This week’s top site is Solo Business Marketing, subtitled “Where Entrepreneurs and Success Connect”,  and is the work of my good friend and colleague and one of my favorite home based business owners, the ever enthusiastic  Shirley George Frazier.

Since 1990, Shirley has been amazingly successful at starting and growing her business, gaining print and televised media attention along the way, and speaking at business and trade shows throughout the USA.

She also wrote the book Marketing Strategies for the Home-Based Business: Solutions You Can Use Today

The Solo Business Marketing blog makes great reading, not just for solo professionals working from home, but for anyone in business who is looking for practical, experience-based advice on marketing.

Shirley has a lovely, easy style of writing, which is actually a perfect reflection of what you would experience if you were to have the benefit, as I have, of a direct conversation with her.  The warm, friendly and down-to-earth style of her blog posts can be experienced readily in such posts as:

Five Ways to Get Your Marketing Plan Back on Track

Yesterday evening I escorted a relative to the hospital. He had not eaten for two days and was feeling poorly.

Tell me you don’t want to read on.

Why Falling in the Street is a Great Marketing Lesson

This week, during one of my fitness walks through town, I found myself tumbling onto the concrete. My right foot turned slightly inward, and that’s when my body met the pavement.

“I cannot believe this is happening!” I shouted in my head, wondering if I’d get up and keep going or call on my cell phone for medical attention.

More (don’t know about you but I had to know where all that was going!)

I interviewed Shirley on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio back in February this year. You can hear/download the recording of that here.

Solo Business Marketing – Top Site. Check it out.

It is my intention to feature a new Top Site every week. If you have a favorite site on home based business or which would be of direct benefit to professionals working from home, please let me know so I can consider it for inclusion in the TopSites section of this site: please note, only sites with original, quality content and authored by a home based business person will be considered.

Some freely available resources to help people thinking of starting a business, or starting over

In over twenty years of being in business I’ve had a lot of good business advice. My only regret is that I wish I’d followed more of the good advice, sooner.

I’ve also had plenty of bad or unduly self-serving advice and my regret there is in having followed some of that until I had enough experience to see through it.

Sound familiar? My guess is that if you are in business and are not super omniscient and always amazingly successful you have had both of those experiences too.

So is there something to be done, when embarking on a business, or when re-starting our existing businesses, to cut through the fog of theories and advice that are not going to serve us and get to some good, practical advice which will enable us to get on with the business of business, with confidence as well as optimism?

Yes there is. And, believe it or not, it is provided by government!

The heading to this post says “free” resources. That’s not completely accurate, because these resources have been put together at taxpayers’ expense. But they are freely available on the web for anyone who wants to use them.

As a taxpayer, you can say, “At last, something useful from the government!”

If you are one of those people who believe nothing good can come out of government – what do they say, one of the great lies is “I’m from the government, I’m here to help you”? – then I ask that you put aside your skepticism for a moment and check out the resources listed below.

Because what has happened in several countries is that governments have paid some people to put together “starting a business” checklists and resource lists, with lots of links, to save people having to do all that themselves.

In this post I’m just including links to sites provided by federal/national governments – USA, Canada, UK, Australia. I know from previous research there are other such sites provided at State/ Provincial level. And maybe even at local government level although I have not looked into that yet.

The US Government’s Small Business Administration provides a Small Business Planner.

From the UK Government there is Practical Advice for Business: Starting up .

The Canadian Government’s Canada Business site has Starting a Business.

And the Australian Government’s business.gov.au site has Thinking of Starting a Business .

One note of caution. I have found sometimes with such sites that you can be clicking on a link to resources that are really third party ones and which do promote products and services commercially. If that is the case with a particular government-provided resource, it should be clear from the site: it’s a while since I have researched such sites so I don’t know the current situation. Just be aware.

If you know of other such national/federal or state/provincial government provided free resources for business, do please share them. There may even be regional or local government sites that you know of and have found helpful.

Ten Free Videos Provide a Great Introduction to Outsourcing

In conversations I have from time to time with other people who work from home,  the distinction between working in their business and working on their business seems to be common parlance. I think it’s fair to say the most of us know why it is a good thing, actually a necessary thing, to aspire to working more on the business and much, much less in the business.

Getting all the ducks in a row, so as to achieve that, is another story.

Anyone who has read Tim Ferriss 4 Hour Work Week – is there anyone left who hasn’t? – knows that one of the ways we can move more into the “on the business” plane is by outsourcing things that others can do, more economically and often better than we can.

Many of us are also aware, from conversations with support desks if from no other source, that the Philippines has become a key provider of outsourced services at highly competitive prices.

