Small Business Tools FAQ

Community Wiki FAQ

The Community Wiki is a place where small business owners and employees can ask questions and get authoritative, community reviewed responses. Questions and answers are voted on by other users. As more people vote, the best answers rise to the top. This model has been described like the best parts of Wikipedia combined with the best parts of sites like Digg and Reddit.

You should ask anything that is related to the starting, running, managing, selling, or funding a company, franchise, non-profit, new product, or any other type of organization. If it is at all related to business it is welcome here.

Your question should be detailed and specific. You should write clearly. Use small sentences and simple words.

There is no such thing as a dumb question. No one should be afraid of asking “newbie” questions.

Try and ask questions that can actually be answered! There are all sorts of questions that can be subjective, argumentative, or inflammatory that will never receive a satisfactory answer.

To read this site and receive the benefit of those who have come before, there is no need to register. Ever. If you want to start asking and answering questions, if you want the site to start learning who you are and trusting you, then you will need to create an account.

Reputation, put simply, is a measure of how much the site trusts you. Some users will care about this greatly, others won’t care at all.

To ask and answer questions reputation does not matter.

In order to use any of the administrative features of the site – voting, editing, and the like – your reputation starts to matter.

Here is a list of the reputation points you need to have in order to perform certain actions:

• 15 Vote Up
• 15 Flag Offensive
• 100 Vote Down
• 400 Edit Community User's Posts
• 1000 Edit Other User's Posts

Reputation, in general, is earned based on how other users react to you. Every time someone votes one of your questions up you get 10 points. Every time someone votes one of your questions down, you lose 2 points.

Once you have amassed enough reputation, you will be able to edit and clean up the posts of other people. You will be able to delete posts, retag them, and completely change them in every way. These changes are tracked and you can view the history of the changes at any time.

Marketplace FAQ

Every small business needs to be able to let the world know about their new offering. In some cases, this is the hardest part of starting any new venture. The Small Business Tools Marketplace is a tool for all small businesses where they can list their product and tell the world all about what it is, what it does, and why people should buy it. And it is completely free!

Anything you sell. Whether you install pools, write software, sell books, sew Chihuahua sweaters, or any other product or service imaginable, you can list it on the site. This is a service we offer the community that we feel every business needs, regardless of the industry.

The Marketplace provides a link back to your product. When users click on it they should be directed to the page on your site that will let them buy what it is your selling.

There is no limit. In fact, the more the better. You should not list the same product more than once, though. (For instance, if you are selling a book, and you have 20 copies of it, you should not list it 20 times).

Each product remains in the Marketplace for one year (365 days.) You will receive an email when your product is about to be removed from the Marketplace and you can optionally relist it for another 365 days (again, completely free).

And, of course, you can choose to remove any product you listed at any time before the year is up.