With the inauguration of President-Elect Obama just days away, small business owners affected by recession see restoration of the country’s economy as his top priority, but many lack faith in him to improve matters, according to a poll of 50,000 small business clients by email and direct mail marketing company VerticalResponse.

As more television makes the transition to the Internet, Google is doing its part to bring a little of the Internet back to television. It is doing so through a newly signed deal with NBC Universal (NBCU) in a move to help NBCU attract "new kinds" of advertisers.

As a small business or site publisher, the route to Moneyville displays signs pointing to Google’s advertising products. In Google’s estimation, of course, but they may be correct.

Yahoo Small Business said on Wednesday that it is offering unlimited disk space, data transfer and email storage space for $11.95 per month.

The service plan allows small businesses to launch a new business or expand an existing one online. Business owners will not have to be concerned about the bandwidth and storage limits of their plan.

It can be especially difficult for business-to-business companies and brick-and-mortar stores to stand out in search results, especially if their relying on local results or paid listings. The answer to that, of course, is good (old fashioned?) SEO.

Galen De Young, managing director of Francis SEO, says research suggests b2b customers overwhelmingly ignore PPC ads in favor of organic listings. That and local search often fails to present businesses that serve a larger area than just their home base, or also nearby cities.

I recently spotted a blog post by Adam Senour over at Walk My Path. The post outlines why Gene Marks is right on certain comments from the blog post. I must say I didn’t think I would find someone defending Gene marks comments like Adam has.

OK folks I can’t take mainstream media much longer. They are so out of touch with what is really happening online it is simply ridiculous. Take the latest offering from Gene Marks at MSNBC:

The total online spending by small businesses is expected to reach $70 billion by the year 2012, up from $47 billion in 2006, according to JupiterResearch’s new report "US Online Small Business Market Category Forecast, 2007 to 2012."

Close to 30 percent of small businesses in the U.S. are estimating that their ecommerce sales will increase over the next 12 to 24 months, according to the Small Business Research Board study out now.

Small businesses often times struggle to keep up with big conglomerates, but now they have an opportunity to function as a big company without the additional manpower.