208 | HOW TO WRITE A BUSINESS PLAN
of helpful information at the SBA site
including the SBA Hotlist (www
.sba.gov/hotlist), perhaps the most
extensive set of business-related links
on the Web.
• Center for Business Planning (www
.businessplans.org) provides links to
relevant articles and sample business
plans.Conferences and Newsgroups
In addition to the information presented
in various websites, there are lots of
opportunities for businesspeople to interact
on the Web, and many won’t cost you
a cent. Some websites offer chat rooms
where you can communicate “real time”
with others who are present, basically by
typing in a question or comment which
will appear to everyone else in the chat
room instantaneously. Any replies will also
appear to all participants as soon as they
are submitted. Other sites maintain bulletin
boards, sometimes called conferences,
where users submit questions or comments
which appear on the board for others to
see. If another user wants to reply to a
given post, she submits a response, which
also gets posted. In this way, some topics
generate long “conversations” among
users, which are often called “threads.”
By reading and joining in these threads,
you can learn from other people who
have similar interests and perhaps more
experience than you in a particular area.
Of course, it’s up to you to decide if other
posters really know what they’re talking
about.
To find sites that offer chat rooms or
conferences, the easiest method is to
start by using a search engine such as
Google (www.google.com) and type in
the subject that you’re interested in, for
example “business plans.” Then click the
tab marked “Groups.” That will lead you
to chat rooms and message boards where
the topic of business plans is discussed.
Another method of locating chat rooms
and message boards is to simply look
around. Visit business-related sites such
as Entrepreneur.com (www.entrepreneur.
com), Findlaw for Business (http://biz
.findlaw.com), BusinessJeeves.com (www
.businessjeeves.com), and look for chat
room or message board options. The Well
(www.well.com) has ongoing conferences
on hundreds of topics, including small
business. While many conferences are free,
there is a small monthly fee to join The
Well.
Another interactive area of the Internet
is called the Usenet. The Usenet offers
thousands of topic-related conferences
called newsgroups. The scope of the
Usenet’s subject areas is truly staggering.
Like conferences described above, a news-
group consists of an ongoing discussion
among users who post messages to the
group. Unlike conferences, however, the
Usenet isn’t accessed from a website; it
occupies its own realm of the Internet. For
information about how to utilize Usenet,
check Google’s Usenet references (www