Opening and maintaining your own business can be easy or difficult, depending on how much research you do.
For instance:
- Do you know your competition?
- What kind of forms do you need to file?
- How can you effectively market your product?
- What role does the IRS play?
Research it @ Winter Park Library.
Recommended Reads
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Instagram Power, Second Edition: Build Your Brand and Reach More Customers with Visual Influence
Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product.
The essential guide to marketing and building your business on Instagram - today’s hottest social media platform
While other social sites are declining in popularity, Instagram is hotter than ever—and shows no signs of cooling off any time soon. But it’s not just users that are flocking to the site, marketers love it too. With more features and marketing capabilities than ever, Instagram is a channel that smart marketers can’t afford to avoid.
Filled with proven strategies from leading Instagram experts this updated edition of Instagram Power walks you through the steps of setting up your account, actionable monetization methods you can use, and how to integrate the social media platform into your complete marketing approach. With 15 new chapter subsections and revisions throughout, the book shows you how to leverage all the new features, including Insights, IGTV, Shop-able Posts, Stories, and Instagram Ads.
You’ll discover how to:- Leverage Instagram to build and strengthen your business or personal brand
- Design an effective marketing plan for the platform
- Sell directly on Instagram with Shop-able posts
- Avoid common pitfalls, and much more
If you’re serious about marketing, you need to tap into the power of the world's most popular photo-sharing platform.This guide offers a road map to achieving Instagram marketing success.
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Influencer Marketing for Brands
In the next few years, brands are on track to spend billions of dollars on influencer marketing. This form of marketing—currently utilized with great success on Instagram and YouTube—is not a short-lived fad, but a tectonic shift for the future of digital advertising. It's the way of the future, and the responsibility is on business leaders to keep up.
Modern marketing professionals looking to adopt influencer marketing for their brands face equally modern challenges. Like finding the right talent, tracking and measuring results and quantifying how this new marketing opportunity aligns with the overall strategy. Influencer Marketing for Brands is the field guide for the digital age. After working with hundreds of brands from across the globe, author Aron Levin shares his insider knowledge gained from research, strategy, and hands-on experience from more than 10,000 successful collaborations with influencers on Instagram and YouTube. He provides you with valuable insights that help you eliminate guesswork and avoid common mistakes. More importantly, he shows you how to turn influencer marketing into a scalable and sustainable marketing channel.
The digital media landscape grows more complicated by the hour, and influencer marketing is no exception. Influencer Marketing for Brands breaks down the art and science of influencer marketing and helps you synthesize, contextualize and transform this new way of creating and distributing content with powerful formulas, proven strategies, and real-world examples.
What You Will Learn
- Plan effective influencer marketing campaigns using a simple 3-step formula
- Create top performing YouTube videos that drive website traffic, app installs and sales
- Understand what to pay for influencer marketing and how much you should invest if you're just starting out
Who This Book is For
Marketing and agency professionals, influencers and content creators, marketing students, those who are looking for more effective forms of advertising and are generally interested in understanding the new and evolving digital media landscape.
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Start Your Own Nonprofit Organization
FOLLOW YOUR PASSION
Serving missions rather than profits, the nonprofit sector employs 11 million people, making it the third largest industry in the United States, and often provides our communities' most fundamental services.
Whether your mis-sion is to save puppies, feed children, or preserve history, Start Your Own Nonprofit Organization equips you with the tools you need to start, run and grow your organization. This guide provides mission-driven entrepreneurs like you with the latest industry research and pairs it with advice from real-world nonprofit leaders to teach you how to:
- Determine if your business idea is nonprofit or for-profit
- Manage the day-to-day operations and onboard key staff and volunteers that help you achieve goals
- Write a business plan, mission statement, and grant proposals that gain funding and help grow the organization
- Manage your finances to the satisfaction of the IRS
- Integrate the latest technology, apps, and social media strategy to aid in volunteer tracking, donation facilitation, and audience outreach
Plus, gain insight and hard-won lessons from nonprofits like the Susan B. Komen Foundation, Prosperity Indiana, the Melanoma International Foundation, and the New Hampshire Center for Nonprofits
No matter what kind of nonprofit you want to start, this guide will turn your hope for change into help for a deserving community--starting now!
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Million Dollar Women
The essential guide for female entrepreneurs who want to “go big,” which shows you how to turn that creative idea into a million-dollar-plus business.
American women are starting businesses at nearly twice the rate that men are, but only three percent of female business owners have revenues of over one million dollars. Most women entrepreneurs are stuck at the “mom and pop” level, just getting by, or in many cases, running out of cash. Julia Pimsleur shares her inspiring story of building her own company and raising millions in capital in a guide for women like her who have a great idea and need to find the resources to take it into the big leagues.
