Fortunately, there is a lot of advice and lots of great resources to help you make your dream come true.  Here is a list of the top 10 blogs and resources that I use all the time to build my Internet business. 

These bloggers and resources will help you learn how to start your business from scratch, help you find a great idea and help you stay motivated and make your business successful. 

Please help me add to this list if you notice that we missed any of your favorite blogs on entrepreneurship.

Top Entrepreneurship Blogs

As a new entrepreneur, you will love this blogs! They cover several topics such as raising money, marketing & sales, and more ecommerce specific issues.

Blog: Springwise
URL: http://www.springwise.com/
Description: Excellent source of inspiration to get smart new business ideas.

Blog: Guy Kawasaki
URL: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
Description: Venture capitalist blog from Guy Kawasaki, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures.

Blog: Brad Feld
URL: http://www.feld.com/blog/index.php
Description: Another amazing VC blog from Brad Feld, managing director at Mobius Venture Capital. 

Blog: Kauffman blog
URL: http://blog.kauffman.org
Description: Entrepreneurs’ Viewpoint Blog on many topics such as finance, human resources, sales & marketing.

Blog: Workhappy
URL: http://www.workhappy.net/
Description: Killer resource for entrepreneurs. Blog referring to many other blogs and articles.

Blog: Joel Spolsky
URL: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Description: Huge resource on software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site.

Blog: Andy Budd
URL: http://www.andybudd.com/
Description: Andy Budd’s blog focuses on web design isssues and in particular CSS, web standards, user centered design, information architecture and running a successful web project.

Blog: JohnJantsch
URL: http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/weblog.php
Description: John Jantsch has been called the World’s Most Practical Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-world proven marketing ideas and strategies.

Other great resources

Blog: Paul Graham
URL: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
Description: Several interesting articles that you must read such as “The 18 mistakes that kill startups”.

Blog: Standord Entrepreneurship Educators Corner
URL: http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
Description: The Stanford Entrepreneurship Though Leaders seminar series invites one prominent thought leader per week and offers the podcasts for free. A truly excellent resource.

Blog: Business Plan Archive
URL: http://www.businessplanarchive.org/
Description: Welcome to the Business Plan Archive. In partnership with the Library of Congress, the Center for History and New Media, and the University of Maryland Libraries, the Archive collects and preserves business plans and related planning documents from the Birth of the Dot Com Era so that future generations will be able to learn from this remarkable episode in the history of technology and entrepreneurship.

Blog: Startup Nation
URL: http://www.startupnation.com/
Description: Source for Small Business Advice, Help Starting a Business, Entrepreneur Forum

Blog: SBA website
URL: http://www.sba.gov/smallbusinessplanner/index.html
Description: The Small Business Planner from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) includes information and resources that will help you at any stage of the business lifecycle, including how to establish your business plan.

Blog: Lifehack’s 20 Great Resources on Entrepreneurship
URL: http://www.lifehack.org/
Description: Of course no list is complete without at least pointing to one other excellent list with great resources so you can keep on learning.

There are lots of excellent guides to get started but to truly stay on top of your SEO game, you have to keep an eye on the rapidly changing search engine market.

Following the top bloggers on SEO is one sure way to do that and we have compiled a list of the top SEO blogs. If we left any of your favorite top SEO blogs off this list, please let us know and will be sure to take a look:

The Top SEO Blogs:

Blog: SEOmoz URL: http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php Description: News, tips and highlights from the search marketing industry.

Blog: William Slawski URL: http://www.seobythesea.com/ Description: Offers great search engine optimization advice and tips.

Blog: SEO chat URL: http://www.seochat.com/ Description: Great blog with well researched posts. Part of a larger site with an excellent forum and free SEO tools.

Blog: Aaron Wall’s SEO Book URL: http://www.seobook.com/ Description: Leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search space. It offers marketing tips, search analysis, and whatever random rants come to mind.

Blog: Matt Cutts URL: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ Description: Matt Cutts works for Google and is responsible for search engine quality (i.e. getting rid of spam) and for helping web masters with good SEO practices. This one is a must for anyone that wants to master good, solid, SEO practices.

Blog: Searchenginewatch.com Blog URL: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ Description: Blog founded by Danny Sullivan, internet consultant and journalist. It offers many search engines resources and SEO related news. Free newsletter.

Blog: Jill Whalen URL: http://www.highrankings.com/ Description: While they do not maintain a blog, they have an excellent newsletter and lots of great seo articles. Blog: Nadir Garouche URL: http://www.seoprinciple.com/ Description: A blog covering Search Engine Optimization techniques, news, commentary and much more.

Noteworthy

Blog: Stuntdubl URL: http://www.stuntdubl.com/ Description: Todd is a certified AdWords Professional and SEO consultant. He maintains a very solid blog where he shares his latest thoughts and insights on SEO. Well worth reading.

Launching soon:

Blog: Search Engine Land URL: http://searchengineland.com/ Description: Everyone is waiting for this blog to launch. It will cover the latest news on search engine marketing and promises to be the single most resourceful tool on search engine marketing.

Free SEO Tools

Blog: SEO company URL: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html Description: In this blog you will find 156 SEO tools that will help you to optimize your website and move your search engine position higher. Blog: The webconfs.com SEO toolset URL: http://www.webconfs.com/ Description: You will find SEO Tools, Articles and Forums. Try also to do the quiz on SEO practices.

