The Daily Freebie

Last night, we stood in line and got free chicken and tortillas at El Pollo Loco for dinner. Apparently they were responding to a free chicken giveaway by KFC a day earlier.

Tonight, we paid $1.86 for six scoops of ice cream at Baskin-Robbins (.31 cents per scoop) during an anniversary special.

Apparently, if we'd known about it, we could have gone downtown and had breakfast at The Original Pantry (one of my Dad's absolute favorite places) for .85 cents.

I know restaurants are hurting and all, but how many more of them can afford to give away free food!?

What's the word on the next freebie?

Buying A WorkOut

Business turnaround experts call struggling firms that still have potential "workouts."

Not surprisingly, this is a terrific time to acquire a floundering company and turn it around. Anyone who attempts this, however, must have a strong stomach and a strong grounding both in the industry and in entrepreneurship.

One expert told me that anyone aquiring a workout should have an "MBA." Not a master's of business administration, but a "massive bank account"!

See what some other experts have to say in my most recent Smart Answers column.

Beef Up Your Website

Websites are no longer optional marketing and sales tools, but too many entrepreneurs are missing out on the Internet's full power. So says the guest on my Smart Answers podcast this week as he explains how to engage customers and monetize content.

Speaking of monetizing content (I swear I didn't plan this), my Smart Answers column talks about affiliate plans and reselling online.

Most of us are familiar with affiliate programs, where you put a link on your site to a site like Amazon.com and share in some portion of the proceeds when sales result. But some firms are going beyond that rather benign practice and asking their customers to become distributors or resellers for them.

It's an interesting proposition, but it gets into trickier, and potentially more time-consuming, territory and should be evaluated more carefully.

Red Hot Internet

Last weekend, I attended an Internet publicity seminar conducted by Penny Sansevieri of Author Marketing Experts, Inc.

I have been to three or four of these workshops, all sponsored by the Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC).

Penny's was easily the best. It was detailed and practical but easy to follow. I found out that there are a lot of things I could be doing to increase my visibility online.

A few highlights:

There are more than 500 social networking sites on the web. Penny says you need only three: Facebook, Squidoo and Twitter.

She recommends downloading the Google toolbar and using PageRank, a tool that shows you how Google assesses the strength of any website or blog you visit. This way, you can spend your online marketing time wisely, targeting the strongest sites (i.e., those that have the most visitors, incoming links, etc.).

Think there aren't enough hours in the day to keep up your tweeting, blogging and commenting - let alone actually work for a living? There is software that allows you to automate your tweets and posts, so that anything you write for one venue can be repurposed everywhere else you have an account. (Exactly how one sets that up I didn't quite catch, but Penny claims it can be done.)

Finally, she says, "social media" is so named precisely because it is "social." Expect to spend time socializing online just as you would if you were going into face-to-face social situations. The great news? Online networking is much easier on the fashion budget.

Penny has written a couple of books. And she's "BookGal" on Twitter, where she apparently posts loads of short and sweet tips every day. Check her out. If anyone could persuade me to sign up myself, she may just have done it.

Employee Advice

The talk over at BusinessWeek.com's Small Biz page is all about employment, and unemployment, today.

My Smart Answers column gives alternatives to downsizing.

Staff writer John Tozzi opines on the right way to handle layoffs.

And Jason Calacanis, founder of the Silicon Alley Reporter, writes about how to hire - and get hired - in a recession.

Bees in the Bin

There was some drama in the still-nascent organic garden this week.

I noticed lots of bees going into my compost bin on Tuesday. After dusk, when no bees were in evidence, my son lifted the lid (while I watched from a safe distance). Sure enough, there was a giant ball-o'bees clinging to the underside. I screamed and ran for the garage, and he dropped the lid and followed close on my heels.

For the next two days, we steered clear of that part of our yard - not easy to do since that's where our trash cans are stored.

April and May is bee swarm season, I learned, so rogue bees are not unusual (although it never happened to us before). But what to do?

If I weren't such a chicken, I would've bought a bee box and kept them myself. I love honey, but I wrote an article on killer bees once and the horror stories have never left me.

So I called L.A. County Vector Control and found out they remove bees for free. The bad news is that they have a waiting list several months long.

Then I called an exterminator to come poison my pests. But I started to get kind of fond of the little critters. It felt like a shame to kill them, especially since so many hives are dying off due to a true pest called varroa mite.

My friend Donnie Dale came to the rescue when he remembered that a local beekeeping group had recently been featured in the L.A. Times

A few minutes of Google magic and I came across Kirk Anderson, of the Backwards Beekeepers.

Kirk was all set to come out and find a new home for my buzzy friends. Then late this afternoon I noticed that there weren't many bees around the compost bin. My son flipped the lid with a shovel and - voila! They had flown the coop, leaving just a few pieces of honeycomb behind.

Apparently they found a better site for their hive. I'm relieved, but also a little sad. I only wish they'd left us some honey as a parting gift.

Business Startups

Lots and lots of people are thinking about starting companies right now. Some have been laid off, others are retiring early, all have long had the entrepreneurial bug. My email is jammed with startup questions.

I address two of them in my LA Times In Box column this week.

Having had a couple of relatives crash and burn with startups - with dire consequences for their finances and even their marriages, sadly! - I try hard to instill some common sense into my answers. If I can steer clueless newbies to a prudent, research-based approach to starting their companies, I feel that I've done both my job and a public service.

My Smart Answers podcast this week is all about how to evaluate a bank and move your accounts if you can upgrade the relationships and services involved.