First impressions are always important in business, especially when you're approaching investors to secure funding for your startup.

Angel investors and venture capitalists have specific expectations surrounding "the pitch," that charged moment when you try to sell an investor on you and your company. If you're heading into this culture for the first time, you'll need to do more to prepare than just catch a few episodes of "Shark Tank."

As part of women's entrepreneurial network Ladies Who Launch, business owners learned "Investor Math 101" at law firm Chadbourne & Parke in New York on Thursday. The presentation focused on the essentials of pitching investors, including these three tips for startups to consider before making their case.

As part of National Small Business Week, Cleveland, Ohio-based KeyBank and Los Angeles-based Open Bank will each receive a 2012 7(a) Lender of the Year Award by the Small Business Administration on Monday in Washington. (The SBA's flagship lending program is known as 7(a).)

KeyBank is being honored as the large bank that supported the most jobs with its SBA lending, making the most loans and loaning the most dollars to underserved markets and utilizing the most SBA programs. Meanwhile, Open Bank is receiving the accolade as the small bank that approved the most loans and dollars. It also was recognized for approving the second highest number of loans to underserved markets.

Of course, getting a loan from a bank is no cakewalk these days, particularly for small businesses. So, we asked those banks, which make it their business to lend to small business, how entrepreneurs can increase their chances of securing loan dollars.

Here, they share the top four mistakes business owners make when applying for a loan -- and how to avoid them.

Many small-business owners dream of finding an angel investor or two who would pump cash into their business and help them expand.

In my experience, though, most of these dreams are more like delusions. Why? Most business owners don't have a realistic sense of what they'd have to give up to an angel investor. And often, once you find out what you'd be giving up by taking on an investor, you're not interested.

Case in point was a recent Shark Tank episode. Five different entrepreneurs came out to pitch the Sharks -- and each one made an equity offer that was just never going to fly.

Despite Facebook's billions of users, it turns out many of them are far from enamored with the massive social network when it comes to ecommerce. Some 54 percent of people who participated in a recent AP-CNBC poll said they don't feel safe using the site to purchase goods or perform financial transactions.

Is it time for your business to pull the plug on using Facebook as an ecommerce tool? Not necessarily. Ahead of Facebook's IPO, here are the three biggest ecommerce mistakes it has made and how you can avoid making them in your own online sales efforts:

As a transitive verb, Merriam-Webster describes "like" as "feeling attraction toward or taking pleasure in." To a 15-year-old girl, the word "like" is a filler used as often as three times in each spoken sentence. To most people, "like" is a lighthearted word, a happy word.

So at what point does clicking "Like" on a Facebook page result in a pair of federal complaints pitting employers against employees and raising fresh questions about the role of online speech? In recent weeks, two cases have come to light, each featuring employees clicking "Like" on Facebook and being fired for having done so.

In the first incident, a Library of Congress worker says he was fired when he "Liked" a Facebook Page of an organization advocating gay adoption of children. According to published reports, the 30-year-old library employee, who previously received only glowing work evaluations, said the library became a hostile work environment after his supervisor learned he was gay. 

Loads of business owners would love to get the kind of publicity bonanza an appearance on a national TV show brings. Turns out, the TV-contest format is spreading rapidly into the real world -- and business owners may get a boost just by entering local competitions.

Like their TV counterparts, competing in a local contest can get your business seen by influential people who could help you. The scale is smaller, of course, but if you have a locally focused business, these contests could be an opportunity for exposure and making new connections.

For instance, in Los Angeles, 100 women business owners recently competed "American Idol" style at the Count Me In Urban Rebound Los Angeles Conference & Competition. Wal-Mart's club-store subsidiary, Sam's Club, picked up the tab for winners to attend a nine-month business-incubator program designed to grow businesses past the $250,000 annual revenue mark.

If you've seen the phrase "Penguin attack" online recently, don't worry. No one's being invaded by an army of adorable sea birds. Penguin is the nickname given to Google's most recent algorithm update.

Penguin launched late last month with the purpose of weeding out what Google considers over-optimized sites from the natural search results. That is, sites that attempt to game the search algorithms by incorporating excess on- and off-page SEO factors.

The update was estimated to have affected the natural search results for approximately 3 percent of search queries. The sites most influenced by the update have been those that are database driven or mainly aggregate information, according to web data firm Searchmetrics.

