UPDATE: On Tues., May 15, 2012, the Senate passed the bipartisan Export-Import Bank Reauthorization Act of 2012 by a vote of 78-20, extending the Bank's authority through 2014 and increasing its cap to $140 billion. President Obama, who has set a goal of doubling the nation's exports by the end of 2014, issued a statement in support of the reauthorization.  

Business owners looking for help exporting are once again facing a nail-biter as they wait for Congress to decide the future of Export-Import Bank of the U.S. If Congress opts not to extend the agency's charter, many businesses that depend on sales in foreign countries could suffer.

Ex-Im Bank is a federal agency that provides direct loans, loan guarantees and insurance to businesses that export. A large part of its role is to support small-business exporters. The last charter for the Ex-Im Bank expired Sept. 30, and has been extended three times. The latest extension will expire May 31. A charter authorizes the Ex-Im Bank's operation for four to five years.

In addition to needing a new charter, the Ex-Im Bank needs Congress to raise the cap on its outreach. Each time it extends a loan, makes a guarantee or provides insurance, it adds to its exposure to risk. The total limit for its exposure is mandated at $100 billion and the Ex-Im Bank has about $90 billion worth of exposure, says Phil Cogan, an agency spokesman. The agency is set to run up against its exposure limit at about the same time that its charter expires, based on its application pipeline, he says.

Facebook told marketers that its new Timeline interface would improve consumer interaction with brands. Timeline is living up to that promise, according to a new study.

The study, by Seattle-based social engagement analytics firm Simply Measured, focuses on 15 large brands, including Toyota, Ben & Jerry's, and The Humane Society. It compares each brand's engagement rate with its fans both before and after Timeline was made available earlier this month. 

The results indicate that brands are enjoying an average 46 percent increase in engagement per post. 

Growing a business can be almost as tricky as getting the enterprise off the ground. These growing pains came to mind as I watched this past week's episode of ABC's reality show Shark Tank.

The first entrepreneur up to pitch the sharks was Nick Romero, the owner of The Ave, a small business on the beach in Venice, Calif., that offers shoppers a unique way to screen-print any image onto a pair of shoes. The idea was a smash hit with trendy beachgoers, with lines out the door since it opened last April. The Ave, a store of less than 500 square feet, saw first-year sales top $500,000 and had more than $100,000 of profit.

This is the sort of story the Sharks usually drool over -- a proven success with both sales and profits, as well as products that are flat-out cool. I thought they'd be fighting each other over a chance to get a piece of The Ave's future revenue. But in the end, the Sharks all passed on helping the owner open more stores.

As a small business owner using the web to reach customers, you've surely been implementing search engine optimization tactics to make sure your site turns up high in web searches. But just when you might feel like you're starting to get the hang of this SEO thing, it appears that search giant Google might start penalizing websites that are over-optimized.

At this year's South by Southwest festival, Google spokesperson Matt Cutts hinted that such a penalty would weed out sites that focus too much on SEO and too little on providing a quality experience for their users.

So what factors might play a role in an over optimization penalty? Cutts outlined several signals that would qualify as too much SEO, such as "too many keywords on a page" and "exchange way too many links."

The tricky part is determining what constitutes too many keywords or links. While the penalty has not yet been put in place, you can still take steps to make sure your business's site doesn't end up being labeled "overly optimized":  

There's so much you need to run a business: a great idea, access to capital, industry knowledge, passion. Should coding be on that list, too?

Programming skills were high on the wish list of startup entrepreneurs at the recent SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. One reason: Investors seem to take a liking to those in-the-coding-know. During the Q & A portion of a panel called "Investor Spotting," I witnessed one investor interrupt an entrepreneur who was trying to pitch his startup idea. "Do you code?" he asked. Big pause. "No," the entrepreneur said, dejectedly. "I wish."

As the U.S. Supreme Court finishes up hearing challenges to the Affordable Care Act, business owners continue to be split on what outcome they'd like to see. The possibilities include no change to implementation of the 2,700-page law, while some parts of the law could get struck down, as others are kept. Or, the whole thing could get tossed out.

We won't have a resolution until June, but the business community aims to continue to debate the issue.

"Ambient" social networks were all the buzz at Austin's annual South by Southwest tech festival. So what are ambient networks? They include social discovery platforms and "proximity"-based apps on a smartphone or mobile device that locate other app users within the same geographical area.

Unlike Foursquare, which connects people to places, ambient social networks aim to connect people to people. Startups playing in the ambient social networking sandbox include:

• Highlight
• Sonar
• Glancee
• Grindr
• Banjo
• Circle

Depending on the app, users can search for and connect with Facebook contacts and Twitter followers, or locate nearby app users who have friends in common or share their interests, hobbies, or even dating preferences.

Small-business owners have more options today for how to market their products and services than ever before. That means it's more confusing than ever, too. But in a competitive climate, marketing effectively is critical.

So what types of marketing have the most impact in our ad-cluttered world? Here are seven methods to consider:

1. A well-crafted press release. Submitting to big press-release sites, such as PR Newswire or PRWeb, can not only get your business some media coverage, but also really boost your website's rankings in search engines.

2. Outsourced sales forces. Users of this approach report that the return on investment is higher than when housing and supporting staffers, probably because salespeople perform better when they're not being micromanaged.

