Today we’d like to pass along a wonderful small business resource from Inc.com.

Check out Inc.com’s “Start-Up” page for a great collection of expert articles, advice columns, and general useful info aimed at the entrepreneur interested in starting up his or her own small business. From winning over investors to creating a business plan, from structuring your business to managing your cash flow, this is a resource with more depth than the usual small business page.

Whatever questions you may have about starting up a new company, Inc.com’s “Start-Up” is likely to have an answer. Check it out here.

Early last week, America’s entrepreneurs and financial community watched anxiously as the Fed prepared to make a set of decisions that would dictate financial transactions for the upcoming quarter (for many, the most crucial time of the year). Read more about that anticipation here.

So how did the Federal Reserve Bank respond to this anxiety? They decided to cut interest rates by twice the normal margin (cuts are usually a quarter-point at the time; the Fed chose to cut it half a point).

The response? An exuberant Wall Street that enjoyed some record gains in the immediate aftermath.

However, not all financial observers are ecstatic about this news. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Paul Greenberg provides an interesting analysis:

The Dow gained 2.5 percent Tuesday, the day of the rate cut, to close at 13,739 — the biggest one-day jump in five years …

Sure, a great big fat interest-rate cut is a good thing, but as in “too-much-of-a.” How long before the Fed decides that what the economy needs is a whole point cut? Or several of them. Maybe it does, but why get there all at once? …

A quarter-point rate cut would have been a nice appetizer for an economy starved for cash. But a half-point drop makes it sound as if the Fed is getting ready to serve every dish on the menu in one course. Indigestion may result.

The same herd now rushing to buy will soon enough be running to sell when this stimulus abates and the inevitable downturn recurs, maybe bigger and worse. It’s all enough to make one suspect that economics is but a branch of mass psychology. And the patient — in this case the fickle, buying-and-selling public — needs to be treated with care and consistency, not rushed from treatment to counter-treatment.

What do you think? Did the Fed go to far with the cut, and are we going to see a backlash that might hurt investment? Does any of this affect the future plans of your small business? We’d love to hear what you have to say. Sound off in the comments section, below.

(Read Paul Greenberg’s full editorial here.)

We’re happy to announce that Aplus.Net’s President and CEO, Gabriel Murphy, will be appearing live this Friday morning on the “Eye on Small Business” radio show!

“Eye on Small Business” is a local Kansas City radio show, broadcast weekly from Overland Park, Kansas, by host Kelly Scanlon, who is also publisher of the magazine Kansas City Small Business Monthly.

The show airs every Friday from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. central time and can be heard on 1510 on the AM dial. Be sure to tune in today to hear Mr. Murphy discuss Aplus.Net, as well as his life as a web hosting entrepreneur!

Today we share with you a great resource from one of our favorite spots to find small business tips and tactics, Ana Rincon’s About.com online business section.

The Online Business Glossary is a pretty comprehensive collection of all the terms you need to get started in the online business game. They range from the basic to the complex. A few excerpts:

CPA: Cost-per-Action: A term used in online advertising that refers to the cost charged to an advertiser for each predefined action taken as a result of an advertisement. For example, a mortgage company may agree to pay $3 per application filled out as a result of clicking through an online ad to the application form.

CRM: Customer Relationship Management: CRM is the process of managing all aspects of interaction a company has with its customers, including prospecting, sales, and service. CRM applications attempt to provide insight into and improve the company/customer relationship by combining all these views of customer interaction into one picture.

Meta Tag: An HTML tag that provides information about a Web page, such as its title, description, and subject keywords. Unlike other tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. However, search engines can read the tags and use the information when building their indexes.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page: The page of search results displayed in response to a query.

SSL: Secure Sockets Layer: A protocol designed to create a secure connection to a server using “public key encryption,” to protect data as it travels over the Internet. SSL was created by Netscape but has now been published in the public domain.

This is just a small sample; check out the full glossary here, and be sure to let us know what you think in the comments section.

America’s entrepreneurs are closely watching the U.S. financial markets this week. Why? After a summer of slight instability, the next three days just might provide the answers to many of the questions plaguing the economy.

Um, probably. The truth is, nothing is certain, ever, regarding financial markets. However, as the Washington Post tells us in “Three Telling Days for the U.S. Economy“, it’s extremely likely that data being released this week by the federal government is going to have a very significant effect — whether positive or negative.

From the article:

Today, Wednesday and Thursday are shaping up to be pivotal days for financial markets’ recovery from disarray and for the direction of the U.S. economy.

The much-anticipated announcement of whether, and by how much, the Federal Reserve will cut a key interest rate is to come at 2:15 p.m. today. During the week, earnings reports from four major investment banks will give a sense of how badly Wall Street has been hit by the credit crunch: Lehman Brothers (today), Morgan Stanley (Wednesday), and Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs (Thursday).

More clues to what’s coming — from the Fed and from Capitol Hill — may emerge when Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. testify before a House committee Thursday. And important data about inflation come out today and Wednesday.

These developments could help stabilize markets and prevent their troubles from spreading further through the economy, or they could create new tumult.

“If there are no big surprises this week, then I think we will see the volatility in the financial markets go down,” said Howard Chernick, an economics professor at Hunter College in New York. “That doesn’t mean that the stock market will necessarily go up. That depends on what happens to the economy. But these wild swings will decrease.”

The article goes into more detail about the specific questions that will be answered by this data. Of greatest interest among them:

How worried is the Fed? The Fed’s policymaking committee has a target for the federal funds rate, the interest rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans, of 5.25 percent. That rate ultimately affects the cost of borrowing money by businesses and consumers through credit card interest rates, commercial loans and more …

How hard has the credit crisis hit the balance sheets at big brokerage houses? Assuming that the losses are fully disclosed, investors will learn how much the value of assets on the books at Lehman, Morgan, Bear and Goldman have been marked down. If the losses are manageable, the earnings reports would open the door for financial markets to continue to stabilize. But a few nasty surprises could make markets tremor all over again.

Is inflation still a threat? The producer price index is to be released this morning, and the consumer price index on Wednesday. These numbers will indicate whether prices are rising (for businesses and households, respectively) more than policymakers are comfortable with.

Read the entire article here, and be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments section.