photo credit: Guoman Hotels in London

Starting a business can get expensive very quickly. The last thing you want is to have a lot of overhead when you barely have any cash flow. This may mean working out of your home office. Working from home can save a lot of money. There is no commuting, you're available for your family, you set your own hours, but you may not want to deal with clients out of your home. You may want to project a more professional image for your business.

This is where a virtual office may come in handy. Using a virtual office will help your business appear larger than it is. While having actual office space would be ideal, the monthly rent can wipe you out when you're trying to produce income. So what can virtual office space do for you?

• Professional business address - You can choose an office in most major cities and the addresses are actual street addresses. This is great for image when printing your address on business cards and stationary.
• Mail delivery and forwarding - Most virtual office packages offer mail forwarding.
• Conference rooms - You can book time to use the office conference room for meeting with clients.
• Receptionist service - Some packages even include a live receptionist to greet people in the lobby and answer phone calls.
• Administrative support - You can even have secretarial and administrative support.
• Directory listing - Your business can be listed in the main building's directory.

As you can see, you can have the image of a large company and actually work out of your living room if you desire. Virtual offices can save you a lot of money and provide the image you need until you can afford to lease actual office space.

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LLC stands for Limited Liability Company. Often times when you begin researching how to start a business, someone may recommend starting an LLC. It isn't bad advice and the primary reason is because an LLC can protect you to a certain extent. An LLC shares characteristics between a corporation and a partnership or sole-proprietorship. The "limited liability" is the feature it shares with a corporation and pass-through income taxation is what it shares with a partnership or sole-proprietorship.

Advantages of a Limited Liability Company

One reason many turn to an LLC is due to its flexibility. There are numerous advantages to forming an LLC to include:

• Choose how to be taxed as: a sole proprietor, partnership, S corp, or C corp.
• You and partners are protected to a certain extent from the LLC's liabilities.
• Less administration and record keeping as compared to a corporation.
• Can be run by one person.
• Easy to set-up and maintain.

Disadvantages of a Limited Liability Company

Although the advantages are many, there are some disadvantages to consider as well:

• Harder to raise financial capital from investors.
• Some states require a franchise tax or capital values tax on LLCs.
• Some states have high renewal fees.
• You're not 100% protected from the LLCs debts - some creditors place loan liability on the owner(s).

Starting an LLC may be beneficial but the only way to know for sure is to do more research and ask questions from professionals such as an accountant or lawyer. Your local library should have plenty of books which talk about the various types of business entities that exist. However, seeking professional advice is probably the best way to go.

Now a days you can start your LLC easily over the internet. LegalZoom.com is one such place. Also keep in mind the fees and taxes that your state may require. Every state is different in how they view an LLC.

Resources:
Wikipedia.org

photo credit: Dave Kinsella

As a freelance web developer and internet marketer, there are several tools that I utilize on a regular basis to make research, marketing, and overall web developing much easier. Below I go over everything that I use either daily or very often. Maybe you already use some of the same tools but if not, hopefully something on the list can help you out as well.

Web Developing

Browser - Firefox is my browser of choice because of all the plug-ins available for it.

Web site display - Browser Shots comes in handy for checking the display of your web sites in multible browsers.

Billing - I have been using Billing Orchard for years. It is great for keeping track of billable hours and sending out invoices.

Web hosting - I use both Dreamhost and Hostgator. I like them both but if you need a reseller account, go with Hostgator.

Text editor - I use a Mac and use Textwrangler which is a free text editor.

FTP - Transmit is the FTP client I choose but it is only available for the Mac. If you use the Firefox browser, you can use a free FTP client plug-in called FireFTP.

Marketing

Page rank checker - SEO for Firefox displays the page rank in the search engine results. SearchStatus sits in the bottom of your browser and tells you the page rank of each site you visit.

Quick backlink checker - Yahoo! Site Explorer can give you a quick glance at the number of backlinks pointing to a specific web page.

Backlinks in depth - I use SEO Elite to go more in depth with backlink checking.

Keywords - Keyword Elite can generate keyword lists and can be used hand in hand with SEO Elite for research. I also use the Google AdWords: Keyword Tool.

Niche sites - Sometimes I build a niche site from scratch but most times I install WordPress because it saves time and has some cool plug-ins for SEO purposes.

Screencasting - When I need to make screencasting videos, I use Screenflow which is only for Mac. Camtasia is a popular software for Windows users.

Those are the tools I use regularly and I will add to the list when I come across more. What online tools or software do you use often?