Here’s our weekly link roundup of small business buzz, musings and muchness. A curation of the best small business talk around the web.

[hr]

Advice From VCs For Startups Navigating the Government Shutdown

When there’s market uncertainty–say, caused by the government closing down for business until further notice–venture capitalists can be found doling sage advice to portfolio companies to help them navigate any volatility ahead. Days into the U.S.’s first government shutdown in 17 years, the thoughts Fast Company has collected from venture capitalists vary from the nonchalant to the mildly worried.

The Six Disciplines Entrepreneurs Need To Succeed

When starting out in business, you may be able to fumble your way to short-term success if you have a good product and a measure of business savvy. If you want to experience long-term success, however, there are some core disciplines that must be learned and executed. At some point (sooner is better than later), you will need to become skilled in the following six areas.

How to Build Your First Content Marketing Strategy

Google’s recent Penguin algorithm updates have forced many business owners to take a hard look at their content strategy and link portfolios. Sites with unsavory linking practices, sub-par content, and no social media signals, are losing visibility in Google’s search rankings. Many sites have also incurred manual penalties that have either caused them to rank much lower in search engine results pages, or become de-indexed completely. And once you’ve been knocked into search engine oblivion, it’s nearly impossible for people to find your site.

10 People Who Won’t Be Happy As Entrepreneurs

Some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. This is a good thing, or the business world would be chaos, with everyone trying to do their own thing. So what about you? How do you know if you should be running your own company, or concentrating on that queue of work that someone else has built for you? I’ve hit this before, but I still hear from too many unhappy entrepreneurs. Now is the time to put aside your fantasies, and take a hard look at who you really are, before you commit to the entrepreneurial lifestyle.

10 Rules Startups Must Know Before Partnering With Corporations

About four months after leaving American Express, I got a call from a startup I brought into the company to build an innovative new service. Even though I was now waaaaay off the clock, I agreed to meet. They needed advice – or an intervention. Like a sliced strawberry, they somehow got suspended in corporate Jell-O. It’s a form of purgatory where there’s lots of jiggle, but nothing moves forward. Competing priorities, politics, fear of change, and tech issues can threaten any partnership. But it can be especially brutal for startups. They don’t have the resources to endure endless brainstorming sessions, re-orgs, or meetings with consultants.

6 Ways Entrepreneurs Lie To Themselves

There’s a learning curve in the entrepreneurial world, and sometimes, it’s easy to tell where someone is in their journey just by the way they talk. Both of my companies (matchist and Entrepreneurs Unpluggd) target entrepreneurs, so I tend to hear the same few phrases and ideas over and over again. Here are the most common, overused phrases that you should absolutely avoid when talking to others about your startup.

Personality traits of entrepreneurs linked to cities they live in

For years, Personality Psychology has provided a broad understanding of individuals and behavior. So, the idea that there is an “entrepreneurial type” of person with a set of psychological traits, probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise. We are all familiar with the fact that some people just ‘have what it takes’ to succeed in various fields, and entrepreneurship is a field like any other… But what exactly is it that sets entrepreneurs apart? And what draws entrepreneurs to certain parts of the country over others?

© YFS Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Copying prohibited. All material is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this material is prohibited. Sharing of this material under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International terms, listed here, is permitted.