Only one in ten small business owners file their taxes on their own, according to the IRS.

If you’re among the 10 percent of small business owners who do your own taxes, take heart as you pull your hair out getting your forms in order this month: A simpler tax code is another step closer, and provisions aimed at small business are included.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) this week released a third “discussion draft” of the Tax Reform Act of 2013. This version includes language aimed at creating a simpler and fairer tax code for small businesses.

“Every dollar spent on complying with an overly complex, burdensome and broken tax code is a dollar that cannot be used for investment, hiring, and higher wages for American workers,” according to Camp’s statement. Camp also issued a Fact Sheet offering several reasons the tax code needs to be simplified, including that “Today’s tax code contains almost four million words,” and, “On average, more than one new tax provision has been added to the tax code each day, with nearly 4,500 changes in the last

Fishing for new employees

Before the age of the internet, employers had it pretty easy when it came to recruiting talent. Little and big catches swam readily through print classifieds to get a chomp at those tasty starter and dream jobs. Today, with newspapers fighting extinction, that one enormous reliable sea of talent has exploded into millions of micro-pools spanning across the planet. Now, with a kaleidoscope of puddles that must be monitored for movement, what small business has the time to spend all their resources trolling them all for talent? Here are five strategies many employers deploy to gig fresh catches.

Twitter for recruiting

An ocean of tweets (live and archived) are search friendly for any employer armed with a neat list of keywords (i.e. C++, Ruby on Rails, developer, etc.). For those posting jobs on Twitter using such keywords, they are conveniently searchable via search engines.

Internal recruiting

Many small business employers have been successful at developing talent from within. Hire

Some of the best stories from the past week on Advisor - in no particular order.

Networking is Dangerous: Never go alone. [Great article from TJ MCCue about how to really focus and succeed when networking to build your business relationships.

Tax day advice; and 6 tips for next year. [At this point it is last minute for your taxes - but just in case - here is some last minute advice and some for next year...]

Private companies' health heading into sequestration. [really worth reading this and especially the full report linked to in the article.]

Small business rising. [a nice infographic about the strains small business is under]

11 Common mistakes small businesses make. [great straightforward advice about what NOT to do.]

Ten things really amazing employees do. [These traits should help you value the great employees you already have and help you look for the great employees of the future when you hire.]

7 Brand Storytelling lessons you can learn from Ron Howard. [Don't let the

Marketing and social media consultant and author Mark Schaefer is a big believer in blogging. For one thing, as you'll learn shortly, it saved him from sitting through another cold chicken lunch at the chamber of commerce. Yesterday we posted part one of an interview with Schaefer explaining why blogging might be the best social media move your business could make. Here in part two he offers tips for blogging your way up the search engine ladder.

Yahoo! SBA: Does blogging help businesses show up in search engines?

Schaefer: Search engine optimization: that’s the number one benefit of blogging. It’s an evolving and complicated topic, but for many businesses today, customers are beginning their search for your business and your products on Google. It’s essential that you show up in the top three search terms.

How do you do that?

One way to begin to tip the Google search algorithms in your favor is to create very helpful, useful content that your customers will love. If your customers are

When I met the marketing guru Mark Schaefer at a crowdsourcing conference in New York last week, I asked him what’s the most important thing small business owners should be doing on social media. I was surprised by his answer. It wasn’t Facebook or Twitter or Google+. He said, “Blogging.”

Marketing and social media consultant and author Mark Schaefer

It seemed to be such a retro bit of advice. To find out why he gave it, I followed up by phone with him this week at the Schaefer Marketing Solutions headquarters, his home in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.

Schaefer says he makes the one-hour commute by plane from Knoxville to Newark a few times a month to teach marketing at Rutgers University. He also travels the globe giving lectures, teaching workshops, and consulting with clients large and small. He also offers $200 “instant consultations” by phone, and his work, including several social media marketing books (Born to Blog and The Tao of Twitter among them) got him onto Forbes' list of the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers.

Here’s part

Business Mistakes

Since small business owners wear so many hats, they can make mistakes. However, mistakes in managing and operating a business can threaten the organization’s long-term viability. Consequently, it’s important to identify the organizational priorities never to overlook or neglect. Here are 11 of the most common mistakes.

1. Unclear Purpose

Every organization must articulate why it exists and what it’s striving to achieve. Owners must focus time and attention on developing a mission and vision. It doesn’t matter if the business is a delivery service, neighborhood dry cleaner, or mom and pop restaurant. Every organization needs to understand its reason for existence, which is the anchor for all business decision making.

2. No Plan

There is an old saying, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Developing a strategy and having a plan to achieve objectives is critical to any organization’s success. Large or small, every business needs a plan. Devoting time, at least once a year, to

There is an accepted belief in politics and generally in the economy that small business is the engine of the American economy. But recently there has been a backlash with people trying to make a case that larger corporations are really the economic engine – creating more jobs and driving larger revenues. And sometimes it seems like government agrees – for all the rhetoric from both parties, very little is actually done to make things better for small businesses specifically. So who is right?

This infographic from OnDeck Capital has some of the answers. But it also highlights how much small businesses are in fact in danger from big business moving in and homogenizing local markets throughout the US. Here at Yahoo! Small Business Advisor we are obviously small business partisans – but every big business was a small business first. And the new legal and political rules categorically do favor larger businesses which can afford to support SuperPACs and lobbyists to drive regulation that

The sequester that went into effect on Friday will impose a nearly $60 million cut on the Small Business Administration, that, taken together with innovation-hindering cuts to education, science, and health budgets, will create an increasingly austere climate for small businesses, according to Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, a New York representative and ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Small Business.

Velazquez and fellow Democrats on the committee issued a report today describing the “Impact of the Sequester on the SBA and Small Business.” SBA budget cuts will result in “reductions to small business services, loss of lending authority, reduced oversight of private-sector lending partners, and many other areas that help our nation’s small firms succeed,” according to their report.

Among specific cuts they report:

• $1.5 billion in SBA-guaranteed lending will be cut from the SBA’s $29.3 billion business lending program;
• More than $17 million of a $335 million business lending