And it’s not only telecoms companies and call-center providers who are outsourcing to the Philippines.  Many small and even micro businesses are doing so too.

I’m probably treading on a toe or three

On a previous occasion when I have written about outsourcing I have drawn some criticism on the basis – as far as I could figure out – that I was somehow encouraging people to use less than “quality assured” services. But if I can get quality services provided, within a budget and on terms that are reasonable for both parties,  from whatever country, I’ll feel ok about that.  After all, I’m in an international market myself, where some competitors charge a lot more than I do and some a lot less: it’s up to me to show I can provide value for money.

Mass Outsource

Here at our two person company we have been exploring the possibilities for outsourcing some of our business processes to the Philippines and we have spent some time and money doing that.

In that regard, one of our best investments, of time and of money, has been on a course and system developed by Tyrone Shum, under the heading of Mass Outsource Mastermind Program.

It has been and continues to be a good experience and definitely value for money.

For anyone interested, I would recommend taking advantage of the opportunity available just now to get access to ten free videos in which Tyrone explains how the outsourcing process works. It’s effectively a free e-course, which provides valuable, experience-grounded information about the outsourcing process and how it can liberate us to do the things we really want to do and which will reward us better.

In a world of fast-talking, over-promising “gurus”, Tyrone Shum is a refreshing change – his dedication to providing quality information, advice and support, quietly, thoroughly, is impressive. He doesn’t over-promise and he delivers generously. And I like that when he asks “Are there any more questions?” he means it – and welcomes the question.

Is this an affiliate linked post? You bet (see next para), but I’d be happy to do it anyway as I really respect what Tyrone has achieved and how he shares.

Here is the link to the free Mass Outsource video e-course.

Talking about Boomers Next Step

Last Thursday, US time – Friday my time – on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio I had a great chat with my friend and colleague Bill Vick.

You can listen to the episode – or download it to listen later – at this link Bill Vick on Des Walsh & Friends.

Although separated by thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean, Bill and I have worked together for a few years now. It is a mark of how business has changed in recent years that we have been able to collaborate, co-author books and now begin planning for an ambitious new project, without ever having met face to face and without spending a vast amount of money on communications. In fact, most of our communication is via email and Skype, which means there is no cost to either of us, apart from the regular internet connection charges we incur anyway.

We have produced, with publisher Happy About, the book LinkedIn for Recruiting, which went through two editions and which we finally “retired”:  the e-book version of the second edition is now available free of charge and can be downloaded from the link in the sidebar here. We also published, independently, the audiobook – DVD and e-book – Big Biller, based on a series of interviews with highly successful recruiters and other industry leaders.

And now, as we discussed in last week’s BlogTalkRadio session, we are about to launch our Boomers Next Step project, to help boomers meet new challenges, especially in terms of career and business.

Bill, never a man to let the grass grow under his feet, has in fact already got the project going, with a stack of resources and a series of fascinating video interviews on the Boomers Next Step project site.

We’ll be making some specific announcements over the next couple of weeks. If you would like to know more and be kept in the loop, check out the Contact page on Boomers Next Step: if you give us your details there or get the RSS feed link, we will be able to keep you posted.

We’re both excited about this project and I’ll endeavour to provide the occasional update here on Thinking Home Business too.

Guest for the first episode of 2010 for my BlogTalkRadio show is Becky McCray

One of the many interesting and inspiring people I met at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in 2008 was Becky McCray, who among other accomplishments publishes the rural and small town online resource Small Biz Survival. We have been in regular contact since then and I was delighted when Becky and another friend, Becky’s colleague Sheila Scarborough expressed interest in being guests on my Des Walsh & Friends program on BlogTalk Radio.

It would have been good to have both Becky and Sheila on together so they could talk about their exciting new venture, Tourism Currents – social media learning for tourism – but for Sheila fans, be assured she will be my guest in the first week in February. Anyway, each will doubtless be happy to talk about Tourism Currents individually.

Becky is a woman of many parts: a genuine small town entrepreneur who somehow combines being a liquor store owner, a business advisor and a cattle rancher and still makes time to be active on Twitter and other social media platforms.

Becky and I love swapping rural type stories – what in Australia we call “bush yarns” – and I am really looking forward to the session in the latter part of this week (that’s Thursday in the US, Friday in Australia).

Scheduled Time:

In the USA: 12 noon PST, 3 pm EST on Thursday, January 14.
In Australia: 7 am AEDT (Sydney time) on Friday, January 15.

The link: Des Walsh & Friends

Image credit: Becky McCray by Roxanne Darling, via Twitter: Creative Commons