that, as long as they offer something good, that means they’ll be able to find customers. But that’s not true at all. The democratization of data means that you’re now competing with thousands of competitors doing something similar enough to what you are doing, that you not only need to be better, but you also need to find all new ways to get customers’ attention.

The rule of thumb for a new business owner is simple: your first year marketing and sales budget should be the same as your first year development budget.

Where technical entrepreneurs get into trouble is in thinking that since they didn’t have to pay anyone else to build their product, that means that their marketing budget can be small, too. Wrong. Do the match as if you had to pay someone, by the hour, to do the work. And then you’ve got a start.

But even more important than cost is timing: don’t wait until you’re at the end of the line to start marketing your business. By then you can’t afford experts, experimentation or the time it takes to really see progress.

The bottom line: building a marketing strategy with a solid sales pipeline won’t happen over night. If you wait until the week before you run out of money, you’re never going to get there. Start early, and put the same degree and quality of resources into the revenue generating aspects of your business as you do into your product.

After all, isn’t making money with your product critical to your business? Don’t make the mistake of treating it like an unworthy afterthought.

Since Justin and I are the same age (mid-30′s), it’s probably easy to assume that my source of pissiness was the same as his: Get over yourself, you big babies.

In point of fact, though, my source of pissiness is him being pissy about these survey results. Because, while I may have nearly two decades on the participants of that survey, add me into the group for whom that would make a difference. And while my reasons may not look the same on the surface, I’d venture to say that they probably aren’t as far off as some of my old fart peers might assume.

During my entire career, I have only spend three and a half months working at a company that was neither a startup nor a tech company. You know why I only lasted 3.5 months? Because the 30 year old company had a 30 year old culture that hadn’t seen any modern influences since the Nixon era.

What became crystal clear to me in that environment — an environment, by the way, when even during the NYC public transportation strike, when some of us had absolutely no means of getting to the office at all (depending on where you lived) vehemently prohibited anything as ‘lax’ as working from home — is that the technologies and business practices a company adopts speak to who and what they are as a business. Culture informs everything; and you learn a lot about a company by its rules and policies.

Here is what it says to me about a culture, if a business blocks access to social networks:

• You don’t trust your employees. If you have employees who are abusing the problem, then grow a set, fire them and leave the rest to do their job in the way that makes most sense for them.
• You are not allowing your employees access to valuable tools for business. Whether it’s current events, industry news or general networking with peers in other companies, Twitter is the single most powerful tool I have in my daily arsenal. Facebook is a close second. I get complex questions answered faster, find out industry-specific news more quickly, and generally manage to navigate my knowledge worker day far more effectively with Twitter than I ever did without. If an employer didn’t let me have access to it, I wouldn’t work for that employer.
• You are sticking your head in the sand and may as well paint a great big target on your ass. If you are restricting access to social media, then you are deliberately choosing to ignore changing trends in the marketplace around you. As an employee, any employer who deliberately did that would be someone I would think twice about working for, because I would read that as an indication of their attitude toward change and innovation in general — which has huge cultural implications for where and how I spend my day each and every week.
• You are being capricious. Blogs are as much social media as Facebook is. Are you going to block access to those, too? If so, that would include most major news outlets (after all, NYT is on WordPress), and source of current events. And what about Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Yelp, YouTube, Flickr, Trippit or LinkedIn? They are all social networks. You going to block them, too?
• You are misallocating resources. Does your IT team really have nothing better to do with their time than to lock down the firewall to prevent me from getting to Twitter or Facebook? IT talent is expensive (I know: I’ve spent a well-paid career in that space), if you can’t think of something better for them to do than that, they you are not the type of company I want to work for.
• You are missing the point. Facebook (and text messaging) is how that age group communicates. Cutting them off from that would be like cutting me off from email and expecting me to be as fast, as accurate or as deft at navigating my day. Just because you and I have different preferred methods of communication does not make yours more valid than mine.
• You are setting a bad precedent. If you are summarily blocking social media, what other innovations can I expect that you will dismiss as having no value, despite the fact that your staff could find them profoundly impactful?
• You are fighting an unwinnable battle… which just makes you look lame. Business 101: Pick Your Battles.  The more time goes by, the more of your employees will have the same ability to ‘waste time’ via their smart phone as they do via a web browser. Are you going to confiscate their phones when they come to work, too?