So you've got an idea for a small business. Congratulations! Now, it's time to figure out how to make it one that survives and even thrives.

Many would-be entrepreneurs are held back by fears of failure due to the risks of starting a business. But there are ways to lessen those risks -- by taking a sane, step-by-step approach to getting ready to launch. 

Here are seven fundamental steps for planning a low-risk launch:

1. Know how you'll fund it. There are many costs to starting a business, even if it's an online one. Do you have money saved up, or access to a credit line you could tap? Will you work a side job? Get relatives to help you? Have a strategy for how you will pay for business expenses.

2. Be realistic about ramp time. Even with a simple business idea, expect it will be at least six months to a year before the business starts throwing off enough cash to support you. Know how you will cover your living expenses until then.

Here's some encouraging news for Women's History Month: more women are starting businesses, and more woman-owned $1 million businesses are growing, according to a new report from American Express OPEN Forum. 

The new State of Women-Owned Businesses  looked at the past 15 years of business activity to track trends in women's business ownership. It found that American women are starting about 550 new businesses a day, opening more than 200,000 new enterprises in the past year. The rate of startup activity by women leaped 54 percent and far outstripped the overall business creation growth rate of 37 percent.

The study also found that women-owned firms are as likely as any other to be doing over $500,000 in annual revenue in industries including construction, transportation, and warehousing. Perhaps most encouraging, in the past five years, woman-owned firms with sales over $1 million have shown stronger growth than they did in earlier periods. 

How have women been able to become more empowered to grow substantial businesses? Three things come to mind: 

If you've been wading through the sea of tools that claim to measure exactly how your social media campaigns are benefitting your business's bottom line, Google is betting it has the solution you've been looking for.

Over the next few weeks, the search giant will be rolling out a new set of reports within Google Analytics it says can help measure social media activity on and off your website, across networks including Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and, of course, Google+. According to a Google blog post, there are three main goals the reports can help marketers accomplish:

In Fashion Star, reality TV and home-shopping TV have finally met, and the result is a customer's dream. For business owners, the new NBC show serves as a training course in how to get customers to see your products, fall in love with them, and then know exactly where to buy them.

Unlike Project Runway, where a panel of fashion designers decides who makes it to the next round, Fashion Star's judges are buyers from major department stores, including Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue, and H&M. If they like the clothes, the buyers negotiate a deal on the spot and buy the garments for their store. Even better, by the time the episode airs, the clothes are in the stores and available online for shoppers to buy.

What if a shopper can't remember which buyer bought which design? Not to worry: a quick browse at the Fashion Star website shows all the designs and where they are for sale. Click on a garment, and you go to that retailer's website and see the price. One more click, and you've bought it. Unless, of course, the wild demand that's been created by the media exposure means it's already sold out.

With 2012 shaping up to be another challenging year economically, you may be wondering how you can prepare your business for growth. It turns out, there are some specific steps you can take to improve your odds of seeing better performance this year.

A recently released study from the Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute polled owners of both thriving and floundering small businesses about their management habits. The results paint an interesting picture of what owners of high-growth businesses are doing to thrive in this downturn.

Here are the study's six steps to better performance:

Robert Rodriguez may be a film writer, director and producer. But he's also an entrepreneur.

The multi-hyphenate filmmaker recently shared news regarding his latest venture El Rey, a forthcoming independent TV network on Comcast. The El Rey network, which is slated to go live by 2014, will be an English language channel geared towards the next generation of U.S. Latinos. The cutting-edge director of Desperado, Sin City and From Dusk Till Dawn described his business and production model as "high-tech guerilla." In other words, he plans to work off a limited budget, which he says will ultimately drive greater creativity and innovation -- a notion that may sound familiar to many entrepreneurs.

This DIY mentality isn't surprising. Twenty years ago when Rodriguez released his breakout indie film El Mariachi, he shortly thereafter wrote the book Rebel Without A Crew. The book was a guide to a new wave of filmmaking where a $300,000 budget equals just as many opportunities and possibilities for distribution and release as a multi-million dollar film. "When you do that, it's called something like breaking the end field," he told me. "You can only run the 100 yard dash in 7 seconds. That's all that's possible, until someone does it in 6.5 seconds. Changing the game is a mindset."

Here, Rodriguez distilled more of his creative philosophy, as well as his insights on everything from TV to social media to entrepreneurship:

Some entrepreneurs are born to start businesses -- often more than one. But not all of these idea people really want to lead a company. They simply don't have the leadership traits that would make them the best choice to head the company, especially as it grows larger. That's why so many founders are replaced before a company goes public -- investors want to know that a vibrant, inspiring figure whose core competency is leadership will be there to drive growth.

It's common for founders to step back from being CEO and take on some other role -- common titles for founders who have stepped away from the top spot include chief technology officer, board director, chief operating officer or research and development director. Some people are full of creative spark and have a passion for coming up with new concepts or for marketing their idea. Others love to lead teams of people and inspire them to do their best.

But rarely do these two innate drives reside in one person. Many entrepreneurs cling to leadership simply because they fear the loss of control, even though their business would be better off if they brought a passionate leader to the helm and focused on the part of the business they love.

So how do you know if you should lead your business? Here are some questions you should ask yourself: