This is the first day of the marketing challenge. Here are the three things I got done today. These aren’t the sort of real traffic building activities I’d like to get to, but are more like pre-requisites to get the site together properly.

1. I moved the email newsletter service from Zookoda to FeedBlitz. There were a few reasons for this, namely that Zookoda is really buggy and appears to have no-one supporting or correcting it anymore. It’s a shame because they had the best service out there (and it was free), but a little neglect here and there and the whole thing became unusable. They must be focused on other activities. Feedblitz is quite good as well, but costs some money.

If you see an email from FeedBlitz, don’t be alarmed. Hopefully this change will allow the email newsletter to operate smoothly and draw people to the website with excerpts that grab their attention, and entice them to click “Read More”.
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In Breaking Free, I make a big point of how important it is to incorporate your business.

It makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, because it protects you from personal liability, and second, because it offers you some great tax advantages.

For today, let’s just focus on the personal liability part.

Incorporating your business protects you from personal liability, because it essentially separates you from the business. When you incorporate, your business becomes like another person. This other person has it’s own bank account, it can own things like property, and it can take risks. Even if that “other person” (your business) goes completely bankrupt or gets sued, YOU (and your personal assets like your house, car, savings) are safe.

This is important because many new businesses fail, but you as the entrepreneur don’t want to fail. You want to pick yourself back up and start your NEXT business which will be even more successful. Failure is a necessary way to learn, so we want it to be as painless as possible.

Of course, I have to admit that what I wrote above is a a “best case scenario”. When everything works like it should, then yes, you PERSONALLY are protected. But there are certain situations where your corporate status doesn’t help you out, and every business owner should be aware of them!

You see, setting up a company gives you so much protection from liability, that unethical people in the past have tried to take advantage of it. They have created a “shell corporation”, in other words a business just for the purpose of liability protection, to help them get away with a crime.

Of course, the law had to be modified to weed out these people and make sure they were appropriately prosecuted. But in the process, the requirements for honest small business owners became TOUGHER. Some extra steps are now required to make sure your corporate status stays intact.

By the way, whenever a court decides to waive the corporate protection and actually prosecute the owners behind the company PERSONALLY, they call it “piercing the corporate veil”. (Lawyers always like to come up with fancy names for things.)
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