What makes your business different from others offering the same services? If you can’t answer that question than what are you doing? New business owners need to clearly and quickly point out what is so special about the way they are doing business. If you don’t know, your customers sure the heck aren’t gonna know — which means they aren’t spending money with you.

We are in the age of going green. Any company worth their salt is considering their impact on the triple bottom line and consumers are demanding more environmentally sustainable practices and products. Check out what FedEx did to get ahead of the curve in sustainability practices.

You small business owners and entrepreneurs might be thinking “I am too small to worry about footprints and sustainability”. Wrong! Think about it. If your small business is running a green practice, no matter how small, that is something you can use to differentiate yourself on your websites, in your blogs, everywhere. Also, isn’t when your practice is small the BEST time to ensure you’re building a green practice? Isn’t it much harder and more expensive when you have grown to be a large operation? That’s what we thought. So here is a free tool from Carbon Trust to help you get it together.

Carbon Trust recently released a free guide to help you determine your carbon footprint. The guide shares how to perform two different kinds of eco-footprinting. The first helps businesses determine the carbon footprint of a particular product’s life cycle. The second helps businesses determine the footprint of the whole organization. The guide gives clear, step-by-step instructions for calculating these footprints. You will need to register (for free) with Carbon Trust, and the end of the guide is devoted to outlining the ways Carbon Trust can help your business.

It’s Monday night and you just got word that a prospect you’ve been following for months suddenly wants to meet on Tuesday morning to discuss your proposal.  You have less than 12 hours to learn all about their website and the company. What do you do?

Check out Dataopedia, a free tool that provides fast facts on company websites.  This online service can be used as a research and performance measure tool if you want to get a preview of a company or track a particular website.  Just type in a domain name and it will pull up a short bio of the website – when it was launched, its worldwide ranking, how fast it loads, traffic statistics, etc.

Dataopedia also provides a short company bio, the executive management team, and any employment availabilities. The data can be accessed not only through the website, but also on your mobile device and using embed-able widgets.

For more information, visit Dataopedia.

www.free-research.com has over 3902 industry reports on 27 diverse sectors. This site based in the UK and focuses on non-US studies. You can search by industry, country, company and associations.

Cost: Zero

Oddpodz review: This site is easy to navigate, requires registration and also offers fee-based research reports. I downloaded several industry studies related to a client am writing a marketing a plan for. I found them credible and helpful and they fit in my budget, too.

Ask500People.com is brought to you by Wondermill. Here you will find tools to survey groups of people quickly. Questions can be answered by image choice, scale of agreement, YES or NO or with an open word or reply. Ask500People touts a FREE survey for businesses. I signed up and, yes, it was FREE and fast. However, the pool size was 5 votes on question, hardly enough to provide me any valuable insight.

Cost: Zero

Oddpodz review: Nice site, nice idea, easy interface and pricing reasonable ranging from 50 people for $29.00 to 1,000 people for $374.00 to conduct a survey. Did I find there FREE offer rewarding? Nada.

Throughout my 25 years in business, one of the most important weapons I’ve used to win business or to solve a problem is information I’ve dug up via research. This info includes: industry stats, info on a company’s background or market opinions. When you have big budget you can find lots of valuable sources to get the good stuff. But what do you do if your budget runs dry?

Quick backgrounders on a company.
FREE 7 day trial, easy access to company profiles.
Goliath is The Gale Group, a part of Cengage Learning’s online-business content service, providing global company and industry intelligence to business executives. They provide online access to millions of records including business articles, industry reports, company profiles and executive contacts pulled from business data resources. While they offer comprehensive paid reports and intelligence in a variety of categories, if you need a fast snapshot of a company, their executives, revenues etc. you can sign up for a FREE 7 day trial.

Cost: Zero

Oddpodz review: I was recently pitching a client and needed some background info. This is an old guard firm that did not even have a Web site. Within 5 minutes, I had company’s history, contacts & officers, comparable companies, product & brands, company financials, divisions & subsidiaries and business rankings. A credit card is needed to sign up, however, canceling a subscription was easy and fast. It provided useful and timely information.

Wayback Machine

You want to find any information that you have read on a website years ago but which seem to have been removed from this website? Use the Wayback Machine which archives websites pages and saves them.

www.archive.org

ChaCha is like having a smart friend you can call or text for answers on your cell phone anytime for free. ChaCha works with virtually every provider and allows people with any mobile phone device – from basic flip phones to advanced smart phones – to ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text message in just a few minutes.

What’s your question?
Simply text your question to 242242 (spells ‘ChaCha’) or call 1-800-2ChaCha (800-224-2242) from your mobile phone to ask any question.

Cost: Zero

Oddpodz review: This innovative service gets the bright light. Well done, easy Web site and got to love the name.

Hoovers.com

A great tool if you want to find out more about more than 28 million companies. You can find information such as the competition of the company, executives’ names, financials, etc.

www.hoovers.com