Subtitle: The deals chase the money. The money doesn’t chase the deals.

Two days ago in Angels vs. VCs on Business Pitches I said our angel investment group looks at all submissions.

That confused my friend Anthony Richardson, who followed up yesterday with this question:

Should an early stage company bombard every online submission under the sun ? It has always been my advice to clients to tell them that it was a complete waste of time, and if I may be honest here; I was fairly surprised to see that you thought differently.

Anthony, I completely agree with what you’ve been telling your clients. An

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Anxiety over the state of the economy and a continued shortage of mortgage finance prevented the spring bounce in the housing market hoped for by estate agents, according to the monthly snapshot of the property market from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors today.

More than four fifths of firms reporting a decline in house prices said the drop had been in the 0-2% range, but the Rics said evidence of decline was the most widespread it had been since the start of 2011. Once adjusted for seasonal factors, the balance of firms reporting falls in prices exceeded those saying they had risen in May by 28 percentage points, although the bulk of agents said there had been no change.

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If you’re a small business, one of the goals of your marketing strategy is to drive more traffic to your website, where you can convert those visitors into leads.

To generate traffic, you need to publish great content that is interesting and useful to your target market.  You can write a blog, newsletter, white papers, press releases, articles, how-to guides, whatever, and then you’ll push out all of that content to your audience via email or social media.

Well, how about tapping into an audience on social media that goes way beyond your followers?

Check out this Baltimore-based startup, SocialToaster.  I first wrote about them for Tech Cocktail back in March.  I have zero affiliation with them, but their idea – and the technology behind it – is really interesting and super useful for small businesses, so sharing them here at GrowSmartBiz has been on my to-do list for a while.

So, here’s how they work:  Ask customers, employees, Facebook fans, and anyone else you’d like to be your ambassador (their term, not mine).  You’ll share content with them, and they will spread the content on their social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn).  Naturally, there are built-in analytics so you can track website visitors to see which ambassador sent them.

SocialToaster is a great way to gain brand exposure and build up your sales funnel, but it is dependent on you producing content on a regular basis.  You don’t need to g

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Homebuyers should be legally required to put down a minimum 10% deposit and borrow no more than three and a half times their income to purchase a property if Britain is to avoid another damaging boom-bust cycle, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

Today’s report by the thinktank also argues for controls on buy-to-let lending to deter property speculators from ramping up the market.

The report sets the IPPR against most of the mortgage industry, which is campaigning for the Financial Services Authority to use “affordability” tests rather than formal caps on loan-to-value and loan-to-income.

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Hector Sants is preparing to go eyeball to eyeball with top City bankers to see if they are taking on too much risk – and threatening the entire financial system.

As designated head of the soon-to-be-created (but not snappily named) Prudential Regulatory Authority, Sants plans to fix bank bosses with his stare as he takes charge of “promoting the safety and soundness of regulated firms”.

He said: “The style of the regulation will benefit from that focus. This a key message. The senior executives of the PRA will be intimately involved in the supervisory decisions.”

Calibre

But he insists: “Individuals can be found who recognise the rewarding nature of the role in the wider sense and are attracted to the concept of public service.”

He set out his plans for the PRA to a packed conference room in Westminster on Thursday. A

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For startups, patents are nice to have, but not if you trust them to really protect you. In that they’re like umbrellas. Good protection in a drizzle. False confidence in a downpour.

I write that because I’ve read about 50 real startup business plans in the last two months, and I’ve gone through at least two dozen pitch presentations, and I think it needs to be said.

Patents are usually better than nothing. I like it when a startup has a patent portfolio already issued, but also promises to keep trade secrets very tight and has a budget for patent defense. I like it more when they have a letter from a patent attorney talking about coverage and defensibility of the patents.

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