Small Business Starter Tips - Part 2

Use credit cards to your advantage. Credit cards like American Express offer some fabulous small business benefits with their OPEN Savings program.

The greatest savings are for everyday purchases. Take for example online advertising. Earlier this year Yahoo partnered with American Express to offer an exclusive 5% discount for Yahoo services like web site hosting, e-commerce, business e-mail, domain name registration, and advertising. We use Yahoo Search Marketing and pay with our American Express card so at the end of each month we get a 5% credit for all our advertising expenses. Plus we double dipped on savings by entering the coupon code "USCJ11" into the shopping cart when initially creating the account. How cool is that?

If you are a retailer, American Express has FedEx shipping discounts available too. Like Yahoo, you get a 5% refund on all FedEx expenses. Plus enrolling in the FedEx discount program can save you an additional 21%.

Now aside from the merchant side discounts, you can also get credit side discounts by choosing a rewards card with OPEN Savings benefits. (Click HERE to see available cards)

Depending on your preference, you can get cash back rewards, merchandise rewards, or travel rewards. I've found that the travel benefits far outweigh the other rewards. Travel related partners are much more flexible on price than retail partners. So if you do any kind of traveling (or plan to ever take a vacation, which I hop you do) then I would highly recommend choosing this option.

So to recap. If you can get your hands on an American Express card (or any other rewards type credit card) and pay your normal monthly expenses with it, you will get rewarded by everyone. It is important though that it be used for NORMAL monthly expenses because you do need to be able to pay it off at the end of each month!