snowmanWe're almost half way through October, which means it is already time to be setting up your online advertising plans for success in your holiday shopping endeavors for your online store.

Last year, holiday shoppers in the U.S. spent over $46 billion online. This holiday season, online sales are predicted to grow to significantly - by at least 15%. So it is important to be ready to put your holiday plans and deals in front of your customers. Microsoft is presenting a free Bing Ads webinar to address this topic on October 18th at 10AM PST and this is a great opportunity to pick up some tips.

The webinar is supposed to cover

Driving more traffic to your site: Choosing the right keywords and perfecting ad copy.
Reaching the right customers: Savvy targeting tips and ways to put Bing Ads' powerful reporting tools to work for you.
Positioning your ads in the right places: How to capture the growing number of shoppers searching for gifts on their mobile phones and tablets.

You can find out

Microbusinesses have a tough time getting credit

A new poll of microbusiness owners contradicts another recent report that small business owners have a gloomy outlook on the economy. Instead, according to the survey conducted by three small business organizations, most owners of businesses with 10 or fewer employees are optimistic about the future of their business and about the economy.

The Association for Enterprise Opportunity, the National Association for the Self-Employed, and Small Business Majority retained Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research to survey 470 microbusinesses online in August. The organizations say that many microbusinesses have been growing and expect to continue growing: over half report increased sales or revenues over the last two years and another 50 percent plan to hire within the next two.

National Association of Self Employed CEO Kristie Arslan says microbusinesses, including the self-employed, are key drivers of the US economy. Based on the survey results, NASE predicts that the 22 million self-employed

The presidential candidates are accused of missing a wave of entrepreneurship sweeping the nation.

Despite all of the pandering to small business by both election campaigns, neither President Obama nor Governor Romney made any mention of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship during the first presidential debate last week. SmallBizVote noted that glaring omission, and this week, Fast Company editor Robert Safian accuses the candidates of having their heads in the sand. Safian says they are overlooking "a tidal wave of creative, innovative startups sweeping the country."

We pointed to many examples of those kinds of small business owners in another recent post here, Real job creators in the White House today. Safian points to several more who are "enthusiastically and optimistically setting out to build new businesses and to invent new ways of doing business," including by raising startup capital through crowdfunding platforms.

Ryan Paugh, cofounder and chief of staff at the Young Entrepreneur Council, told Yahoo! Small Business Advisor that his organization would "love to know how each

fedgovtWe are going to revisit a great article from last week today. After the debates, which some outlets characterized as delivering a big win for small business, we took exception, pointing out that the debates were long on rhetoric and contained almost no practical discussion of small business issues. Take a look.

Some of the other best stories for today:

A great article about converting visitors to your website into sales. The suggestions seem simple but are extremely practical and in our experience while most businesses have done SOME of these things, very few have done ALL. 7 Tips for converting website visits into sales.

Following on from our look at the political scene is an impassioned plea from a small business owner and advocate in Oregon about getting big money and big business out of politics in order to restore the voice of the smaller business. It's a good point regardless of any other reasons for or against the Citizen's United decision.Big, secret money in politics hurts

Small business got few specifics from first debate

The term "small business" was uttered a total of 27 times in 90 minutes by President Obama and Governor Romney on stage in Denver Wednesday night, prompting headlines such as "Small business front and center in the presidential debate" in the Washington Post and a Bloomberg editorial that proclaimed small business the biggest winner of the debate.

But for all their references to small business, did the candidates address the real concerns of small business owners, or just play to them with sound bites?

Before the debate, we asked six leaders of small business and entrepreneurship advocacy organizations what questions they'd most like to hear answered. Post-debate, we've reviewed the transcript to determine whether the candidates delivered. For the most part, they did not.

Two small business leaders—Small Business Majority founder John Arensmeyer and Young Entrepreneur Council cofounder Ryan Paugh—hoped the candidates would specifically address how they would improve access to capital

mavenlink-infographic-small-businessWe had the first presidential debate this week and while small business came up, it came up mostly under the guise of taxation or with a great deal of rhetoric and no specifics. We had proposed seven great questions that could have been addressed and in the end one of the seven was addressed, two were alluded two and the four most important were ignored. Despite all the talk, small business owners know that carrying on the hard work of finding new customers, fulfilling contracts, making sales and all the everyday operational work must go on. But we can all take heart from the teacher who has made $1 million selling lesson plans online - while continuing to teach. More and more startups and entrepreneurs are coming from the ranks of the baby boomers or even retirees - whether that is because of a desire to keep working or a necessity. Regardless, the SBA has some programs to help. And even though many of them are over, you can still get help from SCORE and other SBA programs. If you are

smallbusinesselectionWe had the first of the presidential debates yesterday. Unfortunately, despite using the phrase 'small business' a total of 29 times between them, very little was showcased in terms of specifics. We showcased seven questions we would have liked to have seen addressed. Unfortunately only the last three were even discussed and the answers to those were long on rhetoric and short on specifics. Hopefully we'll see some more answers in the debates to come.

Some of the other best stories for today:

How to protect your small business from lawsuits.

Why are small businesses hiring?

How YouTube can be a marketing tool for small business.

Are you fighting the wrong business competitor?

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Inc. has a good article reporting on a discussion Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had with reporters at the IAB MIXX Conference during Advertising Week in New York. Much of what she had to say was about small business, what a problem it is for advertising online and how Facebook is hoping to find the solution. This is a subtle shift from the focus of her discussion earlier that day with Charlie Rose where she talked about social advertising, re-emphasizing a theme that Mark Zuckerberg brought up on his recent trip to Russia.

Local advertising has indeed been a hard problem for tech companies to solve, but perhaps not as difficult as the Facebook team is making out. When supplied with any form of location data, google search ads on any site can be locally relevant for example, as can ads from The Yahoo! Bing partnership. And here at Yahoo! for example, there are local listing services, the ability to locally target advertising within the Yahoo! Shopping portal and even local solutions