In Million Dollar Women, Pimsleur introduces you to seven women who, instead of “leaning in,” simply left corporate America and “marched in” to the world of entrepreneurship. They have raised capital, developed powerful networks, and generated multimillion-dollar companies from scratch. When Pimsleur herself started Little Pim, a company that produces a program for young children to learn foreign languages, she wanted to create an exceptional experience. But soon she realized that she had to think and behave differently to become the head of a multimillion-dollar company. Eventually she transformed from a creative person with a business idea into a CEO running a business with a creative idea at its center.
Million Dollar Women will teach you the concepts, the lexicon, and the steps for taking a business big. It shows you how to network, when to delegate, and when to get extra coaching. Above all, it provides help for overcoming the kind of emotional hurdles you have to jump to join the million dollar-plus business owners—and cheers you on in overcoming every obstacle. With her friendly, pragmatic advice, humor, and an appendix of exercises to take your ideas from theory to practice, Julia Pimsleur’s book is an invaluable reference. -
How Business Works
Let's get straight down to business. This brilliant book explains and explores the essential terms and key concepts in the world of business, finance, and company management.
If business is proving brain-boggling, keep things simple and straightforward with this unique graphic guide. Eye-catching visual aids give a helpful representation of each and every aspect of business, while the complex subject matter is broken down into clear definitions and concise explanations, expressed in easy-to-understand language.
You'll get to grips with how companies work across the board, including management level, research and development, sales and marketing, and production and distribution. If you're perplexed by profit margin, confused by cash flow, or baffled by balance sheets, all your questions and many hundreds more are answered in this indispensable home reference. Crammed with top tips and essential know-how, How Business Works is perfect for anyone looking to boost their business brain or learn the ropes from the ground to the top.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or starting up your own business, this book is the perfect business partner to get you ready for success.
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Start Your Own Etsy Business
CRAFT YOUR OWN SUCCESS
Whether you're a master crafter, a carpenter, a jewelry designer, or have become passionate about making the best home décor in town, now is the time to go from hobby to full-time business owner. And with million shoppers ready to discover your unique offerings it only makes sense to join the largest, most successful online community of creative entrepreneurs on Etsy(R).Our experts have teamed up with successful shop owners to provide you with Start Your Own Etsy(R) Business, an easy-to-understand, comprehensive blueprint that takes you through setting up, branding, marketing, and managing your store. You'll learn how to:
- Create listings and marketing plans that attract the right customers
- Choose keywords and tags design to drive traffic to your shop
- Pick the right shipping and packaging methods to meet your inventory needs
- Define your brand with carefully crafted logos, product listings, and images
- Reach more shoppers with targeted social media and advertising campaigns
- Create storytelling product listings and professional looking product photos
- Decide when it's time to turn your part-time hobby into a full-time business venture
Plus, gain worksheets, templates, resource lists and tips designed to go from passion to profits. If you're ready to share your passion for your craft with millions around the world, this guide is for you. -
Legal Guide for Starting & Running a Small Business
The all-in-one business law book
When you run a small business, legal questions crop up almost on a daily basis. Ignoring them can threaten your enterprise—but hiring a lawyer to help with routine issues can devastate the bottom line.
Fortunately, you have a better alternative. Legal Guide for Starting & Running a Small Business clearly explains the how to:
- raise start-up money
- pick the right business structure
- get licenses and permits
- negotiate a favorable lease
- protect yourself with the right insurance
- create binding contracts
- hire, fire, and manage employees
- cope with financial problems
- protect your personal assets
- save on business taxes
The 14th edition is completely updated with the latest business tax rules and numbers, including options for deducting expenses for the business use of your home.
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How to Write a Business Plan
Step-by-step advice on preparing a business plan
You need a sound business plan to start a business or raise money to expand an existing one. For over 30 years, How to Write a Business Plan has helped fledgling entrepreneurs—from small service businesses and retailers to large manufacturing firms—write winning plans and get needed financing.
This bestselling book contains clear step-by-step instructions and forms to put together a convincing business plan with realistic financial projections, effective marketing strategies, and overall business goals. You’ll learn how to:- figure out if your business idea will make money
- determine and forecast cash flow
- create profit and loss forecasts
- prepare marketing and personnel plans
- find potential sources of financing, and
- present your well-organized plan to lenders and other backers, and
- learn about best practices for raising money, from SBA loans to equity crowdfunding.
Business Start-Up
Books
Dewey Decimal browsing numbers: 346.065, 650.03, 658.022
You can search for other books and materials on your topic by visiting the Library catalog at www.winterparklibrary.org. Recommended subject searches are small business and entrepreneurship.