So yes, if I was exploring working for someone, one of the things I’d want to understand was their social media policy. Absolutely. Just like having the ability to work from home when necessary, I consider that essential for my ability to be able to do my job well.

For those of us old enough to remember the internet before the web, I recognize that what is transformative about social networking is that it has made things that used to be hard much, much easier. I, for one, am not going to volunteer to hop in a time capsule and go back to making things harder again. Not if I can help it.

And though “marketing” is a broad discipline, one of the best places for many entrepreneurs to get started is their own website.  A website is to business today, what the phone book was in 1985.  And yet, despite all that, according to Carol Tice of Entrepreneur.com, a full 46% of small businesses still do not have a website.

Even more importantly, however, is that — if you chose carefully — your website can be an inexpensive place for you to test your message, develop your content and start reaching out to your customers without the extreme expense of traditional marketing and/or advertising campaigns.  And once you’ve had the chance to hone your material, then you can look at how else you can use it.

So, as promised last week, my focus for the final week of 2009 is going to be on the free tools that every business owner can use to help their business.  When it comes to my work with entrepreneurs, I usually start most clients off with one key recommendation: WordPress.

While most people know WordPress as a blogging application, the fact is that it is a fully matured content management system that makes managing your website far easier than attempting to deal with a custom coded site.  While some large-scale websites may need more advanced functionality, most entrepreneurs that I work with who are focused on getting their first site up and running find WordPress to meet their immediate needs.  Even better, your actual core WordPress functionality is free.

Here are a few quick steps to getting a business website up and running on WordPress in less than 2 hours:

Step 1: Select a hosting provider. (Low cost providers are fairly easy to come by.  My recommendation is to go with one that uses Simple Scripts.  It is a utility designed to help you manage installations of a host of applications on your domain.)

Step 2: Purchase your domain.  This can be done as part of your hosting provider purchasing process.  Many providers will even register a domain for you for free as part of your sign-up package.

Step 3: Once your purchase is complete, log into your administrative system and go into Simple Scripts.  Find WordPress.  Select the option for it to “install” in your root directory.

Step 4: After your installation set-up is complete, log into your WordPress admin and go to Settings –> Permalinks.  Under “Common Settings” select “Day and name.”  Hit save.

Step 5: Activate Akismet.  Akismet is a WordPress-built comment spam system.  Unless you want tons and tons of porn spam comments clogging up your website, make sure you turn on this Plugin.  In order to do that, you will need to go to WordPress.com and create an account (or login if you already have one).  Once in, select “My Account” from the main navigation, and then click on “Edit Profile.”  The alpha-numeric code you need (your API key) will be right at the top.  Copy it, and then paste it into your new WordPress install on your domain, in the Akismet settings page.

Step 6: Go to Appearance –> Plugins –> Add New.  This will give you a menu of different plugins that you can add to your installation of WordPress to help you customize it and get the functionality you need for your business website.  Some of the common plugins I recommend include the following:

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Google Analytics for WordPress
3. XML Sitemaps

I recommend these as starting points for new site owners, because they are extremely important in both driving and understanding traffic.  Additional options that I personally use are plugins for social network activity and “related post” plugins that recommend other articles that are similar to the one the reading is currently viewing.

You’ll need to follow the instructions for each of the plugins to make sure they are properly configured once installed.  Good plugins will walk you through the process, so as long as you follow the instructions, you should be able to get things set up fairly quickly.  (And remember, in a worst case scenario, you can always delete the plugin and then reinstall it, if there is a problem.)

