You’ve ventured out and decided to start your own business, congratulations! You have just taken the first step in having complete control of your life. I know that it’s a great feeling, because I’ve done it myself.

One of the first things you will want to do is determine what type of legal structure to use. Here are the top 3 entities:

1. Corporation

2. LLC

3. Sole Proprietor

You will want to do this before you create your first business transaction because the way tax is treated is different for each entitiy.

Whether you want to set up a Delaware Corporation, California LLC, Nevada LLC, or just a sole proprietorship, there are companies that you can visit online to set up the structure that you choose. Inc Paradise can incorporate in all 50 states and they only charge $89 plus state filing fees. When you visit their website, they have a very informative FAQ that should answer most of your questions about the differences between the different entities.

You can also meet with your lawyer or accountant to determine which structure is right for you. There are certain pro’s and con’s to each of them. The biggest pro to each of them is the business tax deductions, however the way tax is treated is different for each one.

Starting your own business is an exciting process. Make sure you have set up the business structure that is best for you business and enjoy your success!

A man flying in a hot air balloon realizes he is lost. He reduces his altitude and spots a man in a field down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”

The man below says, “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, about 30 feet above this field.”

“You must be an engineer,” says the balloonist.

“I am. How did you know?”

“Everything you told me is technically correct, but it’s of no use to anyone.”

The man below says, “You must be in management.”

“I am. But how did you know?”

“You don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

That leads it to the top end of $29 - $31 range.  That means that the IPO will raise $4.1 billion.

Blackstone units will begin trading tomorrow under the symbol “BX”

Tonight Blackstone’s offering is scheduled to price.  There are been a lot of discussing about Blackstone’s IPO the last couple of weeks, specifically regarding the tax structure involved in the offering.

There are two U.S. lawmakers that have asked the SEC to postpone the offering until Congress holds hearings about it.

However, the SEC can only block an IPO if a company’s filings are inaccurate, incomplete, or makes untrue statements.

It will be interesting to see what happens after the bell.  Hopefully, everything will go smooth and Blackstone will hold their IPO tomorrow.

You already have that great job, or you’re interviewing for a new one.  Make sure you get the most for your salary.  Here are 5 tips to getting that higher salary.

1. Ask for it.  I shouldn’t even have to say this one, but I do.  To many people don’t ask for more money.  This is where negotiation skills come into play.  If you know how to ask, when to ask, and what exactly to ask for, you will have a better chance of getting more pay.

2. Polish your resume.  If your resume looks like a million bucks, you should command a higher salary.  However, if you just through it together and it has many typos and crap on it, don’t expect to be able to negotiate salary.  You should consider yourself lucky for even being at the interview.  A polished resume will allow you to use your negotiation skills to increase your salary.

3. Express interest.  If there’s a promotion at your current job, you need to express your interest to your superiors, or whoever it is that will decide who gets the promotion.  If you just sit there at your desk, nobody may know that you even want the job.  Then, when it’s given to someone else, you’d be pissed off (but you wouldn’t tell anyone).  You have to let others know that you want more money, more responsibility, and more out of life.

4. Leverage your interviews.  If you’ve received offers from 3-4 different companies, use that as leverage for a higher salary.  If you’ve positioned yourself properly and your skills are in high demand to can expect the big money to come through.  Just make sure you don’t pick the new job based entirely off of the money.  You want to be sure you will enjoy your new position.  Nothing would be worse than going to a job you hated everyday, no matter how much they pay you.

5. Have it in writing.  Whether your currently employed or getting that new job, make sure you have a clear understanding of when salary raises will occur.  That way you will be able to take on projects that will allow you to leverage your accomplishments when in a salary negotiation.  If you do not know when salary negotiations will take place, it will be hard for you to schedule the duties and tasks you take on.

Those are some basic tips to help you succeed in getting a higher salary.  If you want more help, check out Negotiating Your Salary: How To Make $1,000 A Minute or Secrets of Power Salary Negotiating: Inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator . Your salary will thank you for it.

It’s tough being CEO of a company sometimes, especially when you have these types of perks in your contract:

1. Free Beer - Anheuser-Busch executives receive unlimited free beer “for personal use and entertaining”. This one I can understand, kinda makes me want to work for Anheuser-Busch.

2. Free Fishing - The executives of Oceaneering International received personal rights to fish and camp on company land.

3. Personal Health Coach - Big wigs at Motorola get a health coach. Not that it really matters, because they can afford the best health care in the nation, even if they’re 50 pounds overweight and eating all day.