Magazines
Economist - Forbes
BPlans Business plans and advice for all steps of a new business.
Florida Deptartment of State - Division of Corporations File business entities, trade and service marks, judgment liens, and fictitious name registrations. This is a registry and information resource for almost all business activity in Florida.
Small Business Administration The government's detailed guide to starting, financing, & managing a business and much more.
Start-Up Basics All the basics neatly organized from the US government’s Small Business Administration.
UCF’s Small Business Development Center Fee-based seminars, and free one-on-one counseling for Central Florida small business owners.
Company Information
Better Business Bureau: Includes a searchable index to all BBBs in the U.S. and Canada.
Big Charts: Includes quotes, news, industries, markets, historical quotes, big reports and more.
(Edgar) United States Securities and Exchange Commisions: Registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms of all foreign and domestic companies.
Florida Trend Top Lists: The magazine's TopRank Florida lists tells you which companies lead in their respective industries.
PR Newswire: Full-text news on companies with a one-year archive.
Forms & Trademark
Dewey Decimal browsing numbers: 346.7304, 346.7306
You can search for other books and materials on your topic by visiting the Library catalog at www.winterparklibrary.org. Recommended subject searches are small business, trademarks, intellectual property.
Copyright Crash Course This U of Texas site offers info on copyright, fair use, intellectual property, digital content, and more. Includes a copyright tutorial.
Find Law: Forms & Contracts An A to Z list of 100+ business-related forms.
Florida Division of Corporations (Sunbiz.org) All Division of Corporations' forms are available for download in PDF format.
Microsoft Office Template Gallery Download free business templates from Microsoft
U.S. Copyright Office The U.S. Copyright Office provides registration forms, key publications, etc.
Marketing
Dewey Decimal browsing numbers: 658.8, 658.022
You can search for other books and materials on your topic by visiting the Library catalog at www.winterparklibrary.org. Recommended subject searches are marketing, small business management.
Ad*Access 7,000+ advertisements from 1911-1955, ranging from beauty and hygiene, radio, television, transportation, & WW II.
The Advertising Age Free articles and info on demographics, Hispanic marketing, news, blogs, etc.
Behance: See branding from all over the world on this website to gain inspiration.
Coppyblogger Articles with helpful tips and hints for copywriting. Tons of articles to help enhance copywriting skills.
Entrepreneur.com Offers free how-to guides and articles on the most popular marketing topics.
Florida Trend Top Lists The magazine's TopRank Florida lists tells you which companies lead in their respective industries.
The Inspiration Blog Great articles for anyone interested in marketing. They cover things like design, Power Point, logos, and so much more.
Marketing Eye A blog that features so many helpful articles for different marketing ideas, situations, pricing, budgets, and much more.
Metro Orlando Economic Development Commission The latest info about relocating or building a business in the metro area. Explore industry sectors, regional data on topics from education to transportation and much more.
Tax Issues
Dewey Decimal browsing numbers: 343.7305
You can search for other books and materials on your topic by visiting the Library catalog at www.winterparklibrary.org. Recommended subject searches are small business taxation, tax planning, home-based businesses taxation, tax deductions.
1040.com Find news and general tax informaiton. Also includes forms.
Best Tax Software of 2021 NerdWallet gives a list and information on different tax software, which includes ratings, prices, review, and links. They even include a side-by-side comparison.
Internal Revenue Service Forms and information for filing tax returns.
Small Business and Self-Employed Tax Center This IRS site tells you what you need to know about IRS reporting standards. Includes tax forms and links to other related sites.
State of Florida Department of Revenue Download the most commonly requested forms from the Florida Department of Revenue.
Business Insights: Essentials
Find information on companies, industries and more in the context of timely news, statistical data, and in-depth reports. Online tutorial available.
Business Plans Handbooks
Search hundreds of business plans compiled by entrepreneurs North America. Includes templates, fictional business plans, and a listing of organizations, agencies, and consultants.
DemographicsNow Library Edition
A comprehensive web-based solution offering up-to-date resources on demographics and extensive market level information. Online tutorial available.
Gale Legal Forms
Thousands of legal forms available. Official, State Specific, Federal, Business, Personal, Real Estate and General forms covering hundreds of legal subjects and issues. Online tutorial available.
Reference Solutions
Offers verified details on 20 million U.S. businesses and 222 million U.S. residents. Research executives and companies, news articles, conduct market research and much more. Online tutorial available.
Udemy for Business
Access thousands of video-based courses in business, tech, software, and personal development. For help, click Udemy App Start.pdf and Udemy Tip Sheet.pdf.