Though "barter and trade" sounds like a medieval concept, it's actually a very common occurrence, even in big corporations. Huge dot-coms often swap ad banners with restaurants and sports promoters, who supply them with event sites, gift certificates, and "shwag" for contest giveaways. Most of small business owners I know have been a little squeamish about dipping into barter and trade pool, unless they're massage therapists, naturopaths or Reiki practitioners (until insurance companies cover alternative healthcare modalities, these friends will be forced to get creative with their compensation, whether they want to or not).

When you are deciding on your business goals, one thing you can do is divide your one main goal into several smaller goals that will make your main goal seem more attainable. Instead of your goal being to make a million dollars a year, you can divide this into yearly, monthly, weekly and also daily goals.

For example: If you are an ezine publisher and your goal is 100,000 subscribers, your first year goal could be set at 1000. You make your goals into attainable steps and follow those steps to success. You will accomplish more and not be so easily discouraged by working your business this way.

When you first decide you want to start your own business, what you should do is write down your plan for your business and also what you want your main goal to be. Put all this in an outline. Then you decide on smaller monthly, weekly and yearly goals to work for in order to achieve your main goal.

Another good idea is to organize each day by what you want to achieve for that day. Organize your time each day into blocks and write down what is to get done in each time block. Example: