Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

There's a bill in Congress that could affect entrepreneurs in a really bad way.  The Patent Reform Act of 2011 was expected to pass a few weeks ago.  Thank goodness it hasn't - yet.  After cries from engineers and patent attorneys, Congress paused and is reconsidering the bill.  Action is now expected in mid-June and if Congress doesn't hear from voters, the bill might still pass.  In this case, the "reform" is not a good thing. Here's why.

Stop This Bill Before You Get Bitten

According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an organization that opposes this bill and of which I am a member, the heart of the issue is that this Act will convert the U.S. from a "first to invent" country into a "first to file" country. This is extremely bad for small businesses, which make up the backbone of our country.

If this legislation passes, patents will be granted to the first person to file for a new invention as opposed to the first person who actually invents something.  This means that if an entrepreneur or small business creates a new innovation and does not have the finances or legal help to file a patent, anyone else can come along - such as big business - and steal the idea and file a patent.

This could have devastating ramifications to small businesses because most innovation in our country comes from entrepreneurs.  Also, the bill does little to improve the quality of patents or of patent examiners.

Please contact your member of Congress and ask him/her to vote AGAINST the Patent Reform Act of 2011 in its current form because it is bad for small business.  Click to find your representative.

The Washington Times also has a more detailed article on this: read more.

What do you think? Post your comment below - and be sure to contact Congress today before it's too late.

Entrepreneurs have always worked evenings and weekends.  You can see in our web log below that traffic to morebusiness.com spikes around 9:00 a.m. and then climbs again between 8:00 pm and midnight.  (Each colored bar in the charts represent a metric related to traffic from our stats tool, AWStats. For this post, the details of each bar aren't as important as the trend.)

Many of you can probably relate to this.  When I started my businesses, I spent long hours over a long period of time doing research, building a customer base and managing all of the details in getting established.

MoreBusiness.com hourly traffic (U.S. Eastern time), March 2011

My brother and I planted the seeds for morebusiness.com back in 1994 and in 1996 launched it as a full blown site after seeing site traffic grow steadily.  We have built several other businesses since then, among them MailerMailer, our email marketing service.

As the publisher, I peruse our web traffic statistics regularly.  Every week, traffic to morebusiness.com is always high Monday through Wednesday, takes a little dip on Thursday and Friday and then goes a bit lower over the weekend.  The numbers seem logical.  Small business owners are usually energized at the beginning of the week to try and accomplish as much as they can.  Our web site is full of resources to help them with their business so it makes sense that traffic is higher earlier in the week.

A New Trend?

I've always seen business traffic dip on Saturdays and Sundays, with Sundays being only slightly higher than Saturdays.  I could relate to that.  Saturdays represent a nice breakpoint to recharge, buy groceries, do the laundry, take the kids to their soccer games, you know the drill.

Then, a while ago I noticed spikes occuring on Sundays.  I started to monitor our weekend numbers more closely.  For a solid year and a half, our Sunday traffic has been within 4% of our Friday traffic.

MoreBusiness.com traffic by day of week, March 2011

The numbers were telling me that more people were doing research online on Sundays. Saturdays still continue to be the lightest work day, but Sundays are extremely close to Friday levels of web activity.  A disclaimer: this is not an in-depth study examining the work patterns of business owners.  Rather, it is trend information backed by data: our morebusiness.com's web log files revealing traffic patterns to our popular site designed specifically for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

What Does This Mean?

What can you do this information?  If you are small business owner, you know that it can be lonely.  Your friends and family who haven't gone through the same rigor may not appreciate why you drive yourself to work so hard.  So my fellow entrepreneurs, look at the data - when you're burning the midnight oil or working on Sunday afternoon, take solace in the fact that you are not alone.

Now you can get the hottest tips to grow your business wherever you are.  Our free new mobile app is great for finding ideas and inspiration while you wait for the kids soccer practice to finish or as you stand in line at the DMV.  Watch videos on how to negotiate an awesome deal, read about the best ways to get publicity, and more.

Here's how to get Morebusiness.com on your Android phone:

1. Login to the Android Market
2. Search "MoreBusiness"
3. Download the app

Yes, we know the iPhone is more popular. The thing is Android's app submission process is much quicker. We're working on getting an iPhone app for MoreBusiness.com as well - half of our staff uses iPhones.  Sorry, no ETA yet.