Essential (and FREE) Newsletters for Business Start-Ups

Perhaps the biggest difference between starting your own business and working for a big company is the number of people in your office. If you’re just getting started, you may be all alone.

There’s no one standing around the water cooler to bounce around ideas with.

No one to sit around the conference table and brainstorm your next marketing idea.

It’s all you.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t have access to new ideas, and great advice from others who have built small businesses from the ground up.

It may not be the same as having a few partners in the office, but we’ve put together this short list of newsletters you may want to consider subscribing to for ideas, advice, links to business tools, and more that will help you get your business growing faster.

Here are a few of our favorite newsletters (with content for small business owners). Best of all, they’re all free.

The best newsletters and blogs for business owners

1. Seth Godin’s eNewsletter (weekly). Seth Godin is one of the best-known marketing personalities on the web. His books include: Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, and Linchpin (all highly recommended). Each day he posts a new idea on his blog. And each week, all of those ideas are gathered up into a single email. Each of his ideas will spur your thinking in new ways.
2. Inc’s Start-up Advice and Small Business Success eNewsletters (weekly). Inc Magazine is focused on the needs of small business owners and features articles and profiles of successful entrepreneurs. They’ve pulled some of the best content from the magazine and made it available in a number of weekly newsletters. These are two of the best.
3. Duct Tape Marketing eNewsletter (weekly). John Jantsch is the author of the best selling book, Duct Tape Marketing (and a long time friend of Logomaker). He’s a smart guy who’s helped hundreds of small businesses launch and grow their businesses. His weekly newsletter features articles on all kinds of marketing topics from optimizing your website for online search, to story telling, to getting referrals from your customers. Worth checking out.
4. The Small Business Blog (weekly) by the logo design experts at Logomaker. This one may seem like shameless self-promotion but stick with us for a minute. Each month we put together a little newsletter with advice on design and more. Things like how to set up your website, what to do when giving a presentation, and what is branding and how to do it.
5. Small Business Trends (bi-weekly). This newsletter is a collection of the writing you’ll find at the smallbiztrends blog by Anita Campbell. There’s a lot of variety in what she includes from what the latest legislation means to small business owners to social media and tips for making your business profitable.
6. The IRS Small Business Newsletter (bi-weekly). Let’s be honest, this one can be a snoozer. Who wants to read about tax information? Well, if you own a new business, you do. This newsletter will keep you up-to-date on filing deadlines, changes in the tax code that will affect you, and other reminders that will help keep your business out of trouble with the law.

Of course, there are hundreds of other newsletters you may want to check out, covering topics like marketing, operations and fulfillment, ideas for new businesses, human resources, and on and on. Can you think of any we missed? Please share them in the comment below so everyone can benefit.