In an effort to separate my work portfolio from the general tips and advice I’ve previously offered business owners, I’ve decided to start a new site in order to give the latter its own home. Called simply ‘Tips For Business’ with a rather neat web address: www.tipsfor.biz , the site is aimed at small business owners, self employed people and those just starting out in business.

For those trying to adapt to the world outside the comfortable confines of regular employment, the transition can be a demanding one. We’re all trying to make it in difficult times at the moment, so I hope you find my advice helpful.

The site is biased towards marketing and promotion as that’s my specialist area, but there is some general stuff on there that I hope will appeal to everybody.

Visit Tips For Business

I’m very proud to announce that one of my best clients has won an award in the FSB Hertfordshire Small Business Awards 2010. Women With Waders, the garden pond cleaning and construction service, has won ‘Most Enterprising Business’.

Women With Waders scooped the top prize in the prestigious 2010 awards, organised by the Hertfordshire division of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).

The awards celebrate the very best of the contribution made by local businesses across the county, and our success is a reflection of the hard work and dedication of our team since the company was founded in 2005.

Finalist in ‘Best E-Business’ category

Since I designed and built their website, it has become absolutely integral to their marketing strategy (in fact it generates most of their business) and as well as receiving top prize in the Enterprising Business category, they also earned a finalist place in the Best E-Business Award category. The site was praised for being accessible and user-friendly, which is very pleasing for me as the designer.

You can find out more about Women With Waders by visiting their website.

Mid Beds Locksmiths are a company specialising in restoration ironmongery for nationwide building conservation and preservation projects. I built a new website for them six months ago and today they contacted me to inform me that their business has boomed as a direct result of the new site.

“Just a quick note to thank you for the web site. Our work load and enquiries since its launch has trebled, the reaction from our clients has been very positive indeed.”
Mid Beds Locksmiths (visit site)

This means the site has payed for itself many times over. This is brilliant news for the client and very satisfying for me to hear confirmation that all the design work and built-in search engine optimisation has payed dividends.

The client is so pleased that they have now asked me to design some printed leaflets, adverts and catalogues for them.

If you would like your web site to be a similar success story, please contact me to find out how I can help.

A real success story for one of my clients. After first building a site for them in 2006, and then a completely new site in 2009, I have now completed a major overhaul of the site for 2010, in the interests of keeping things fresh.

The client has reached a point where they can rely almost entirely on the web site to generate business, and this has proved a very cost effective form of marketing compared with magazine advertising and other forms of promotion.

This is hardly surprising – a Google search for Pond Cleaning Hertfordshire places Women With Waders at the very top of the results page. Same goes for Pond Cleaning Bedfordshire.

Visit the Women With Waders site.

Would you like a similar success story for your business? Talk to me!

Anyone can have a blog. You just go to wordpress.com or blogger.com or any of the other free hosted blogging services and sign up for an account. Simple as that. Now you have an online journal, and you can write informative articles relevant to your business and attract interest from others in your industry. Or you can just keep customers and prospects informed of what your company is up to these days.

What’s the catch? To be honest, there aren’t any major drawbacks. By choosing any one of these free services you end up with is an excellent, feature rich, perfectly usable blog that will do just about everything you want it to. You might have to put up with a few adverts on there (these services have to make their money somehow) but the chances are they’ll be infrequent and unobtrusive.

What will it look like? Well, you’ll be able to choose from a multitude of ‘themes’ and if you choose wisely you’ll have a tasteful, professional looking blog template. But what if you already have a web site and want a blog that looks like part of your site? That’s a bit more difficult. The chances of finding a theme that looks like your site are remote, and there is also the possibility that you end up choosing a popular theme, so there will be other blogs that look identical to yours. You can modify themes, but you have to know what you’re doing.

However, there is an alternative. My site is simply a blog based on WordPress technology platform. It’s hosted on my server just like any other site and I’ve made it look exacly like I want it to look instead of relying on one of the free templates. Plus I’ve included other pages like you’d find on a normal site instead of restricting it to just the blog pages.

If you want one like this, ask me about designing a custom theme for your blog, or a template that looks almost exactly like your current site. I can do this for you at reasonable rates and you will find that getting a blog can really raise your profile and benefit your business.

Unless you’ve been in a coma for the past year, you’ll have realised we’re in an economic downturn. Whether or not it’s officially a recession depends on whose definition you read, but there’s no denying times are hard, and it’s all been helped along nicely and hyped up beyond all sanity by the Daily Mail and the BBC.

So now more than ever is a time when you need to make every penny count and look at the most cost effective and creative ways to keep your business moving. Yet when the going gets tough, many businesses choose to cut back on the one thing that can keep them ahead of the game: Marketing.

It’s easy to see why. When a business is looking to cut costs, immediate tangible savings can be made by cutting your advertising budget or cancelling that new corporate brochure you promised yourself. Or just by letting the company web site stagnate for a while longer.

But is it really worth making a few short term savings if your business is going to suffer in the long run? What about maintaining your brand awareness and your company image? Cutting back may pay the bills this month, but what if you don’t have any new business coming in to pay them next month? Most of all, why miss out on the opportunity to push yourself to the forefront while all the others are shrinking into the background?

The truth is, it’s easier to raise awareness of your offering at a time like this, because your competitors will be cutting back and spending less on promoting themselves. Why not take advantage of your competitors’ hesitance and trepidation and make yourself the leader of the pack. The best news of all is that it’s nowhere near as expensive as you think. Here are a few low cost ideas:

• Business cards have long been recognised as one of the most effective marketing tools, and yet they are extremely cheap to design and produce. Refresh yours today.
• Give your web site a makeover. Sometimes it only takes a few hours for someone like me to give it a fresh look and revitalise your online presence.
• Mailshots are still as effective as ever. Ask me about the mailshots I regularly send out to hundreds of names at a time, consisting of a simple letter and business card, for not much more than the cost of the stamps.

So if you’re feeling the fear, don’t let it get the better of you. Let your customers and prospects know you’re a business that’s here to stay. Talk to me about the most cost effective ways to promote your business.