[TheVOICE] – 1st Venture, Starting A Biz Under $100, 2013 & Idiots

A lot is going on in the world of startups, business owners and entrepreneurs. Here are some great articles you should read from the week of December 9, 2012.

CEO Blog Nation

1. Every Entrepreneur Has to Start Somewhere: First Venture Stories [ANSWERS] (Hearpreneur) – Entrepreneurs and business owners explain how they started to become entrepreneurs.
2. Entrepreneurs & Business Owners Explain How They Maintain Balance [ANSWERS] (Rescue a CEO) – Entrepreneurs and business owners offer tips on how to balance the numerous tasks that come with being an entrepreneur.
3. 12 Steps to Start a Business for Under $100 (Rescue a CEO) – Guest post on how to start a business for Under $100.
4. ‘Tis the Season to Spruce Up Your Online Presence! (Rescue a CEO) – Guest post on things that entrepreneurs can do to increase their online presence.
5. What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Johnny Football (Progreshion) – Johnny Football won the Hesiman. Here's what you can learn from him to win the Heisman for your business.
6. Entrepreneurs & Business Owners Engage in Healthy Discussion at Small Business Forum (DMV CEO) – Over 150 people attended the Atlantic Small Business Forum held in conjunction with Bank of America and Gallup at the Gallup Building.