Step 7: Pick a “theme.”  In WordPress-speak, a “theme” is the design of your site.  There are, literally, thousands of themes to choose from, many of them are free.  And even “premium themes” are reasonably affordable, ranging anywhere from $20 up to $200.  I recommend starting with something free, and going from there.  The first place to start looking for themes is within the WordPress admin itself.  Under Appearance –> Add New Themes you will find a menu that allows you to browse different themes, see what you like, and install them to try them out.

If you want to use a theme from a different location (such a Woo Themes, which is a popular seller of business themes for WordPress), you will need an FTP utility that allows you to transfer files from your computer up to your hosting provider.  An application such as FileZilla is also free, and comes with easy instructions that can walk you through the process.  (And any theme you download from another website will also give you instructions on where to upload it once you need to move it into place.)

Now you’ve got a website.

Of course, while this first part is what intimidates many non-technical people, the fact is that installing the site is actually the easiest part.  The hard part is developing your content — what needs to be on your site, what makes sense for your customers, and how should it be organized to be both findable and valuable.  Later this week we’ll cover more tools to use to help you manage your website and develop its content.

A couple of last words of advice on setting up your site with WordPress:

• Use a secure password that you can remember.  Far, far too many people either leave a default password in place (which they can never remember) or use one that is too simple (which can easily be hacked).  Keep in mind that this is your business website, and treat your password appropriately.
• WordPress issues updates to the code fairly regularly.  It is important to try to stay current, because a great many of the updates are security related.  Once the basic WordPress installation has been upgraded, often the plugins will need to be next.  You will get messages whenever you log into the admin, so just follow their instructions and you should be fairly safe.
• WordPress is very easy to get comfortable with, even for the least technical people.  So play around in the admin (or, even better yet, set up a second install in another directory on your website, so that you can experiment without damaging your main website).  To learn more about WordPress, I recommend checking out Yoast.com. Yoast is a site all about WordPress and maximizing it’s value.  There are tutorials, information, recommendations and a great deal of content there for someone trying to get up to speed on how to get the most out of their WordPress install.

Finally, many people ask if they can use free WordPress hosting for their blog. For businesses I strongly discourage this for a couple of reasons:

• Free WordPress hosting does not get your site running on your own domain, which is vital for your search engine optimization (SEO).
• Free WordPress hosting has a very tight number of themes that you can chose from, and you cannot modify them without paying.
• Free WordPress hosting has storage space limitations that could limit some of your multimedia options for posting content.
• Free WordPress hosting does not allow you the opportunity to generate any revenue through advertising.

This article was originally posted on WorkingPoint’s Small Business Blog.

One of the biggest assumptions I make is that the only real learning — in both life and business — is attained by doing. And usually doing is a constant experiment. Do, make a mistake, re-do, and repeat as needed.

But what about people who actually do learn in a more academic way? People who want and need to first read, then discuss, then process, then internalize and then try? And is it possible to be successful in life — and especially in your own business — if that’s the process you need to go through to learn?

That’s a perfectly fine solution for a 19-year-old, just getting started, who is still in school. But what about a mid-life professional in a career change, or launching a new venture? What do they do? If you’re trying to get a new business off the ground, you don’t get the luxury of pulling to the side of the road and going back to school for a couple of years.

For some of us, that’s ok. In fact, for some of us, that’s fabulous. But for others, it’s overwhelming, upsetting, frightening and debilitating. What is their solution?

The only thing I can think of is finding a mentor. But how does someone who needs an immersive learning experience find a full-time mentor to come into their new business for 3-6 months, and walk with them as they learn to navigate the treacherous world of a startup? Is it possible? And how does an unfunded startup compensate for that?

I’m genuinely curious and truly want to know how to blend a more traditional academic learning aptitude with the daily chaos of a startup business venture. The two feel mutually exclusive to me, but I feel confident that it can’t be an entirely unique problem, either. Someone somewhere must have solved it. But who? And where are they? And what did they do?