Monday, April 27, 2009

Essential Tools for Starting Up Your Side Business [Entrepreneurship]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/7tzAu7raDjw/essential-tools-for-starting-up-your-side-business

Finally getting serious about turning your hobby into a side business? Dozens of free and cheap do-it-yourself tools make setting up a professional virtual storefront easy.

Photo by intenteffect.

Now that you've paid your income taxes, you want to turn your nights and weekends into an extra income stream (and business expenditures into tax deductions). With the recession in full swing and pink slips getting handed out at the job, now's a great time to take the leap and set up shop on your own. Whether you're selling t-shirts, building the next great webapp, or contracting your brilliance out to clients, several handy tools can offer small biz services you need for free or cheap. Let's take a look.

Get Physical

You may be running your side business out of your home, but you can still get yourself a separate business address without actually leasing an office. Rent a private mailbox somewhere near your home for your business correspondence. While a PMB won't be free, it's pretty cheap. Mine costs over $300 a year, just about a buck a day. This separate address gives you the ability to publish your business address without worrying that some nut is going to show up on your front lawn, or that you'll have to change your business AND personal address if you move across town. If you've got a day job and won't be home to answer the doorbell when FedEx shows up, or you have to ship packages often, your private mailbox will really come in handy. I've got one at a local Mailboxes, Etc, and "my guy" there helps me ship material, make copies, ! send fax es—and when I'm on vacation, I know he's there signing for incoming packages, and calling me when I've got a priority overnight envelope waiting.

Just like you'll publish your business address on your cards and web site, you'll also want a separate phone number for your side or small business. I was lucky enough to get in early on a free (but invite-only) Google Voice number that lets you set up custom greetings for customers and forward business calls to my cell phone during business hours. Many voice over IP services offer similar features that let you set up filters to separate business and personal calls so your customers don't get your personal voicemail greeting.

In the age of email, faxing is a pretty antiquated way to exchange documents. Still, if a customer wants to fax you something, use a free-to-cheap service like eFax to get faxes digitally to your email inbox. Photo by turtlemom4bacon.

Make Your One Essential Hire: An Accountant

Most side businesses want to avoid hiring a lawyer unless absolutely necessary because, well, attorneys are expensive. However, out of the gate, you at least want to have a good accountant. Especially when you're first getting started, an accountant can answer questions like "Should I found an LLC or an S-Corp?" and help you figure out how your business will affect your taxes. In some areas (like here in San Diego), there's a yearly city tax for running a business and a local business registry (which I had no idea existed when I moved here). Your accountant will be able to answer finance-related questions and help you deal with all those annoying details of just getting set up.

Establish Your Business Presence Online (and Off)

Now that you've got yourself a name, address, phone number, and accountant, it's time to get down to busine! ss. Cons ult with your accountant about what type of business you should found (or if you should just stick to a sole proprietorship) and get to filing the paperwork. Tools like previously mentioned MyCorporation can help you found your company; otherwise a good accountant can help you do the paperwork as well. Make sure you talk over what you need and how the business entity will affect your finances before you make your move.

These days no business is in business until it's got a web site. Register your company's domain name using a reliable registrar (and that business address you set up). After their awful Super Bowl ad I got tired of popular registrar GoDaddy's annoying upsells and low-class marketing and switched over to NameCheap; I've also had a good experience using Dotster. If you're going to spring for web hosting, your host may offer domain registration as well. (Adam and I both like DreamHost.) However, if your company's web site is a straight-up brochure or simple blog, there are many ways to host your business domain name with free apps.

You may also want to claim your business name on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and unlike domain registration, that's free. Twitter's a super-easy way to distribute short bits of news about your business, and on Facebook you can easily set up a business page for connecting with your customers and letting them know what you're offering.

Distribute Your Goods

While what you need to distribute goods and services depends on what you're selling, there! are mor e specialist services to set up your storefront than eBay. If you've got t-shirts or mugs you want CafePress, self-publishing your book you want Lulu, selling your crafts you want Etsy. Even if your business involves recommending things like books and movies, you'll want to set up an Amazon Associate account to earn referral payments. (Got a storefront somewhere I didn't mention above? Post it in the comments.)

