HOW TO: Connect with Other Entrepreneurs Online

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

There’s no substitute for experience. Many successful entrepreneurs learned how to run a business as they built one, and they had the educational benefit of being able to make mistakes and learn from them as they went along.

But if there’s something close to a substitute for experience, it’s probably somebody else’s experience — which makes other small business owners the perfect people to ask for advice about your own business decisions.

These nine websites will help you track down the appropriate entrepreneurs. If you’ve found success on similar sites, let us know about them in the comments below. Read more at mashable.com

5 Ways to Use Google Voice for Your Business

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Google Voice (), which the search giant introduced in 2009, recently became freely available to everyone in the United States. Even though the service hasn’t dramatically changed since then, it’s still very useful to those that run small businesses, because it can give them an extra edge and make professional life much easier — at least, it can if you know how to use it.

When you register you can choose a virtual phone number in any area code. You can use that number to send and receive text messages, record voicemails and even receive and make calls over the Internet (), but it becomes particularly useful when you attach it to the number associated with your mobile or landline phone. Read more at mashable.com

Why the Small Business Failure Rate Is 90 Percent Smoke and Mirrors

You can’t read or talk about small business long before you run across it. If you haven’t heard it before, it could well rattle whatever resolve you have to go into business for yourself. Ninety percent of small businesses, you’ll learn, fail within one year of startup. Are you now thinking twice about refinancing the house and draining your retirement account to finance your startup? Oh, yeah.

However, without passing judgment on the specific prospects for whatever startup you are considering, if you listen to the 90 percent failure rate stat, you are probably making a mistake. It’s a myth, and far — very far — from the truth. No one seems to know where that factoid came from. We can say that, whatever it’s source, it’s flat wrong. Read more at www.bnet.com

The Mind of the Entrepreneur

What it really takes to build a successful business.

There are lots of stories out there in entrepreneurial lore that seem to confirm our most basic assumptions about successful founders: Namely, that you need a strong stomach for risk, a brilliant vision, and a detailed business plan that will lay out exactly how you plan to execute your brilliance.

Doesn’t sound like you? Not to worry. Those assumptions are wrong, wrong, and, well, wrong. Entrepreneurs don’t make it big because they have the right personality traits. And they aren’t the gambling, visionary super heroes that we often make them out to be.Read more at www.bnet.com