Today I received a pretty nice T-Shirt from Advanta innovative team for blogging about their very special website: www.ideablob.com. (”Small Business Network from Credit Card Issuers“) As I indicated in my previous post, the ideablob is an active online community for entrepreneurs and small business owners. People can submit their ideas to the community and get some comments or advice from community members and advisers. At the same time, every month, the community votes on the best idea. The winner will get $10,000 to help their idea grow. Because of its uniqueness, I’d like to give an brief review on ideablob which I think is of great help to those small business owners.

I like the idea to share the business ideas at a social networking site. Imagine there are 30 million small businesses in the United States, but there is not a good way to bounce their ideas off each other. In a nurturing environment like ideablob, you will have the opinions from many other small business owners and entrepreneurs. They will bring their experience, insights and help to your idea. Compared to other business networks, the ideablob is without the question the most unique and helpful site.

If you are not a business owner yet, you can still participate in the online community and share your opinions with others. This is a great learning process on how to form a great idea and put it into practice. You should always remember that great ideas always come from daily life!

Let’s see previous monthly $10,000 winners and their ideas:

Elizabeth Dehart, Organic Vending Machine, July 2008 Winner

Jessica Hammock, Develop Astronomy Curriculums for Underprivileged Youth, June 2008 Winner

Alex Eaves, STAY VOCAL, May 2008 Winner

Matt Allison, Portable Personal Trainer, April 2008 Winner

John Studer, No Sweat Apparel, March 2008 Winner

Aaron Fleishman, Mashavu, February 2008 Winner

Naomi Bar-Yam, Mothers’ Milk Bank of New England, January 2008 Winner

Chris Elam, Misnomer Dance Theater, December 2007 Winner

Marci Schankweiler, Crossing the Finish Line, November 2007 Winner

Tom Krieglstein, Red Rover, October 2007 Winner

If you are an Advanta cardholder like Matt, you will receive another 1,000,000 bonus rewards points which are equal to $10,000！That’s $20,000 total bonus!

How can you participate in the online community?

First, anyone over 18 can participate in the community. No matter what’s your job! All you need is your passion and wisdom! Once you register and activate your membership, you can submit your ideas (no limit!) and leave comments on other ideas. For official Q&A, you can go to here.

According to Jennifer at Advanta innovative team, ideablob has created an RSS feed of ideas from their system. This is very considerate! You can now choose to subscribe to specific industries ideas or tags.

I seldom mention Advanta in this blog because its customers are generally small business owners. Advanta is one of the nation’s largest credit card issuers in the small business market. The two credit cards: Advanta Life-of-Balance Platinum Business Card and Advanta Platinum Business Card with Rewards Options are my top rated business cards. If you are a small business owner, you can apply for one of those.