These hundreds of links are the culmination of years spent on the web researching, reading, and saving the absolute best of the best resources for anyone looking to start or grow a business, whether that's freelancing, building an app, or selling a product/service.
The topics covered are as follows: Entrepreneurship, Small Business, Web Design, SEO, Social Media, Advertising, Analytics, WordPress, Data Visualization, Videos, Negotiation, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pitching, iPhone Development, PR, Blogging, Photoshop, Pricing, Icons, Usability, Email Campaign, Textures, Landing Page, User Interfaces, Web App Building, A/B Testing, Logo, and Internet Marketing.
I'm going to stop right here and tell you to start using
Instapaper (on the web, your iPhone, and even your Kindle), and creating "subject" folders to manage all your intellectual capital. If you already have Instapaper, then it's as easy as following each of these links, then clicking the "Read Later" button you installed to your browser. Or, you could just bookmark this post!
UPDATE: if you don't have an instapaper account and are not logged in, y ou will not be able to use these links. If you want something super portable, here is my entire download-able account (an HTML file, which you can either follow the link to or right click and 'Save As'):
seanMeverett Ultimate Entrepreneurship & Small Business Toolbox
Web Design
Even if you're not a web designer, understanding the tiny details that separate good from great design can make all the difference in the world when it comes to increasing your sales. How often have you left a website because it was too confusing or how often have you stuck around on another website because it was visually appealing and did things you'd never seen before? When all it takes is a split second for someone to get distracted on the web, can you afford not to practice good design principles?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you read any of these links on SEO, you'll quickly realize that I'm definitely NOT performing best practice adding all these links to my website (which I'm not "no following"). Thus, I'm giving this website's "authority" to all these wonderful blogs and authors because I truly value their content. Not to mention the fact that Google and the other search engine's are probably going to flag my site as a "link farm". Oh well, it's not always about link building. Sometimes it's about giving credit where credit's due.
Social Media
The most over-used term in 2009 is back for more in 2010. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumble, Reddit, FriendFeed, and...the...list...keeps...going. Fortunately, these links represent those posts that have risen to the top of the over-written and reported pile.
Online Advertising
Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. It's called arbitrage.
Analytics
A subject close to my heart. The more numbers the better. The problem lies in mis-interpreting the data or over-analyzing to the point of creating optimization bias. We're also building an analytics web app that's going to finally bridge the gap between on-site and off-site analytics, something never done before. Read a bit more about it at
Evolyte Analytics.
WordPress
Easy to use and infinitely customizable. This site is built on it, you should probably have a couple built on it too.
Data Visualization
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Videos
YouTube didn't blow up for nothin' and it takes significantly less backlinks to get a better page 1 Google PageRank (i.e., SEO) than text.
Negotiation
You negotiate every day, whether you realize it or not, with your significant other, your friends, at the workplace, even with your family. Why not get a little better? The secret, in one phrase, is care...but not too much.
Entrepreneurship
This is what it's all about. Follow your
dreams and change the world in a big way. Believe it or not, networking is probably the most under-appreciated yet most important aspect of entrepreneurship.
Twitter
I love twitter. Seriously. And the reason I love it is two-fold. First, you can steepen your learning curve on any subject faster than any other method, and second, because I love sharing interesting things with others (hence the reason this post is ridiculously long with links). If you're interested in keeping up with links like these, you should follow me on twitter here:
@seanMeverett
Facebook
Ah, the bane of my existence. Where Farmville and Mafia Wars updates continually spam my feed, and people who think they're sarcastically witty start their status updates with "Dear ___", followed by unoriginal dribble or upload risque pics like they're still on MySpace. I'm not mad at you though, just keep uploading pictures of your cats and we'll be kosher.
LinkedIn
Yah, I know, not much content. I do have a few videos, however, that I can't share due to copyright constraints.
Pitching
If you've never given a presentation, or if you plan to ask a VC or Angel Investor for a bit of cash flow, then you should take a look at the link below. I'd also recommend searching for Dragon's Den on YouTube, which is somewhat similar to the American Idle concept, but replaces singers with entrepreneurs and Simon, Paula, and Randy with VCs.
iPhone & iPad Development
Self explanatory.
Blogging & PR
If you don't know what a blog is, you should probably just call it a day.
Photoshop
This is a graphic designer's greatest tool. I don't pretend to be anything of the sort, but I have been known to hack around with it from time to time.
Pricing
This is one of those art-and-a-science sort of things. It's the single "easiest" way to impact your revenue (positively or
negatively). Pricing is hard, especially dynamic pricing where you charge the highest price possible for each unique customer. Fortunately, a few of the guides below will help you in your quest.
Icons
You'd be surprised how many things can be represented with a simple icon, and how these basic icons can impact behavior on the web. For example, I recently reviewed a sign-up section of a landing page that asked for the typical information (name, email, address, etc). The goal was to determine a way to increase the conversion rate of folks signing up. By adding a simple lock icon with a green checkmark next to the 5 information fields, it increased the conversion rate by a staggering +50%. That. Is. Insane. Like I said, a picture's worth a thousand words, a