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

Small Business Administration - resources for starting a business

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.