Wrangle Your Paperwork

Paperwork like contracts, invoices, taxes, business cards, and bills are an inevitable reality of running a business, but there are a few ways to reduce the occurrence of dead trees in your venture. In lieu of faxing or filing in manila envelopes, I'm still in love with my ScanSnap document scanner for turning receipts and contracts into PDFs instantly. For invoicing clients, the excellent Blinksale is an inexpensive and easy way to track what's gone out and what's coming in. (Plus their invoices look a lot better than that Microsoft Word template you've been using.) Freelancers tracking billable hours should check out Harvest for time-tracking and invoicing capabilities as well. Finally, for nifty custom business cards, check out Moo.com's offering.

Manage Your Customers

Finally, once your business is up and running you want easy ways to stay in touch with and help out your customers. At Lifehacker we use Get Satisfaction to manage reader troubles and bug reports; here's our support forum! there. For a more tech-savvy audience, a regular mailing list at Google Groups can suffice; that's what I'm using to communicate with users of my Better Firefox extensions. To track client leads and manage your customer contact list, check out 37 Signals' Highrise.

More from the Twitter Front Line

As far as small business owners go, I'm pretty green, so this morning I asked my more experienced Twitter followers what must-have app or service helps run their side or small business. Here's a sampling of what I heard back:

What apps run your small business depends a whole lot on what your need. What must-have apps run your side or small business? Share the love by posting them up in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, loves running a small biz on great apps. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday (except today, because it's Friday) on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.



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Posted by Augustine at 7:39 AM

Polaris Brings Google Analytics to Your Desktop [Downloads]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/bT3nIZTKQQc/polaris-brings-google-analytics-to-your-desktop

Windows/Mac/Linux (with Adobe AIR): Polaris is a free Adobe AIR application that brings Google Analytics (Google's statistics tracking tool for web publishers) to your desktop with an attractive look and feel.

If you don't have your own web site, this application (and Google Analytics in general) is useless to you. If you do have a web site, chances are you're a little bit of a Google Analytics junkie. Rather than keeping a tab or window open dedicated to Analytics, Polaris Desktop Reporting pulls Analytics out of your browser and puts it into an attractive widget-style look at your web site's visitor and traffic status. The application is fast, integrates many of the reports you likely look at regularly, and overall works like a charm.

Polaris is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux, requires Adobe AIR. If you're planning to use the app for more than one web site, Polaris costs $15/year. If you're new to Google Analytics but think it might be for you, head over to our guide to improving your web site with Google Analytics.



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Posted by Augustine at 7:39 AM

Take Aerial Photos with a DIY Kite Camera Timer [Weekend]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/1VHxVzwK8yM/take-aerial-photos-with-a-diy-kite-camera-timer

If you were intrigued by our previous coverage of kite photography, but put off by the expense and knowledge of electronics required, this tutorial will get you started cheaply and without solder.

Instructables user Mikeasaurus was interested in Kite Aerial Photography—yet not so interested in shelling out a lot of money for a custom rig or building his own timing circuit for the shots. He wanted a mechanical device that would trigger his camera on an interval, work with any digital camera, and required no special adapter or plug. He created a mechanical timer out of the motor from a child's toy and other miscellaneous parts like a paint stirring stick, thumb tacks, and a BIC pen.

Although his end creation has a bit of a Frankenstein appearance, it got the job done effectively for him, and he was able to take over 400 pictures from the kite rig's maiden voyage. It also fit his criteria of working on any digital camera he could mount to it—assuming the kite was big enough to lift it! Check out his tutorial at the link below for more information. If you have your creative way of getting photos, airborne or otherwise, share your technique in the comments below.

Kite Areal Photography [Instructables]



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Posted by Augustine at 7:38 AM

Five Best Malware Removal Tools [Hive Five]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/5_Hfji9CZmY/five-best-malware-removal-tools

On Thursday we asked you to share your favorite tool for purging malware from your computer. We've tallied the votes and we're back with the top five contenders for best malware removal tool.

Photo by Anonymous9000.

The internet—unfortunately—isn't a never-ending buffet of secure open-source software and Bollywood-style musicals starring LOLCats. There are people and organizations that delight in stealing your personal data, hijacking your computer, and making a general nuisance of themselves through malicious software. This week we're highlighting the top five tools for removing software with ill-intentions from you PC.

Spybot Search & Destroy (Windows, Freeware)

Spybot Search & Destroy has made quite a name for itself over the years, earning accolades from both general and computer-focused publications. Spybot Search & Destroy is the highest ranked freeware tool at 2Spyware.com, a website that ranks malware removal tools. In addition to scanning for malware, Spybot Search & Destroy also has a variety of additional functionality, including a botnet scanner, hosts-file modification (to keep malware from calling home), a secure file shredder, and a dummy code feautre (it replaces malicious or questionable adware modules with inert code so the dependent program will keep fun! ctioning ). As an added bonus Spybot Search & Destroy is compatible with every version of Windows dating back to Windows 95.

