If you’re a retailer who sells online, and you’d like to give your sales a free, end-of-season boost, you might want to join in on the second annual Free Shipping Day.  

Created last December on a whim by Luke Knowles of free-shipping coupon site FreeShipping.org, Free Shipping Day was designed to help retailers on the last day when virtual shops can guarantee delivery before Christmas. Apparently, online shopping starts to decline around Dec. 12, as customers get nervous about whether packages will arrive, and Knowles thought this might help keep the online sales going.

The response from retailers was overwhelming — Bloomingdale’s, JC Penney, Kohl’s and Macy’s were among the major retailers that jumped on board, along with many smaller retailers. In all, 250 companies participated, and more than 250,000 shoppers visited the FreeShipping site to browse the deals. Many saw a big one-day spike in sales on the event day.

This year Free Shipping Day is back and bigger than ever–Knowles is expecting more than 500 retailers to get on board, which should translate to even bigger traffic. If you can afford to eat the shipping costs for a day, it should be great free marketing exposure–your company logo and free-shipping offer gets posted on the FreeShippingDay.com site merely by visiting the site and filling out a form.

Have you seen any other good free-marketing offers for this holiday season? Comment below and let us know.

If you’re hoping to connect with venture capital firms to pitch your company story, a new contest may help–but you’ll need to be ready to catch a plane to Seattle.

This year at Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s signature networking event, Entrepreneur University, six lucky companies will get to make their pitch before a media panel and conference attendees. How do you qualify? A Twitter contest.

That’s right–boil your business idea down to 140 characters and tweet it, using the hashtag handle #EUidol. Better get busy, as entrepreneurs are already pitching away in Twitterland. Winners will be decided by the editors of TechFlash. In addition, five more winners will be picked by members of Northwest Entrepreneur Network.

The deadline is this Friday, Oct. 30! So get cracking if you’d like to play Entrepreneur Idol in Seattle next week. Create a snappy pitch and you could be winging your way to the Bellevue Hyatt Regency, east of Seattle, for Entrepreneur University on Nov. 5.

May the best tweeter win!

Last night I was watching the HBO documentary Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, which chronicles how Jewish and Italian immigrants created the New York garment district soon after the turn of last century, and built it into the largest employer in the city. It goes on to show how, after more than 70 years of being a thriving source of good-paying union jobs, it all disappeared as trade protections ended and NAFTA ushered in a new era of global free trade.

The film repeatedly asks the questions: How will we rebuild the American middle class? Where will tomorrow’s living-wage jobs come from?

In the 1970s, the film reports, 95 percent of American clothes were made here. Today, it’s 5 percent. The days when an unskilled laborer could learn to be a cutter or machinist on the job, make a good living, and be able to afford a house, a car, and other middle-class trappings seem gone. Just ask Detroit. Or ask Boeing workers in Everett, Wash., who learned this week that their company will build a new 787 assembly line in cheaper, nonunion South Carolina, instead of next to their existing union-staffed plant.

Despite the current gloomy headlines, I believe these moves don’t spell the end of good, living-wage jobs in America.

Why? I look to my own family story. My grandfather originally sold buggy whips, working as a salesman for another company. When people started driving cars, he switched to automotive parts and started his own business, which thrived and left my grandmother well-fixed after he died. When his living-wage job disappeared, he looked at how the world and markets were changing, and figured out how to create another job–by building a successful business of his own, that offered others good jobs, too.

Yes, it’s true that clothes are mostly made elsewhere now, and that the American public no longer seems to care to “look for the union label,” as the old jingle went. Change has come, and it’s wrenching, and there are workers who are the losers.

But all across this country right now, there’s a surge of entrepreneurial energy as more and more workers strike out on their own. Having closely covered the rise of Amazon.com, I think that tomorrow’s American living-wage jobs are going to come from new ideas, new businesses, and new entrepreneurs, who are out there right now, creating products, services and ways of doing business that will revolutionize how we even think of work and define a “good job.”

I also think of American Apparel, which is seeing smash success making its clothes here in the USA. I think it’s possible that as the “eat local” and “buy local” movements progress, we might see more consumer pressure to bring manufacturing back to our shores. Geopolitics may also drive a trend back to domestic manufacturing–think how nervous garment makers with factories in Pakistan probably are about now.

Where do you think tomorrow’s living-wage jobs will come from? Comment and let us know.

When contributing writer Carol Tice wrote about the ROI of networking online, comments from readers revealed their uncertainty over the value of sites like Twitter and Facebook. So when LinkedIn–a site specifically designed for networking purposes–changed its user policy to limit the number of connections a person could have to 30,000, Entrepreneur.com investigated its potential effect on small-business owners and entrepreneurs.

