We all know the economy sucks. We hear it in the news, we read about it in print media, and we read about it online.

I see shows on MSNBC and CNBC with people arguing with one another about how to better our market and we see experienced entrepreneurs shelling out helpful advice to help your business grow.

Then I get online and read articles and blogs which teach us about the effectiveness of social media marketing and how many people use this as their only means of marketing and building their business.

For example, they leverage social media sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, and del.icio.us to help drive “targeted” traffic to their site. Another idea is to comment on other people’s blogs in order to get other bloggers to comment on your blog as a strategy to get your website noticed and talked about.

No one with any sense advertently forms a general partnership these days, yet I hear over and over again new entrepreneurs looking to start a business with a partner mention how they want to form one.

As any smart business person should do, you need to first research your options available and listen to those who know.

The worst way to hold any assets or to do business as a partner is a General Partnership.  In my opinion, it’s all negative and there’s absolutely no advantage whatsoever.

Ok, what is a general partnership?

Here’s the definition: A general partnership is one in which all partners are general partners.

More specifically when a group of individuals (two or more persons) agree to collectively act as a business, a general partnership is formed. The emphasis here is on general. Most people have found that you can sue not only the partnership for all the assets it has, but if it doesn’t have enough, you can go after the individual partners and reach their personal estates. Ouch!

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

How many times has this rung true for you? Whoever first spoke those words was a wise person.

About a week ago a close friend went on Craiglist.org, Las Vegas looking for a rental home. They quickly became excited when they ran across a home advertised for rent in an excellent part of town for a monthly rent price $300 - $400 less a month than similar homes.

They quickly replied to the post and soon after they received a reply from the supposed owner of the house in a message that looked like this:

Good hearing from you am Dr Eric Neville,the Leaders of (WHO) world health organisation appointed by the World Health Assembly on 9 November 2006..

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Thinking positive will create positive outcomes,” or something similar.

Uh . . . yeah, whatever.

I am a believer that part of being successful is having a positive attitude, but to create successful outcomes and win in business, you need to do more.

I know times are rough these days not only for entrepreneurs, but for nearly everyone. Gas prices are still hurting businesses, people are afraid of spending too much, credit companies have tightened their lending rules; heck - even here in Las Vegas where there are a number of huge hotels and casinos, jobs are hard to come by.

If you’re a small business owner and struggling to make ends meet, you probably see two options ahead of you: close up shop or try to weather the storm. Of course, times will get better. They always do.

But what do you do while money is tight?

Article by Theresa Hoff

One of the hardest things for new business owners to figure out when forming a new corporation or partnership is how to split profits.

Often times 2 or more entrepreneurs will enter a business venture with the notion of sharing profits 50/50. But what happens when one person does 90% of the work while the other only contributes 10%?

Is this still a fair split?

To complicate things even further, what if your business partner was a family member or close friend? If you’re the one doing 90% of the work but only receiving 50% of the profits, how do you go about approaching your partner with a request that you take home more of the profits?

Here’s one possible solution.

Do You Have The Right Business Structure?

This is where so many people who try to save a dollar and incorporate themselves without really understanding the different business structures can do more harm than the pros of saving a few bucks.

Image by Roo Reynolds

We’ve reached the end in our series on how to better secure your WordPress blog. It’s been a bumpy road, but we made it.

The techniques I’ve shown here are by no means exhaustive and I don’t want to give you a false feeling that your blog is fully secured. However, the steps I’ve laid out should provide a decent amount of protection.

Many times these attackers are nothing more than kids who have a program which finds hundreds, if not thousands of login pages all accessible on the Web and will run a set number of algorithms to hack these sites while the kid pulls his corn dogs out of the microwave and gets back to his Play Station game.

The key here then is to accomplish two things:

1. Create a series of road blocks and redirects for anyone other than you who tries to access sensitive WordPress directories (like your login page).

Imagine if there were a file where anyone could go to and easily see such things as your:

• Password
• Database Name
• Server Name
• Information About Your Database

Doesn’t sound like the kind of file you’d want just laying around easily accessible, does it?

Well I got news for you, there is such a file that exists, it’s called wp-config.php.

By default, web browsers shouldn’t be able to display the contents of a .php file, however, as we all know, nothing is set in stone. Obviously, this is an important file you are going to want to protect if you run a blog powered by WordPress. Here’s a quick way to limit access to your wp-config.php file using .htaccess.

Protect wp-config.php With .htaccess

As we saw in Post 4: Setting Up .htaccess in this series, the .htaccess file is vital to the security of your website. It’s also relatively easy to set up - just create a file and name it .htaccess and then paste in some code.