Home based business owners, in my experience, love to know about a bargain for goods or services they need. One place you can get a bargain – in fact get help for free – is from government websites.

The old joke is that one of the great lies is “I’m from the government.I’m here to help you.” But in fact, governments – in the developed world at least – often provide quite extensive resources for business and these are not always used by businesses.

In the USA, the Small Business Administration has extensive resources online for small business and some information specifically useful for home based business. In Australia, Federal and State governments have a lot of “how to” and other helpful advice and tools online – go through the Business Entry Point and be prepared to do some patient searching.

One thing I’ve found about government sites is that they are usually a royal pain to search!

State and provincial governments also often have really good resources – see for example Canada’s Ontario government site.