Self Employed Success

For many small business owners, just making your financial obligations month-by-month is difficult. But as your business grows and becomes more profitable, it’s time to start thinking about saving some of that profit towards your retirement.

The IRS has a guide to help define the different types of retirement plans and how they affect your taxes. Publication 560, Retirement Plans for Small Businesses will help you wade through the information and select the right retirement plans for you (and your employees):

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p560.pdf

According to this article by Merle in SmallBusinessNewz, MSN Search is launching a pilot program for their own version of Pay Per Click advertising, competing head-to-head with Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. You can sign up for the pilot program here:

http://advertising.msn.com/searchadv/PilotForm.asp

I can’t wait to get my hands on this! Google has a great interface for PPC, and Yahoo’s is terrible, so it will be interesting to see what MSN has come up with.

If your organic search rankings are good in one search engine, and not so good in another, sometimes PPC is the way to go until you can do your SEO work.

Yesterday was the tax deadline for many small businesses in America, and with the USA tax deadline looming for sole proprietorships (April 17), you need all the business tax advice you can get.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has set up a tax page for businesses, which you might find helpful:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/index.html

The page specifically for small businesses and the self-employed is here:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/index.html

And for those of you who work from home, this Publication 587, Business Use of Your Home is invaluable (in PDF format):

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p587.pdf

You’ll want to read this great report, The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity for 2005, by Robert W. Fairlie (in PDF format). It includes research into entreprenuerial trends like:

• There are approximately 550,000 new business created each month in the USA
• Entrepreneurial activity is highest in the western portion of the country
• Rates of growth are highest in the construction industry

This report is easy-to-read and decipher and is helpful for any small business owner to see the trends for the past few years.

The Milken Institute has released it’s “2005 Best Performing Cities.” It ranks large and small metro areas based on several business factors, including job growth and wage growth. If part of your marketing strategy is to sell to other businesses, you’ll want to look at this report:

http://bestcities.milkeninstitute.org/