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How are blogging and teeth similar?
Blogging as like flossing your teeth, you need do it fairly regularly to maintain your oral hygiene (or marketing awareness). It doesn’t need to be done everyday like brushing your teeth (or working on your marketing strategy), but you need to keep it up if you want a nice smile (or well marketed business).
Nobody likes [...] -
Combine price and quality to attract customers
While visiting Nottingham we decided to go for a Chinese meal. Just down from our hotel was an restaurant called ‘Big Wok’, which looked enticing at £10 for all you could eat.
Now normally these ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ establishments skimp on quality for the sake of price, but we were pleasantly surprised. [...] -
Customers' copy outweigh your business profile
All copywriting, whether for web or paper, should be biased towards one thing: the customer.
Blabbing on about the company is a total waste of time, customers don’t give a tinker’s toot about the business, they only care about “what’s in it for them”, how will they benefit from the product or services offered, will it [...] -
Saying exactly what in the tin
Following on from my visible networking material idea I came across this business card from Jill Wigmore-Welsh. I wanted to share it with you because it stood out from all the other business cards at this networking meeting I went to.
Why? Because the first thing it said is what she does, but in a way [...] -
How many ways can you use a blog?
One blog I always read avidly is Graham Jones’s, and his post on using a blog to keep your customers happy poses an interesting insight into how you could use a blog in different ways, not just the usual weblog diary thing.
I like the idea of providing private blogs, or even individual password protected pages [...] -
'Blackberry' doesn't say 'babies clothes' to me
One young entrepreneur was asking for advice on her babies’ clothes business on a women’s business forum. She had decided to call it ‘Blackberry Babes’ and wondered if it was a good name or not. This is my response:
I’m still a little confused why you need to use ‘blackberry’ – is there some underlying [...] -
3 ways to successfully market your messages
OK, without the multi-million pound marketing budgets the big corporates have, how can SMEs compete? But you can accomplish it just as well within your sphere by using these three simple, common sense marketing techniques that needn’t cost the earth.
First, make your messages regular, repetitive and always upbeat. There are plenty of ways to achieve [...] -
You don’t buy gifts with yourself in mind, do you?
When you choose a present for a friend, I hope you don’t choose it because you really like it?
When you choose the colour, you don’t choose your favourite and not your friend’s?
When you choose the size, you don’t see if it fits yourself, do you?
Think about these facts and compare them to how you treat [...] -
Never give up on your marketing
I read somewhere that small businesses really ought to spend 40% of their time doing marketing if they want to survive. 40%! That’s quite a lot, especially if you’re a sole trader or only have a few employees, but if you think about it, a lot of what you do would be already considered as [...]
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How can questions help small businesses?
If you start thinking in questions, it will benefit you to:
• focus your mind on what your customers really want or need
• ask your customers what they are asking for
• work out what your own business should be asking for
• then aim to provide what your customers are searching for
This sounds deep, but it isn’t [...]








