It’s truly amazing the quantity, and the quality, of information on entrepreneurship that you can find on the Internet, for free. Here are some great resources I found; I hope that you’ll bookmark this list and think of it as your toolbox for when you’re ready to take the plunge and start your small business.

Below you’ll find 69 fantastic free resources for would-be entrepreneurs.

Choosing a Business to Start

• Flip the Switch: Entrepreneur.com published a great article on how to come up with your business idea.  In addition, you should subscribe to Entrepreneur.com‘s newsletters.

• Business Ideas and Opportunities: In order to start a business you need a business idea.  You’ll find lots of help in this blog post, written by me.

• Brainstorming a New Business Concept: John Schulte takes you through a new business brainstorming session (the idea he came up with is a neon beer sign for your home bar, where the beer’s name is your last name).

• The Fire Fly Manifesto: Jonathan Fields, author of the unconventional career guide “Career Renegade”, has written a great manifesto on earning a comfortable living doing something you love, while having time to spend with those who are dear to you. Also, subscribe to Jonathan’s blog awake@thewheel for stories, tips, strategies, and news that will show you how to make a living doing what you love.

• How to Choose a Business to Start: Let Pamela Slim–author of the blog “Escape from Cubicle Nation” (she has a book by the same name which is also a great resource for entrepreneurs)–show you how to establish criteria to choose from among your business ideas.

Your Home Office

• 10 Tips for Creating a Motivating Work Environment at Home:  A lot of people start their small businesses in their homes (I recently learned that Jeff Bezos–founder of Amazon–started working from his home).  Here are some tips to help you in creating the proper environment.

• How to: Turn Your Desk Into a Productivity Zone:  Increased productivity translates into more revenue.

The Business Plan

• 50 Free Sources for Business Plans, Templates and Models: If you’re not sure what you should put in your business plan, here are 50 templates to choose from.

• A One-Page Marketing Plan Anyone Can Use: There’s no need to kill a tree in order to write a business plan. Sometimes, just one page will do.

• 500 + Sample Business Plans: These aren’t just business templates, but actual samples of business plans for several different types of business.

Startup Guides

• The Ultimate Small Business Startup Guide: This is a great, comprehensive 7-part series on how to start your own small business. It’s from a blog called “MyWifeQuitHerJob.com”, in which the author explains how he and his wife started an online wedding linens store so that his wife could stay at home with their first child.  They were generating $100,000.00 in just over a year.

• Create A Profitable Online Store In 5 Easy Steps: This is a 5-part series on how to create a profitable online store, again, from “MyWifeQuitHerJob.com”. I’ve been reading their blog for a while and they offer great advice.

• 10 Steps to Open for Business: This is Startupnation.com’s proven step-by-step process to help you achieve start-up success.

• Business Start-Up Checklist: Go through this checklist to get a basic overview of what you’ll need to do in order to start a business.

• Free 16 Session Internet Course: This course is geared toward the entrepreneur who wants to start his or her own business, and the individual who has an established small business and would like to see that business grow and expand. Most people fail in business because they make avoidable mistakes! This free course teaches you what those mistakes are and how to avoid them.

• How to Start a Business: Your Step by Step Business Startup Guide: This guide show you how to start a business by taking a step-by-step approach to making those critical decisions that make the difference between success and failure to your business startup.

Start-Up Funding

• Start-Up Costs Calculator: How much money will you need to get started?

• How to Find Start-Up Funding: This is a free course offered by Trump University.

Marketing How-To for Small Businesses

• 115 Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses: Mike Michalowicz  is a successful entrepreneur who authors a blog called “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur“.  He also wrote a book by the same name.  He has lots of great articles for entrepreneurs, including this one filled with marketing strategies for small businesses.  Yes, 115 of them!

• 100 Marketing Secrets: It doesn’t matter how good your product or your service is, if other people don’t know about it. Marketing is something you need to devote a lot of your effort to.

• Marketing in a Minute: 104 Marketing Tips: More great marketing tips (it’s a free eBook, but they do ask for your name and email).

• Free Marketing Courses from IttyBiz.com: Naomi Dunford is offering free marketing courses for different industries, including bloggers, light workers, coaches and consultants, and so on.

• Sample Marketing Plans: Here are some sample marketing plans to give you ideas on what to include in your marketing plan. (And yes, you definitely need one.  Forget the old adage that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.)

• 52 Creative Ideas for Finding New Clients: Clients equal business.  Here’s how to get them.

General Tips for Entrepreneurs

• 101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers: Fifty of the top small business bloggers were asked to share their best tips for small business owners.

• 100 Ways to Be a Better Entrepreneur: This is an article from Entrepreneur.com that will show you how to be a better entrepreneur.

• Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE): SCORE offers lots of free guides on financing, setting up a home office, online purchasing, and many other topics.

• Taming the Beast: This is a fabulous article published in Inc.com which provides a rich account of how entrepreneur Paul Eldrenkamp made the transition from being owned by his business to owning it. It’s reminiscent of “The E-Myth”, which I wrote about in this article: The Most Valuable Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs.

• 26 Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Fail: More from Mike over at “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur”.

• MyBizHomepage: A group of entrepreneurs created an integrated series of online business tools designed to overcome the obstacles that can impede the progress of a small business. Best of all, they’ve made these tools available for free.