Next week is National Small Business Week in Washington, D.C. It’s a big deal for small business. Why?

The three-day conference, run by the Small Business Administration, is a chance to cast the spotlight on the importance of supporting small-business owners and shine a light on best practices to that end.

At Entrepreneur.com, we’ll be covering the highlights of the event, focusing on news you can use. Here’s what you can expect, starting Sunday, May 21.

Managing social media for your business can be a tricky endeavor. Which pictures should you share on Facebook? What industry news should you tweet about on Twitter? What topic should you blog about on Tumblr?

And on top of knowing what to publish on which social network, another big question business owners struggle with is the best time to post. Publishing your content at peak times can help you reach the most people on those networks.

Turns out the best time depends which social network you're posting to, according to popular URL shortening service bitly. It tracks metrics on bitly links that are shared across networks. In particular, bitly has examined how the day and time something is posted affects how "viral" it might eventually become.

But each social network has its own "culture," bitly says, and users exhibit distinct behavior patterns. Here's a rundown of bitly's findings on the best times to post to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr:

The new crowdfunding law passed as part of the JOBS Act, which allows companies to sell pieces of their business for cash, won't be finalized until early next year. But many entrepreneurs are already champing at the bit to deliver on the services they think this new marketplace will want.

Here's a look at several industries and jobs being developed as part of the trickle-down effect of crowdfunding, according to David Marlett, Executive Director of the National Crowdfunding Association, an industry trade group that has been involved in discussions shaping this new genre of startup financing.

Proponents of free speech say no employer should have the right to ask job applicants or employees for their private social utility passwords, any more than they have the right to ask to inspect personal diaries or someone's bathroom medicine cabinet.

Such demands by employers could set a precedent for personal and online privacy, a situation where all the power is in one corner, making it difficult for people to get a job. And on the flip side, such action can open employers to claims of discrimination.

Last week, in an effort to make it illegal for an employer to compel or coerce access to any private information stored anywhere on the Internet, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) filed the Password Protection Act of 2012 in the U.S. Senate (SB 3074). Reps. Martin Heinrich (D., N.M.) and Ed Perlmutter (D., Colo.) introduced an identical bill, HB 5684, in the House of Representatives.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has the delicate task of writing guidelines for the next generation of crowdfunding, so that investors are protected and yet preserving its benefits to companies seeking to raise money.

Crowdfunding has been mostly restricted to artists and business owners accepting small donations in exchange for things like tote bags and CDs. But the JOBS Act, signed last month, will let entrepreneurs sell pieces of their business (equity) to non-accredited investors via crowdfunding. The SEC is expected to release its guidelines early next year.

In the crowded business of smartphone and tablet apps, the money might not be in building apps from scratch, but in flipping them.

One way to get started is with Apptopia, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that enables developers, businesses and investors to buy and sell apps in online auctions. The site, which launched in April, provides everything from valuation to escrow services and intellectual property transfer.

“Essentially what we’re trying to do is broker mobile app acquisitions in an eBay style,” says founder and COO Jonathan Kay.

How business friendly is the place you've set up shop? A new report rates the business climate of states and counties across the U.S., based on a survey of business owners.

The report, from 2012 Thumbtack.com Small Business Survey, presented in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation, offers a roadmap -- quite literally -- of the friendliest places to conduct business in the U.S., on a website that enables visitors to check the business climate “score” of any county in any state.

For instance, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma and Utah all earned A+ scores in rankings for states most friendly to small businesses. On the bottom end of the report card are California, Hawaii, Vermont and Rhode Island. Each received failing grades.

The U.S. indoor tanning industry, already chapped over a 10 percent tax imposed by the federal health-reform law, now faces renewed calls for tighter regulation amid publicity surrounding New Jersey's so-called tanning mom.

The case of tanning customer Patricia Krentcil of Nutley, N.J., a leather-toned woman charged with taking her 5-year-old daughter inside a tanning bed, might even lift the efforts of a Canadian lawmaker to seek a ban on indoor tanning for children and youths.

Krentcil, now the subject of late-night comedy sketches (that's Saturday Night Live's Kristen Wiig in photo above), a parody action figure and a reported ban from local salons, has denied the accusation and pleaded not guilty to child endangerment.