5 MINUTES!!

With the price of everyday expenses, food, gas, housing, fluctuating wildly, it becomes increasingly important to keep your finger on the pulse, to keep up with news that affects your business, your business plan, your life and your customer's lives. How to do this? How much time to allocate to keeping informed? These are important questions you're asking as you organize your day.

It's possible to keep up-to-date allocating 5 minutes a day, first thing every morning. How is this possible? Let's take Yahoo Finance as an example. Yahoo Finance gathers daily headlines and stories from major business and finance news providers. This is a free service. Providers include a wide range from Business Week, Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch, the New York Times, Financial Times, Inc and Entrepreneur magazines, the Associated Press and Reuters, Forbes, SmartMoney, Fortune, Morningstar, CNBC, CNN Money, USA Today, US News and World Report, TheStreet.com and the Motley Fool. Click on the headline of your choice and read the article. You can print and/or email the article. The Wall Street Journal and Barrons are included as a headline only service. You must be a paid subscriber to read their full articles.

How is Yahoo able to provide so much information on a timely, sometimes up to the minute, basis? This is done through an internet tool called RSS or "really simple syndication". It's a tool that allows instantaneous distribution of feeds to your desktop. Yahoo, through My Yahoo, allows you to pull together your own interests and feeds onto your own My Yahoo web page. This is a free service. You just need to register with Yahoo to use it. Or you can use the Yahoo Finance page to access these daily providers of business and finance news. Or, better yet, you can bookmark our blog and access your daily news through our Yahoo Business and Finance link.

By using a site like Yahoo Finance you can be up-to-date in 5 minutes and plan the rest of your day accordingly. Of course, you may find yourself spending more time than you want. The resource is there when you want it. As an aside not all the Yahoo providers may be up-to-date. The Economist and Entrepreneur feeds were outdated. All others were current. But, as a first stop resource for business and financial news from a wide range of sources, Yahoo Finance is an excellent starting place. Check it out!!

NOT JUST A MAGAZINE ANYMORE

So you thought a magazine was just a magazine -- flat, bound paper pages that you read and discarded. You read it at a library, bought it at a newstand or bookstore, or subscribed to it. If you wanted a back issue, you went to the library or bought it from the publisher, if they still had it. With the internet now the dominant source of distribution, that's all changed. This is true for all magazines, but in particular, it's true for Business magazines. Entrepreneur Magazine is a case in point.

Entrepreneur's target audience is small business, particularly startups. It is both a monthly print magazine and a daily online presence. (Click on the underlined link to access the site.) It provides support and advice for all aspects of starting up and maintaining a business It does so in a variety of formats including articles from the magazine and special online only articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos. It also features free access to full text archives of the magazine going back to 1998. As many libraries have cut backfiles due to space issues, this is an increasingly important service. (Unfortunately, Entrepreneur does not have a searchable index of their back issues.)

Entrepreneur also incorporates many web 2.0 techniques, such as interactive forums to build a community of like minded people seeking answers to questions about starting up a business, obtaining financing, sales and marketing advice and networking. You can link, share, comment based on your own interest or need. You may also subscribe to free email newsletters and alerts on your area of interest. There is also an extensive content area devoted to women entrepreneurs. (Click on the underlined link to visit.)

The Entrepreneur site is well organized, useful, and diverse. Entrepreneur also is a publisher of small business oriented books many of which are staples in public library business area. The internet has challenged the publishing industry to broaden its scope into the online world; that or perish. Entreprenur has risen to the challenge and has provided an ongoing useful site to the small business person. It is committed to providing the tools you need to succeed and prosper. In a future post I will focus on one of Entrepreneur's most promising tools. It's called Entrepreneur Assist. In the meantime check out the Entrepreneur site and let us know what you think!!
It's not just a magazine, anymore!