The chief business of the American people is business

Cool Calvin Coolidge, in a 1925 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, told the assembly:

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life."

And yet whenever I discuss the superiority of the Chase Ink Plus small business credit card over the worthless Chase Sapphire Preferred, readers invariably remark how difficult it is to get the Chase Ink Plus "without a genuine business."

Normally I keep my business ideas close to my vest, but out of an overabundance of altruism, I've decided to share three easy ways to turn you from an employee into a proud self-employed American.

The gig economy makes business easy and fun

If you're a driver for the ride-sharing services Uber or Lyft, you've got a lot of expenses that you should be keeping strictly separate from your personal expenses: gas, vehicle maintenance, and car insurance for starters. Likewise if you do work through an app like TaskRabbit, you'll need to carefully separate any expenses you incur while on the job in order to correctly report your self-employment income come tax time.

Note that this is true no matter how much gig work you actually perform.

You don't have to be good at reselling to make it a business

Reselling is of course a term of art in the travel hacking community for folks earning miles, points and cash by buying up goods they think they'll be able to sell to others at a small, medium, or large markup, while pocketing the rewards currency of their choice.

But you don't need to a reselling savant to turn it into a business. Have you heard of random crap? Well before you start reselling random crap, you'll want to open a small business credit card to keep your random crap reselling business expenses separate from your personal expenses.

We are all content creators now

If you have something to say, you're definitely going to need your own website. That's going to come with all kind of expenses: hosting fees, maintenance fees and image licensing fees, just to name a few. And those are all fees you're definitely going to want to charge to a small business credit card.

Conclusion: unsuccessful businesspeople are businesspeople too

The Chase Ink Plus small business credit card exists so people will carry it. Those people are businesspeople. But if Chase limited card membership to people with longstanding and successful businesses, they wouldn't have very many cardholders at all, would they?

Your job, therefore, is to be the kind of small businessperson that gives Chase a reason to say "yes" to you and your small business.