Today, April 22, is Earth Day. One way to reduce our national carbon footprint is to increase the number of telecommuting hours we work from home.

Oprah joined Twitter this past week. I think we can safely say Twitter is no longer a fad, and that it is here to stay.

Twitter is a medium for posting very short messages (140 characters or less). Even with that limit, businesses are using Twitter to:

• market products,
• run promotions,
• engage customers,
• talk industry associates,
• monitor their brand,
• ...and more!

Are you or your business on Twitter? If you are, how are you using Twitter to help your business?

If you're not yet on Twitter, now is a good time to get started.

Read it: Twitter 101: Twitter Basics for Small Business Owners

The deadline for filing your taxes this year is Wednesday (April 15, 2009) at midnight. Even if you don't think you can file by tomorrow, at least start the process and ask for an extension. You can get the 6-month extension online, though you will still need to pay what you owe (or a portion of it) by April 15.

Here are some tips for last minute filers....

What makes Twitter so powerful are the hundreds of 3rd-party apps, programs, and web services that interact with it. Here are the 8 most useful Twitter tools for small business owners.

Shane Pike, an entrepreneur who built NursingJobs.org from the ground up and sold it to a major Internet company for big bucks, has written an in-depth article about his experience building and selling a site.

How to Sell a Website for $1 Million teaches other site builders what it takes to have a million dollar exit. Shane talks about:

1. Is your site worth $1 million? When you're evaluating the value of your website, some factors to consider include the strength of your brand, your site's defensibility (how vulnerable is it to new competition), are you still growing, how valuable is your niche, and your site's uniqueness and market position (are you the leader or one among many).
2. Are you sure you want to sell? Shane talks about why now might not be the right time to sell, and more importantly, why now is the perfect time to sell. You may want to sell now if a sale will set you up for life, if the business is risky and external forces may strip your site of all its value, or if you're just burned out.
3. How to sell for the maximum price. Shane offers 3 ways to sell a site -- do it yourself, use a broker, or use an investment bank. He then explains how using an investment bank (the way he sold his site) maximizes the dollar amount you can get for your website.

I had a chance to talk to Shane last year at BlogWorld Expo and found him to be a very open and knowledgeable guy. His blog, AskShane.org, is well worth a read for anyone trying to earn a living building (and selling) websites. Check out Shane's blog and ask him some questions. He's generous with his experiences and more than willing to teach others how to reach their goals too.

According to SEO experts, a webpage's title is by far the most important factor in getting better search engine rankings. According to SEO Christine Churchill:

If you have time to do only one SEO action on your site, take the time to create good titles.

Today, we have a guest post from SEO guru Ann Smarty. Ann explains why page titles are so important, and what you can do it improve your website's page titles:

The page title is the most prominent part of each separate listing in search results interface. It is what Google (or any other search engine) considers when trying to understand what your page is about. It is what you click to leave Google search results page and proceed to the site you chose. It is what you scan trying to choose which page fits your search query best.

Ann offers a few tips on how you can use this information to tweak your page titles to maximize responses from search users (ie., potential customers). Read the full article: Better Page Titles: How to Improve Your Website's Page Titles

Shopify (www.shopify.com) is a hosted ecommerce software aimed at small online retailers. Their main goal is to make it easy for online retailers to get a store up quickly and start shipping product as soon as possible. Being a second generation ecommerce solution (Shopify was launched in 2006), they have learned from the best practices and mistakes of older ecommerce software.

Shopify provides most of the features a small retailer needs while still being extremely easy to use. This combination of just-enough-features and focus on ease-of-use makes building, customizing, and using a Shopify store a very pleasant experience -- a claim very few ecommerce platforms can make. On top of its power and ease, Shopify also has an affordable pricing structure. All of this makes launching an online business possible for very small home-based retailers.

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce software that is easy-to-use, integrates with 3rd-party fulfillment (like drop shippers), and is priced affordably.

Shopify's starter plan supports up to 100 product SKUs, charges a 2% transaction fee, and costs $24 per month. Larger plans can support up to 10,000 SKUs and have lower transaction fees.

I've been testing it out for a few weeks and have grown to really appreciate its smart design and "just enough" features. For the moment, the Shopify team has managed to straddle the line between being too complex (too many features) and being too simple (not enough essential features). Read my full review of Shopify.

Do you work at home as a freelancer? Do you make a few bucks from your blog? If you are one of the millions of people making some income working from home, you could get more back from Uncle Sam by taking deductions not available to other folks. Here's a list of 101 tax deductions for freelancers from the personal finance blog Wise Bread.

Here are the expenses you should look into deducting if you’re a blogger and/or freelancer, assuming they apply to your chosen blogging or freelancing field (you can’t deduct movie tickets if you have no reason to be at the movies…but if you have a blog all about movies and reviews, go for it).

As always, you need proof of this stuff. No good saying you bought 50 magazines last year if you can’t find the receipts. With the government hemorrhaging money, they’re looking for any opportunity to keep as much of your cash as they can. In the event of an audit (aaarggghhh) you want your finances to be watertight.