Help:SmallBusiness.com Local Project

SmallBusiness.com: The free small business resource

The SmallBusiness.com Local Project is an effort to collect and organize information about doing business in U.S. states and localities (and then, other countries).

Types of Information Being Collected in The SmallBusiness.com Local Hub

• Comprehensive directory of state and local services and information for small businesses

• State government agencies and resources providing information about businesses taxes, regulations and licensing
• State registries of businesses incorporated in the state

• State district and regional offices of the U.S. Small Business Administration
• College and university entrepreneurship programs
• Chambers of Commerce
• City government business development offices (found on over 5,000 current city/town pages)
• Chapters of SCORE (Over 250 currently entered)
• Small Business Development Centers associated with a college or university
• Women's Business Development Centers
• Better Business Bureaus
• Local business-focused councils or agencies
• Local non-profit business-oriented associations and organizations

Background

Every city, county and state has agencies, organizations, programs, services and centers devoted to assisting and encouraging individuals who want to start a business or grow one they already own or manage. Unfortunately, it is sometimes hard for small business owners -- and those who want to start small businesses -- to discover these sources of information and assistance. The SmallBusiness.com Local Project is designed to collect and organize a place online where people can easily find where to access all that assistance and information provided by those state and local sources. This is a tremendous task as there are literally tens of thousands of such sources. However, this is just such a task that this website and the wiki platform on which it is built was envisioned to undertake. We started this project in December, 2009, with the initial goal of creating model pages for organizations, agencies and programs that can be found in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

This is a community project

Those of us who host SmallBusiness.com do not have the knowledge or resources necessary to collect, write and deploy this information. However, we are providing each agency a page on SmallBusiness.com, and guidelines and assistance for how volunteers can create such entries. We have spent time trying to anticipate the way in which users will want to find resources in their area, but we also know that different types of categorization and organization will be necessary as the project progresses.

How you can help

• In the coming days, we will be adding helpful guides and tutorials for how to create an entry related to an organization with which you might be associated or would like to assist in creating

• If you are already familiar with creating or editing pages on SmallBusiness.com, feel free to add or edit any page in the project.