photo credit: sakamencho via flickr

GOP conventioneers appeared to take a break to mill around between speeches by Ohio Senator Rob Portman and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty last night. What they missed was Ohio businessman Steven Cohen's speech explaining how American businesses would benefit from a Romney administration.

Cohen is President of Screen Machine Industries, Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of construction and mining machinery—portable crushers, screeners, trommels, and conveyors—in North America with dealers worldwide. In July, Governor Romney made a campaign tour stop and speech at the 45-year-old family-run business' Pataskala, Ohio, plant. Cohen returned the favor with a visit to Tampa, Fla., to voice his support for a Romney presidency.

Cohen stressed that business people like him "need a president who will protect America's patented inventions, guard the value of our currency, and open up new markets for American products."

Patent protection is a big concern for Cohen, who said products

Yale Entrepreneurial Institute helps college students launch startups

For undergraduate students with a yen for starting their own business, a Yale Entrepreneurial Institute summer fellowship can be a true career igniter. Fellows selected from the Ivy League university's student body receive a stipend, mentorship, legal and accounting advice, and access to Yale's alumni network of successful entrepreneurs and investors.

Established in 2007, the YEI, as it's known on the New Haven, Conn., campus, has helped launch close to 100 companies, 52 of which are currently active. Among the successful startups to its credit: an online wedding resource for brides-to-be, a forest inventory management software business, and an early-stage medical diagnostics company. Many YEI fellows launch their businesses while simultaneously pursuing full-time studies.

Yahoo! Small Business Advisor spoke recently with YEI Director James Boyle and Program Manager Alena Gribskov, who both had real-world entrepreneurship experience before joining YEI's leadership, about what makes

Business Ideas

As most children in the US head back to school and colleges also gear up for a new incoming class, the signs are that Summer is soon going to be over and it's time to gear up for the Fall and holiday seasons ahead. With that in mind we have a mixed bag of content this week including some extra tips around invoicing, getting started in business, creating great content for your business online, how customer feedback can change your business and a free class on business growth.

We do still have elections ahead so we took a look at what small businesses want to see from policymakers as well.

If you haven't taken the plunge yet, hopefully some of these articles give you the impetus to start your own business — and if you do, we have tools to help. Besides our domain name, web hosting and ecommerce products, we also have just added an innovative marketing dashboard that you can try for free even if you don't use our other products.

Here are some of the other good small business articles we

Is the interview going well?

By Ramit Sethi

We are terrible at interviewing. We walk into the interview room without preparing. We spend time worrying about "trick questions" and about what shirt we should wear, instead of the things that really matter. Worst of all, we believe an interview is intended for us to simply answer the questions that the interviewer gives us.

I say this as someone who's sat on both sides of the table: as a candidate, interviewing against some of the world's toughest companies (like Google and a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund), and as a hiring manager.

Yet once you can master the interview process, you can secure job offers against other candidates who have many years more experience than you. In today's economy, knowing how to interview is a killer skill.

That starts with knowing what to avoid doing in a job interview, or what I call "5 Interview Killers."

1. "I just sort of... and then... and like... and uh... yeah."

If you ramble, you lose.

Think back to when you last met someone

Darden, Wharton, and Stanford are among top-rate business schools offering online courses for free

Has back-to-school season got you thinking that having some business education under your belt might help you grow your company? Join the club.

Since it was announced August 7, more than 12,000 people have already registered for a free online course being offered in January by University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business through Coursera.

"Grow To Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Business" will be taught by Darden professor Edward Hess, author of several books on entrepreneurship. The five-week course promises lessons that will help you scale your business successfully as well as better manage your life. Hess' four Ps—planning, prioritization, process, and pace—and his "gas pedal approach to growth" apply equally to growing your business and yourself, he says.

"Growth is a zigzag, detour, making mistakes, up and down process," Hess says in an engaging video introduction to the course. "Too much growth too fast not properly managed can destroy your business. This

Van sales are an indicator of small business optimism

Things are looking up for small business, according to a variety of economic indicators released recently. Here are four pieces of good news, with caveats, published in various outlets:

1. Seed funding for startups is up. Way up, in fact, Crain's New York Business reports today: "Venture funding for companies in their very earliest stages has seen a steep increase over the past two years. Dow Jones VentureSource measured a 52 percent increase in venture-capital seed investments nationally in 2011 compared with 2010. A report last month by research firm CB Insights found that quarterly seed-stage funding for Internet companies has jumped dramatically over the past 10 quarters. In the first quarter of 2010, there were 20 seed deals; in the second quarter of 2012, there were 111, more than five times as many."

Crain's report describes two tech startups that have raised $600,000 and $2 million in seed funding, but acknowledges a downside to the trend: "The amount of money for larger

Small business owners name top issues they'd like policymakers to address

What one issue affecting your business would you like to see policymakers address? Yahoo! Small Business Advisor posed that question to 250 small business owners in a recent survey.

We reported last week on the results of the full survey, which indicate that Governor Romney will capture significantly more votes from small business owners than will President Obama at the polls in November.

But the most common replies to our open-ended question revealed that small business owners are fed up with government as a whole. Respondents focused on taxes, regulations, access to capital, healthcare, and jobs and the economy as the issues they'd like to see policymakers address. Several suggested drastic measures for doing away with politics as usual in Washington, and some said they have little hope in politicians' ability to effect useful change.

Many respondents had a hard time zeroing in on a single issue. Wrote one business owner, "I would like to see regulations eased so that the economy

The country is slowly gearing up for the election season ahead and small business owners now have a clearer picture of the choices ahead of them now that Paul Ryan has been picked as Mitt Romney's running mate. We took an extensive look at the elections this week, including the results of a big survey we fielded with small business owners that basically showed that Romney is favored by small business owners but not overwhelmingly, that the economy is a big issue for all small business owners, that government roadblocks are seen as a big problem and that the issue of healthcare reform and how it affects small businesses is very divisive. We also took a look at new VP candidate Paul Ryan's attitudes to small business and how his pick affects people's opinions of the race.

In other, non-election news we also provided some feedback from our customer summit for Yahoo! Small Business merchants. One piece was on ten tips for running an online store and the other was general advice about SEO