Small businesses in states that were hit hardest by the collapse of the housing market – including Nevada, New Mexico and Florida – are having an especially hard time getting access to the capital they need to grow and hire.

“Many small business owners look to home equity as a potential source of financing,” says Dr. John Paglia, director of the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project and Associate Professor of Finance at the University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. Therefore, in states where home values really cratered and individuals lost a lot of wealth, “it is really creating some headwinds on their growth opportunities,” says Paglia.

Locating in "historically underserved business" areas, known as HUBZones, has its advantages. The federal government allots 3 percent of its procurement spending on small businesses that call them home. But the HUBZone designation bestowed on these economically troubled areas can change quickly, depending on a variety of outside data sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census.

This place-based status can leave business owners who rely on this preferential access to federal contracts with uncertainty about whether they'll qualify down the road.

Shelly Fitzgerald wants to set up her new manufacturing firm as a HUBZone business to vie for federal contracts.

That's the quandary before Shelly Fitzgerald, the co-founder of Bosh Global Services, a Newport News, Va., company that supplies communications services for unmanned operations. She's hoping to start a manufacturing company that employs older women in the Newport News area who out of financial need must return to the workforce. She plans to launch with a HUBZone designation. "It opens doors with that kind of work. I'll be able to compete for more contracts," she says.

For an increasing number of startups, crowdfunding is a way to get their companies off the ground when traditional avenues, such as a bank loan, are not an option.

Crowdfunding is a way to raise money by getting small donations from a large number of people, and sometimes the end result is big. For example, the Pebble watch that synchs with your smartphone raised over $10 million on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.

Ever find yourself going over and over a problem in your business, only to hit a dead end or draw a blank?

Find an innovative solution with one simple technique: re-describe the problem.

"The whole idea behind creative problem solving is the assumption that you know something that will help solve this problem, but you're not thinking of it right now," explains Art Markman, cognitive psychologist and author of "Smart Thinking." Put another way, your memory hasn't found the right cue to retrieve the information you need.

Changing the description tells your mind that you're in a different situation, which unlocks a new set of memories. "The more different ways you describe the problem you're trying to solve, the more different things you know about that you will call to mind," says Markman.

For small-business owners, pats on the back can be few and far between. Many of them would settle for a vigorous holiday season or perhaps an occasional day off or, better still, a vacation.

So it's only fitting that we take a moment to highlight the creative, inventive and downright entertaining videos that won the Small Business Administration's National Small Business Week video contest. In no particular order, the winners include KissTixx founders Dallas Robinson and Mike Buonomo, Brad Sterl of Pittsfield, N.H.'s Rustic Crust, Zalmi Duchman, the CEO of the Fresh Diet and Reggie Rodgers, the founder of Rodgers' Banana Pudding Sauce.

Whether or not you realize it, "gamification" has been a part of your life since childhood. You might recall, for instance, receiving rewards or prizes from your childhood dentist after each visit. For me, prizes were based on challenge-response behaviors. If I remained cavity-free (the challenge), I got to choose a stuffed animal to take home (the reward).

Gamification, when used online, brings that same element of challenge to an interactive task like downloading a case study or viewing a particular video, and some marketers have come to depend on these rewards to encourage engagement from customers and prospects alike.

If your business can incorporate rewards such as collecting points or badges, leaderboard rankings, receiving discounts and answering quizzes for free gifts and other incentives, you may be able increase engagement and drive action on your site, thus improving brand recognition and subsequently, your bottom line.

Victoria Tifft

Photo credit: Diana Ransom

We all know the call to entrepreneurship can come from anywhere. For Victoria Tifft, that urge to start up came to her after she contracted malaria while being stationed in Tonga in West Africa with the Peace Corps more than 20 years ago.
After that experience, Tifft told Entrepreneur, "I knew I wanted to do something with malaria research."

So in 1992, Tifft established the Hinckley, Ohio-based vaccine researcher Clinical Research Management Inc., known as ClinicalRM. Today, the company supports the development of Food and Drug Administration-regulated vaccines, pharmaceuticals and medical devices for government and commercial customers. ClinicalRM also helped create and now manages the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research's Clinical Trials Center. That facility develops vaccines for infectious diseases such as malaria.

After 20 years in business, Tifft's company has more than 330 employees and annual revenues that reached $40 million in 2010, up from $17 million in 2007. Further, she says, the company plans to double its staff in the next three years.

For those achievements and others, Tifft was recognized yesterday as the Small Business Administration's 2012 National Small Business Person of the Year by SBA chief Karen Mills at National Small Business Week in Washington, D.C. After the ceremony, she sat down with Entrepreneur to discuss managing the rapid growth that comes with success. Here is an edited version of that conversation:

With just about six months left before the presidential election, healthcare and tax policy are small business owners two most pressing political issues, according to a nationwide survey released today.

About one in five small business owners (19 percent) feel that healthcare will hurt them more than any other political issue, according to a survey of 1,593 business owners conducted in early May by Manta, an online community dedicated to small business. Meanwhile,17 percent of small business owners say tax policy will impact them the most, followed closely by government regulation with 14 percent of respondents.  

Many small-business owners dream of selling their products in mass-market outlets.

But getting your merchandise into large retailers like WalMart, Home Depot or Target isn’t an easy task.

If you’re trying to break into the big leagues, here’s a checklist of what to do. The advice comes from a trio of panelists who spoke Sunday on the topic of “How Small Business Can Win Big with Large Companies” at National Small Business Week in Washington, D.C. 

1. Attend business matchmaking programs and other networking events. The Small Business Administration hosts matchmaking sessions  during Small Business Week, setting up 15-minute meetings between qualified business owners and procurement officers at large corporations, including AT&T, Honeywell and Raythen, and government agencies. Organizations like the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, which certifies women-owned businesses, provide formal matchmaking programs. Or see if the large corporation you’re targeting hosts such an event. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, offers a number of regional matchmaking workshops and webinars.

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.