Email is the greatest marketing tool in history. If used properly, nothing is more personalized, inexpensive, interactive or easier to execute. Chris Baggot

While email marketing is exceptionally powerful, it is also one of the least used, least understood, and least optimized parts of many small ecommerce websites.

To help small online businesses close the knowledge gab, we wanted to list the top Email Marketing Blogs, Tools, and Resources that we have come across. Please help us add to this list if you notice that we missed anything.

The Top 5 Email Marketing Blogs

Blog: Chris Baggot URL: http://exacttarget.typepad.com/chrisbaggott/ Description: Email marketing best practices. Voted best of the web by Fortune and MarketingSherpa

Blog: No Man is an Island URL: http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/ Description: Blog from Email Marketing Reports

Blog: Bill Nussey URL: http://emailmarketing.silverpop.com/ Description: Author of “The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing

Blog: Tamara Gielen URL: http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com/ Description: Best practices, tips & tricks to optimize your next email marketing campaign.

Blog: The Email Wars URL: http://www.theemailwars.com/ Description: Optimizing email deliverability

The Top Email Marketing AutoResponder Tools

To succeed with email marketing, the single most important tool that every small online business needs to find is an autoresponder. An Autoresponder is an email marketing software application that will automatically broadcast newsletters and deliver targeted emails to your prospects. Unfortunately, finding a great, affordable, email marketing tool is not easy.

We are going to list the top 5 tools that we are aware of but it is important to note that we are not fully satisfied with any of them. As you know, our mantra is “test everything” and none of the auto-responders developed for small businesses offer A/B testing, which makes optimizing your online email marketing campaigns very painful and slow. The only tool that offers all the features that we liked is Lyris, but that is far too expensive. We just listed it so that you can see what will hopefully one day be available to all of us.

Tool 1: AutoResponsePlus URL: http://www.autoresponseplus.com/ Description: AutoResponse Plus is a solid choice if your email list has grown beyond 25,000 subscribers and if you want an auto-responder that you install on your own server. This is the system that we use. It is functional and does the basics right but if you are doing broadcasts beyond 100,000 subscribers then we recommend getting a dedicated server just for ARP alone since it takes up a lot of resurces.

Tool 2: GetResponse URL: http://www.getresponse.com/ Description: GetResponse is the perfect tool for beginners. It is offered at the lowest price point and is a fully hosted solution so you do not need anything to install to get started. When we last used it, however, we noticed that as your email lists grows into the tens of thousands you might experience scaling problems with GetResponse.

Tool 3: AWeber URL: http://www.aweber.com/ Description: We have heard great things from AWeber customers saying that the system is very easy to use and that they have one of the highest email deliverability rates in the industry. Since email deliverability is a hot issue, this one might also be a great choice if you are just getting started. However, their pricing plan only goes to 20,000 subscribers and since we have hundreds of thousands we have to go with Auto-Response-Plus.

Tool 4: Zoodoka URL:http://www.zookoda.com/ Description: Email marketing for blogs. Zookoda enables you to send a daily, weekly or monthly summary of your latest blog posts directly into your vistors inbox. Oh…did we mention… for FREE?

Tool 5: Lyris URL: http://www.lyris.com/ Description: This one is a luxury email marketing application. It is far beyond the reach of any small business but it is great to see where email marketing tools are headed. Now we just need to get the little vendors to upgrade their capabilities.

The Top Email Marketing Resources

Resource 1: Email Marketing Reports URL: http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/ Description: Hundreds of articles to help you start or improve your email marketing.

Resource 2: Marketing Sherpa – Email Marketing Newsletter URL: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/index.php Description: This is one of our favorite online newsletters with high quality content and test results and best practices.

Resource 3: Return Path Resources URL: http://www.returnpath.biz/resources/ Description: Company site with a good resource center. Their articles tend to be a little boring and academic though and mostly applicable to big online retailers. For truly great articles – take a look at the resource below.

Resource 4: EmailLabs Learning Center URL: http://www.emaillabs.com/resources/ Description: Their resource center has some excellent articles on best times of day to send, text vs HTML open rates, send time reports and more. All complete with metrics, numbers and charts that would make a math major smile. We loved it. Resource 5: Constant Contact Learning Center URL: http://www.constantcontact.com/learning-center/ Description: Great collection of free email marketing resources.

Do you know of any other great email marketing tools, blogs, and resources that we have left out? Please let us know and we’ll add them to the list.

Additions: Tools Recommended by Our Readers

Recommendation 1: Campaign Monitor URL: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ Description: Campaign monitor offers an excellent email marketing tool, blog, and resources.

Recommendation 2: Mail Chimp URL: http://www.mailchimp.com/ Description: Another excellent email newsletter tool with lots of great resources and an excellent blog that is worth following.

Recommendation 3: Email Roundtable URL: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/emailroundtable/ Description: Email Marketing Roundtable is a Yahoo Group consisting of e-commerce and online marketing personnel from leading brands. People here come together to discuss what works and what flops when it comes to crafting and executing winning email marketing programs for their organizations.

Recommendation 4: R | Mail – RSS to Email URL: http://www.r-mail.org/ Description: Lets you subscribe by Email to Any RSS Feed.