SUPERAntiSpyware (Windows, $30)

SUPERAntiSpyware is available as both a freeware and premium edition like Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware (see below), but the level of restrictions on the freeware edition are considerably higher. The free version is limited to basic on-demand scanning and malware removal. The premium version includes real-time scanning, registry protection, a scheduling service, auto-scan on startup, and 50 startup diagnostics to stop malware infections before they spread. One of SUPERAntiSpyware's strongest selling points is its high level of compatibility with other protection tools like Avira, Kaspersky, Symantec, and McAfee. In most cases it can be run along side other tools without any conflict.

ComboFix (Windows, Freeware)

ComboFix is just as spartan as the screenshot here makes it look. You download ComboFix, run it, and it takes care of the rest. The basic ComboFix process looks like this: It backs up your registry, checks to see if you have Windows Recovery Console installed, and then it goes to town on your system scanning away through 40+ stages. When it's done, ComboFix spits out a log file and lists all the malware it found, which ones it was able to remove, and which ones you'll have to use your Google-fu to look up how to remove manually. It isn't fancy, but it gets the job done and gives you a detailed report at the end to take to security forums for help if you need it.

M alwarebytes' Anti-Malware (Windows, $25)

Malwarebytes' flagship application Anti-Malware is a shareware malware-removal tool. The principle difference between the free and premium version of the application is real-time monitoring. If you don't need active scanning against threats, the free version uses the same database and does an admirable job ferreting out infections. Anti-Malware was, for example, one of the few malware removal tools that could detect and remove the Antivirus XP 2008, a spyware application that masqueraded as an antivirus app. The Anti-Malware installation includes another application from Malwarebytes called FileASSASSIN—a helpful tool for deleting files locked by Windows.

HijackThis (Windows, Freeware)

HijackThis stands alone in this Hive Five as being the least automated yet most likely to completely wreck your system if used incorrectly. HijackThis does a comprehensive scan of the state of your computer and reports back an enormous log file. The tool makes no judgement on whether or not an application, browser modification, or registry entry is malicious or not. It simply generates a list of things that could have been potentially altered or tampered with by spyware, malware, or other malicious programs. Advanced users can look over the log themselves and determine what needs to be pruned. If you're not comfortable doing that, your best bet is to take the log file to a popular security! forum l ike BleepingComputer or SpywareInfoForum and ask their armies of knowledgeable volunteer malware slayers to comb over it for you. Alternately, while not a replacement for receiving expert help from people in the forums, HijackThis.de is a web-based HijackThis log reader which is updated nightly. You upload your log file, it scans the file for relevant entries and gives you links to articles on how to remove the malware found in the log.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the contenders for top malware killer, it's time to cast your vote and see who goes home with the crown. A note about the poll: the option for "Other" is missing from this week's poll. We understand that the best way to get rid of malware is to hit it with multiple tools until the infestation is good and dead, but we'd like you to cast your vote based on the best possible (single) tool for the job, not on the scorched earth policy of using them all. If you have an Other vote for a completely different malware-removal tool, we're happy to hear it in the comments.


Which Malware Removal Tool is Best?(answers)

This week's honorable mention goes to "Reformat" (as in your hard drive) as a last-ditch, foolproof solution to your malware problems. Apparently sometimes when you find a mouse in the kitchen the only way to be sure there aren't any more of them in the walls is to burn the whole house down. Have a malware horror story, a favorite tool, or a prevention tip you want to share? Sound off in the comments below.



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Posted by Augustine at 7:35 AM

FreeProxy Helps You Circumvent Restrictive Firewalls [Download]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/U6xbYdpYG0w/freeproxy-helps-you-circumvent-restrictive-firewalls

Windows only: Corporate firewall got you down? No Facebook behind your school's filter? FreeProxy is a simple proxy tool for routing your browsing through your home computer.

At the computer and technology blog MakeUseOf, they've put together a straightforward tutorial on how to set up FreeProxy, including the software setup, configuring your router, and setting your browser to use a proxy server. Once you're done, all your remote browser traffic will be piped through your home connection, reopening the world wide web to you. If you'd like to use a proxy and have a secure connection, you should look into setting up your own SSH SOCKS proxy for encrypted, remote browsing.



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Posted by Augustine at 7:35 AM

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