Across the Web

1. 20 Business Book Gift Ideas (Small Business Trends) – Books are a wonderful and affordable gift for small business owners. When you give the gift of a book, you’re giving the gift of knowledge. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving. 2012 has been a fantastic year for business books.
2. Twitter Starts Rolling Out Option To Download Your Twitter Archive: Request Every Tweet You’ve Ever Made In One File (Tech Crunch) – It looks like Twitter has started rolling out the option to let users download all their tweets — with some Twitter users reporting they are seeing an option to ‘request your archive’ appearing in their settings (h/t to TNW for spotting).
3. Five Ways to Use a Press Release to Promote your Small Business (Succeed As You Own Boss) – Something new or newsworthy about your product, service, business or related event. Sometimes you can hang a release on a trend, or an upcoming holiday or season, but events are easiest to get publicity for. Make it about what a targeted publication or blog’s readers want to know, and less about your business agenda. Self-serving releases are a waste of time and money.
4. The short head, the long tail and buying expensive scaffolding (Seth's Blog) – Hits are more valuable than ever, mostly because they're more rare than ever.
5. The Startups Making Entrepreneurs Look Like Idiots (Plan to Start) – Startups are getting out of hand.  It’s all over the media, egos are going to their heads, and I just wanted to bring some attention to what’s going on in the entrepreneur community.
6. 6 Things Every Founder Should Hear (but doesn’t want to) (Plan to Start) – Sometimes, you need to hear the tough things no one wants to tell you; but every founder should hear.  To some, they’re obvious.  But others…not so much.
7. 12 Ideas to help you and your business thrive in 2013 (Jim's Marketing Blog) – Simply stated 12 things to help your business next year.
8. Founders must both fear and embrace failure to succeed (The Next Web) – Most first-time founders enter the arena with only a handful of the necessary skills and snippets of domain knowledge required to make their idea work. Everything else has to be learned on the job.
9. 5 Reasons Your Social Community Is Shrinking (Social Media Today) – Marketers often THINK they know exactly what their communities want, but soon find that their content strategy actually prompts users to click unlike or unfollow. It is not always blatantly obvious why this happens, however a recent study has shed some light on the reasons why social media users decide to disconnect from a brand.
10. My SEO Strategy Predictions in 2013 (Social Media Today) – Considering what Google did to its search algorithms in 2012, stronger actions are expected from the search giant in 2013 as well. And the likes of Google are expected to follow the footsteps.
11. 12 Digital Trends That Will Rock Small Business (Social Media Today) – 12 Digital Trends that you should watch to keep your business afloat.
12. Two Days After He Launched His Startup, This Guy Sold It For $176 Million (Business Insider) – On Monday, tiny startup Contrail Systems was in stealth mode. On Tuesday it officially launched. Today, Juniper Networks bought it for $176 million.
13. Jack Of All Trades: Why Trying to Know it All Could Cost You Everything (Common Sense Development) – The problem, as I learned, with trying to be a jack of all trades is that the one trade that actually made me money began to suffer. By trying to make my skill set fit into every single aspect of business from marketing, to sales, to design, to distribution, and so forth, I found myself with little time to actually work on my business.
14. Entrepreneurs Are Healthier, Report Finds (Gallup/Huffington Post/Glamour) – People who go into business for themselves may be healthier than other workers, according to a new report from Gallup. The report shows that entrepreneurs are less likely to have chronic diseases like diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity and high blood pressure compared to other workers. Entrepreneurs are also more likely to lead healthy lifestyles than other workers, such as eating produce at least four times a week and exercising on a regular basis, according to the findings.
15. Rock your next guest blogging opportunity with this guide (Creative Ramblings) – More and more entrepreneurs venture into guest blogging, because they understand its value and importance.
16. Small Business Charm for Gen Y (E-junkie.info) – There is so much talk about Small Businesses these days. Be it in the context of tax hikes or the downturn sweeping out businesses like falling dominoes, we've seen it all unfold in the past couple of years.
17. How the cloud will evolve beyond ‘cheap and deep’ in 2013 (VentureBeat) – The initial rush to the cloud has been led by businesses moving data for backup and archival purposes and for less mission-critical use cases such as testing, development, and web hosting. This mirrors the early days of server virtualization where test/dev was the predominant early use case. As virtualization technology matured, security, performance, and availability concerns were addressed and server virtualization reached into production environments.
18. Introducing Lean Planning: How to plan less and grow faster (Up and Running Blog) – Lean Planning is a set of tools for discovering a business model that works, building an action plan to test your assumptions, creating financial models and a plan for a viable business, and tracking your performance so you can adjust your plan on the fly, quickly and easily.
19. Full-Time or Freelance? Understanding Your Staffing Options (CorpNet) – When you first start a business, you do everything out of necessity. But as you grow your business, you begin to look at your options for hiring other people.
20. Entrepreneurshit. The Blog Post on What It’s Really Like. (Both Sides of the Table) – You’d imagine that every founder was getting rich. Actually, positive outcomes for founders are quite rare. You probably follow some high-profile entrepreneurs on Instagram and Twitter and see conference pictures of them in Davos, Mexico, Monaco or wherever. You might be psyched out into thinking you’re doing something wrong for being in your shitty little windowless office. Clicking on their glam party pictures. You’re not. You’re where you should be.
21. Developing a 21st Century Entrepreneurship Curriculum (Steve Blank) – Sidnee Peck from Arizona State University’s Carey School of Business attended the last Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. I asked her to share what she learned in the class and what she learned when she put it to practice.  Here’s what she had to say…
22. 2013 Small Biz Look Ahead (OPENForum) – This year small business took center stage in a presidential election, with issues like taxes, health care and hiring the subject of heated debate. The fallout seemingly has left owners worried and uncertain about 2013.
23. How to Stop Being Nice and Get What You Really Want (Under30CEO) – Want the key to making more money? Stop being so damn nice. I’ve worked on saying “No” for way too long, and I’m still not good enough. For me, it’s nature and nurture. I’m pretty sure I was born nice… On top of that, I was nurtured by the nicest woman alive—my mother. Why isn’t my business more profitable and more streamlined? Because all too often I let other people have their way.
24. The Top 10 Things I’ve Learned This Year (Under30CEO) – It’s been an entire year since I pitched my idea at Women 2.0 Startup weekend. Now I have a live private beta site with heavily engaged users. However, the road was anything but easy, and here are the top 10 things I’ve learned from this past year.
25. The New Media Puzzle-The Impact Equation (Chris Brogan) – What I think comes next is figuring out a delicate balance of media making and in that, you’ll find some recipes for impact. I’ll share a bit of my own recipe, if that’s okay.