America’s Top Business Mom

You’re no doubt aware that Sunday is Mother’s Day. You’re no doubt unaware that May is Small-Business Month. (It’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, Mental Health Awareness Month.) But back to the topic at hand. Cleverly (kind of) combining the themes of mothers and small business, StartupNation (a site for entrepreneurs) and VerticalResponse (an e-mail marketing firm) came up with the Leading Moms in Business Competition, a contest to rank the top mom-run businesses in the U.S. The winner: Yana Berlin, founder of Fabulously40 & Beyond, a social-networking site for women over 40. All of the top 10 finishers in the contest will receive 1,000 free e-mails from Vertical Response. (They were expecting maybe flowers?)

Social network for small business. The New York Daily News has long been known for its brash headlines. Like "LinkedIn? Log Out!" That might describe the paper’s new online venture, a social network for small business. Daily News SmallBiz gives New York small-businesses people a chance to network with others around North America. You can get sales leads, learn about government grants, find business tools and watch videos. But don’t rush to join just yet. We can’t find the site anywhere online. So it seems not to be up and running yet. (You’d think a newspaper would be a little more newsy.)

Should you spend more on AdWords? That’s the question Google wants you to ask yourself. (You can guess the answer they’d like to hear.) While the online behemoth battles to keep growing with new business tools--a blizzard of apps, optimizers and analyzers--it’s also trying to warm up its base. As CNN Money reports, Google made a record $21 billion in revenue 2008 and more than 95 percent of it came from AdWords. That’s a lot of weight standing on one leg. But, for now, small businesses that want to stick a toe into online marketing don’t have many other choices.