4. Home Remodeling - A Nike executive received up to $580,000 to remodel his home.

5. Apartment Rent - Atari top executive is having his rent paid of $12,200 per month for his Manhattan apartment.  That wouldn’t be so bad except the stock price for Atari had been falling for the past 5 years.

If you’ve heard of any other outrageous perks, leave them in the comments below.

Smorty.com is another place that connects advertisers with bloggers. There is a new trend in making money on blogs, and that is writing reviews for other companies and getting paid to blog.

Advertisers can advertise on blogs and pay bloggers to write reviews for their product or service and link back to their website. This generates buzz around their company and increases the number of links back to their website.

Blog advertising is taking off in a big way as many companies have recently come into the market. One of the leading providers, Smorty.com, is leading the way and showing other advertising companies how the entire process works.

If you’re a company looking for a unique way to advertise, look into blog advertising and see how it works for you and adjust accordingly.

If you have a blog or a website, you may be able to get paid for blogging and find a new revenue stream for your website.

If you’re like most companies, security is a top priority for your business. We live in a day and age that corporations and small businesses alike must keep a certain amount of secrecy to keep a competitive edge.

It was just last month that 2 Coke employees were sentence to prison for trying to sell company secrets to rival Pepsi. How much would it effect your business if employees sold proprietary information to your competitors? It may not take much to put your business under.

With the Internet and the way that digital documents can be filed, more and more companies are storing company data digitally on internal Intranets and on directories that can be accessed from outside locations via a password.

There are companies that can do online data monitoring to make sure your company’s files aren’t floating around the Internet for the entire public to see. If you want to make sure your company’s data is safe and secure, this is another method to protect that data.

webArgos is one of the leading providers of online data monitoring and protection. You can view their website at webArgos.com.

It only takes one bad or disgruntled employee to steal your information and sell it to the highest bidder. Especially in today’s world where knowledge is power, make sure you have your data and intellectual property protected.

It’s no surprise to anybody that Terry Semel has stepped down as CEO and turned everything over to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

Yahoo has had its share of problems the past couple of years and has not returned the capital to shareholders.

They’ve lost a lot of ground to competitors Google and Altavista.

Yahoo has bought other businesses over the years to increase revenue.  Unfortunately, they haven’t made many of these businesses profitable and it’s been hurting the bottom line.  The way I see it, Yahoo needs to focus more on their core business of search engine services to turn things around.  Until they look at how they can do better in their core business, they shouldn’t look at other business activities.

According to the AP report Yahoo Replaces CEO Terry Semel with Yang, Semel received a package worth $71.7 million last year.  I’m no genius, but I know exactly where they should look at to increase shareholder value.

Until Yahoo can show that they understand how the search engine business works, and how to capitalize from it, they will just be a distant runner up in the search engine game.

Unless you have been living under a rock the last 10 years, you very well know that if you want to increase your business revenue, you need to be doing it through an online presence.

Business first began to utilize the World Wide Web in the early 90’s when the Internet first became available to business and home users.  Ever since then, they have been trying to figure out how to create more sales through their website.

Before they can create more sales, they have to figure out how to drive more traffic to their website.  That is when many companies will outsource their Search Engine Marketing to companies that specialize in online marketing and search engine optimization.

It makes sense to do this as well because these marketing companies have specialist that know how to drive traffic to your website in different ways.  From pay per click, keywords, and visual design you want your potential clients to visit your website and have the ability to motivate them to make a purchase.  With online advertising and marketing changing with the pace of technology, it’s important that you have a group that can keep up the pace.

Because there’s so much competition in the market place for online marketing companies, you want to make sure you choose a quality provider as well.  Make sure that you sit down with the representative and clarify all of your goals and set benchmarks to achieve.  You must make sure that the company that you are going to work with completely understands your business objectives and they will be able to meet them as well.

There is enough software available that you should be able to track, analyze, and evaluate any online marketing strategy.  You can sit down with your online marketing company have review all the strategies and evaluate what is working and what is not, and how to improve performance.

After all of this, you should have been able to find an Ethical SEO company that will be able to work with your company and take your online presence to the next level.

You’ve paid good money to have your company on the Internet, make sure you take maximum advantage of it to drive more traffic to your website and create more sales!

 

*Thank you to my sponsor Apogee Search