Can LinkedIn’s recent cap hurt entrepreneurs? Pick a side.

Yes
Sure, hardly anyone is directly affected. Fewer than 20 users (a minuscule fraction of total membership) are over the limit, and even President Obama claims only about 25,000 connections. But the
real problem is what you lose indirectly, says “super connector” Steven Burda, who has more than 37,000 connections, at least 15,000 pending invitations
and around 2,500 personal recommendations.

“The cap matters a lot to entrepreneurs and small-business owners,” Burda says. “I have used LinkedIn to help multiple small businesses secure
funding with venture capitalists, and over the years that I’ve
been on the site, I’ve probably facilitated thousands, if not millions,
of dollars worth of business deals.”

But apparently, no good deed goes unpunished. The limit blocks Burda’s
ability to create more of these deals, and he suspects the change was partly motivated by the fact that LinkedIn is losing out on fees they charge
unconnected members for introductory “inmails” ($10 a pop).

“The real victims are the people who lose out on joining a wider
network, and miss a potential connection,” Burda says. “If the platform
really is for helping people, its users need to be able to network with
each other.” He adds that he just wants to start a dialogue with LinkedIn about
preventing more restrictions from being implemented in the future. So
far, he hasn’t heard back.

No
The LinkedIn representative we reached declined to comment, but
asked us to contact other members who were willing to provide an
opposing perspective.

Enter Sheilah Etheridge,
founder of SME Management and one of LinkedIn’s earliest adopters. She views the value of Burda’s networking method rather differently. “LinkedIn has its flaws, but the one flaw it does not have is limiting entrepreneurs from helping one another or themselves grow,” she says. “There are countless members who help other people find opportunities, and none of them try and take credit for it or expect anything in return. That is the nature of networking.”  

Etheridge says she connected to Burda in 2006 and found
him to be a good networker. But she began to suspect he was abusing the user policy by connecting to people he didn’t know; now, he’s “networking” by collecting names and making surface introductions (that rarely pan out) in exchange for endorsements. “It’s quantity rather than quality, so how does that help an entrepreneur grow or succeed?”

LinkedIn is within its rights to set a cap, she continues, and 30,000 is a generous one, especially when accounts can be free.
“People put in a lot of time to make
this a real networking site with real value, but Burda’s method cheapens and dilutes the experience.”
__

In the end, it probably boils down to your personal view of how online networking is supposed to work, but there’s one thing we can all agree on: There’s no way a measly 30,000-connection cap can stop an entrepreneur from doing what needs to be done.

With the filing of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization petition late last week, the parent company of giant small-business lender CIT is hoping for a speedy trip through bankruptcy court. Small businesses that need loans, however, face a more uncertain future.

While the company has assured the public their lending units will operate normally during the bankruptcy process, not everyone seems convinced: Reuters headlined its story on the filing “CIT Failure To Leave Small Businesses Floundering.”  On the other hand, American City Business Journals site Portfolio.com titled its story “Bankruptcy Business As Usual.” Only time will tell which is right.

CIT’s financial woes aren’t good news for the U.S. government and taxpayers, either–we lent CIT $2.3 billion we likely won’t see again. Many fingernails are likely being bitten from the White House to Main Street, as CIT was the top provider of short-term loans against receivables, a loan type known as factoring.

Business that seek a factor loan are often in pretty dire straits. Getting an advance against receivables is roughly the business equivalent of going to a payday lender, in that rates are higher than for traditional loans. Translation: these businesses have tapped out their credit line, credit cards, and Aunt Mary, and have nowhere left to turn–and they need money fast. They can’t wait another month or two for their clients to pay their bills.

If CIT’s lending capability dips, some businesses may need to quickly find a new place to get factor loans. But smaller factor lenders (the Internet is crawling with them–JustInTimeCash, IFGNetwork, SolveCashFlowProblems and so on) have limited lending capacity, and it’s unclear if even major CIT competitors Wells Fargo and GMAC can absorb all the potential CIT refugees. GMAC focuses on mid-sized businesses, so they may not be an exact fit for CIT’s small-business lenders.

In any case, if a small business can’t get a CIT loan anymore, it means starting all over establishing new banking relationships. It’s unclear whether that can be done fast enough to keep the doors open for businesses on the edge.

If you have CIT loans, weigh in with your take on what the giant lender’s bankruptcy is going to mean to you. Think you’ll be affected? Are you making other plans? Or is it business as usual, as some hope?