The Numbers: Budgets, Financial Documents, Metrics  and Accounting

• How to Create a Simple Budget: In order to succeed with your small business you’re going to have to track your expenses carefully; a budget is an indispensable tool for this.

• Bookkeeping 101: Debits and Credits: A brush up for all those who have forgotten everything they learned about accounting.

• Accounting Basics: More basics of accounting (there are numbers involved in starting a business, even a very small one).

• The Small Business Administration: This site has lots of good information, resources, and tools for small business owners.  One of their courses is an Introduction to Accounting.

• How to Forecast Revenue and Growth: Although this article appears in Womenentrepreneur.com, it contains useful advice for men and women.

• What Should You Charge?: Setting prices is a sticky issue for a lot of new entrepreneurs. Here’s an article from Inc.com that will help you set prices: How to Price Your Products.

• Track Your Critical Numbers:  It’s important to set goals and track your progress to determine whether you need to take any corrective action.

• Free Business Benchmarking Tool: Inc. Gauge: Business owners can quickly evaluate their Key Performance Indicators and discover how they compare with up to 80,000 other companies using this free, confidential analysis tool.

Tips for Freelancers

• 101 Essential Freelancing Resources: If you’re a freelancer, you should treat your activities like a business. In addition, freelancing is something you can do on the side to keep money coming in while your small business takes off.

• 101 Ideas to Get More Freelance Work and Generate New Client Leads: Lots more great resources for freelancing.

Outsourcing

• 100 Small Business Tips and Tricks for Effectively Outsourcing to India: One way to do less and achieve more in your small business is to outsource some of the repetitive, nonessential tasks.

Choosing a Business Entity

• Free Incorporation and LLC Formation Guidebook:  This booklet will give you valuable advice on choosing a business entity.

• Which Type of Business Entity to Choose: Here’s more information on choosing a legal entity for your business.

• Nolo: Free legal information for the small stuff.

Create a Blog for Your Business

• The Business Blogging Toolset: 100 Resources for Entrepreneur-Writers: Setting up a blog for your business can be a powerful way to acquire new customers and get the word out about your products and services.

• How to Start a Business Blog.: This is a free eBook by Michael Martine, author and owner of Remarkablogger.com, a great resource for business bloggers.

Putting Together a Social Media Strategy for your Small Biz

• How to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive Business: You need to develop a social networking plan in order to use sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook effectively.

• 137 Small Business Twitter Tips: Twitter isn’t just for socializing; it can be a valuable marketing tool.

• Twitter 101 for Business: Here are more tips on how to use Twitter for your business.

• The Facebook Marketing Toolbox: 100 Tools and Tips to Tap the Facebook Customer Base: Using social media is one way to market your business on a shoestring budget. This article will show how to best use Facebook to promote your small business.

• 100+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site.  Here are 100 tips on how to best use it.

• 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn: Guy Kawasaki shares his wisdom on how to use LinkedIn

• 10 Ways to Promote Your Business on Squidoo: There are plenty of ways you can use Squidoo to market your business, including using the poll module to survey your readers, creating a lens about yourself so that potential customers get a better idea of who you are, and so on.

More Help with Web 2.o

• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0: Top 25 Apps to Grow your Business: These are some more tools you can use to help make your business grow.

• The Web Entrepreneur’s Customer Service Toolbox: 100 Hacks and Resources: Great online tools for would-be entrepreneurs.

Books and Podcasts for Entrepreneurs

• The 99 Best Business Books Available: The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List: Instead of going back to school to get an MBA–spending money on tuition, in addition to the opportunity cost of time–you can acquire your business education by reading the best business books out there and learn by doing.

• 100 Best Small Business Podcasts 2009: You can learn a lot about business by listening to these podcasts.

Staying Lean and Mean

• 46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money: You don’t necessarily need a lot of cash to start your small business.

• 51 Tips for Saving Money on Technology: One of the best pieces of advice for first time entrepreneurs is to stay lean and mean when you’re first starting out. Here are some tips on saving money on technology.

• Mini-Course: How to Start a Business on a Shoestring Budget: Trump University offers this free course on how to start your business when you don’t have a lot of cash (you need to register).

Writing for Small Business Owners

• Writing Tips for Small Business Owners:  This free download will show you how to write an effective sales letter.

• Make Your Ideas Stick: In a blog post I wrote which was published at Problogger.net, I give a detailed explanation of the steps presented in the book “Made to Stick” to persuade others to do what you want–including buying your products–through your writing.

Business Blogs You Should Subscribe To

• The Top 100 Business Blogs:  Add these to your RSS feed and stay up-to-date on the latest news and information for small businesses.

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My ebook “How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists” explains that creativity is not the sole domain of the arts but is important in any field. Whatever you do, creativity helps you do it better. Discover practical advice on how to be more creative in every life endeavor by reading my ebook.

The Sedona Method is a simple, powerful, easy-to-learn technique that shows you how to let go of any negative, unwanted or painful feelings you may be experiencing at any particular moment. It consists of a series of questions you ask yourself that lead your awareness to focus on what you’re feeling in the moment and gently guide you toward letting it go. Read my review of the Sedona Method here.