Romney-Ryan ticket has small biz vote

Many small business owners are still learning what Mitt Romney's running mate stands for. But an early poll indicates that, so far, Paul Ryan's selection as the Republican VP candidate isn't influencing small business votes one way or another.

In a Manta poll of more than 1,900 small business owners in early August, a significant majority—61 percent—said they plan to vote for Governor Romney on November 6. Manta polled 550 of those respondents again on Monday this week to ask whether Ryan's selection would sway their vote. The percent in favor of Romney changed no more than the survey's margin of error, a Manta spokeswoman told Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. Thirty percent said they plan to vote for Obama.

The stats might change as business owners get to know Ryan. "With his Path for Prosperity, Congressman Ryan has gotten notoriety, but I'm not sure our members will know him off the top of their head," said Kristie Arslan, president and CEO of the National Association for the Self

NASE wants permanent full deductions for health insurance premiums for the self-employed

Both presidential campaigns say they're best for small business, but Kristie Arslan says neither has backed up the claim with substantive plans. "They've never been specific on any of the priorities for the 21 million self-employed Americans," Arslan, president and CEO of the National Association for the Self Employed, wrote in the Huffington Post on Friday.

Arslan challenged both candidates to respond to three of her organization's requests for specific tax deductions for the self-employed:

1. Will you support the permanent, full deduction of health insurance premiums for the self-employed so that the self-employed will no longer pay annually, on average, nearly $1,800 in additional taxes than other business owners?

2. Will you support legislation to make the tax deduction for startup expenses permanent, instead of letting the provision expire at the end of this year?

3. Will you support legislation to simplify the home office deduction for home-based businesses, by allowing the

Paul Ryan proposes a Path to Prosperity

In the two days since he was named GOP vice presidential candidate, most media attention has addressed Congressman Paul Ryan's proposals for overhauling Medicare, Medicaid, and other social services. But what does Governor Romney's choice of running mate mean for small business?

Ryan has said he wants to let "individuals keep more of the money they earn and restore the certainty needed for families and businesses to plan for the future."

Key points of his Path to Prosperity proposal included that "the free enterprise system is being stifled by an epidemic of crony politics and government overreach that has weakened confidence in the nation's institutions and its economy." His plan, he said, "revisits flawed financial-reform regulations and eliminates provisions that make future bailouts of Wall Street insiders more likely."

In March, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he is in favor of spurring "economic growth with bold tax reform—eliminating complexity for individuals and

Shopping Cart Tips
We recently held a small summit and conference for some of our own customers who use the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions product. It's one of the leading ecommerce platforms and a great way to build your own online store - go take a look here.

Across the two days of the summit we heard a great deal of advice about how to build a killer online store and we'll provide a wrap-up and also some SEO tips later in the week. We decided to start with the top ten tips to make the most of your online store that we gleaned from the many speakers at the summit.

• Add a progress indicator for your store's checkout process. This is a specific example of a wider theme - keep your customer or audience informed about what is going on and where they are. If you don't then you risk them getting confused or distracted and abandoning the shopping cart. Make it too difficult or complicated with too little information and you risk losing them to a competitor who is making the process easier for them to understand.

Trust

Now that the Olympics are wrapping up and the return to school for kids and teens is on the horizon, it's time to refocus on some core business basics - and there isn't really anything more basic than sales. We've got a mix of articles this week from our own site and from external sites that highlight some best practices and interesting ideas around sales, marketing, reaching out to customers and also take a look at some new practices and what the US government may have in store for small business owners. There's also a little career advice, how NOT to do PR and why old school marketing can still beat out new fangled methods like social media.

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.

Only 1 in 10 small businesses use social media for marketing, according to a recent survey.

We reported here earlier this week that only 10 percent of small businesses recently surveyed consider social media to be an effective method of marketing their businesses. More than half of B2C and B2B small businesses admitted to needing help with the tools. It's clear that many small business people remain confused or simply don't have time to figure out how to use Facebook and other social media platforms to win customers.

But advertising on Facebook could be getting simpler, the tech trade publications Inside Facebook and TechCrunch reported yesterday. According to Inside Facebook, the company is "testing a new design for its self-serve ad tool that simplifies ad creation and recommends a combination of ad types that are most likely to achieve an advertiser's objective."

TechCrunch explained that the new approach will "give more guidance to advertisers as they build their campaigns — specifically by helping them find the right mix of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories to achieve

The SUCCESS Act has some rare bipartisan support in the Senate.

Just before Congress departed for summer recess last week, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.), introduced legislation designed to spur small business job growth and boost entrepreneurship.

Her so-called SUCCESS Act of 2012, cosponsored by seven other Democrats, is notable because, when it was previously introduced as an amendment to the Small Business Jobs and Tax Relief Act (which remains on the Senate calendar), it got support from five Republicans to achieve 57 votes in the Senate—close to the 60 needed to invoke cloture and get to a vote. Landrieu, who chairs the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, called even that small bit of bipartisanship a "monumental feat in today's political climate."

She said in a statement that the bill "is made up of numerous bipartisan provisions" offered by members of her committee to "get our small businesses the assistance they need to grow our economy."

So what's in the SUCCESS Act? The bill is a mashup of measures from 14 other

In-person interaction is most effective marketing method, survey says

Despite the plethora of digital marketing methods available—from email, to websites, to online advertising, to social media—the old-fashioned in-person interaction is still the marketing approach that most businesses consider to be the most effective.

The small business marketing and social media company Constant Contact polled more than 1,000 members of its Small Biz Council. Its findings, published yesterday, reflect the responses of 728 business owners—280 B2B (business-to-business) operations, and 448 B2C (business-to-consumer) companies.

From a list of nine marketing-communications-related small business worries, including securing funding, 70 percent of respondents named "how to attract new customers" as their top priority. Cash was their second greatest concern—45 percent of respondents admit to losing sleep to thinking about how to get more of it. (More than half of all respondents, however, said cash flow is no problem right now, and 63 percent of B2B companies are in that