Photo by Dessidre Fleming on Unsplash
Text from my newsletter of 25th October. Starting a business is exciting. Growing it is hard. And the harder it becomes the more likely you are to mess up your work-life balance. There will always be times when you must work ridiculous hours to get something done or fix a problem, but the danger is… Read more
Photo by Jana Shnipelson on Unsplash
Text of my newsletter from 18th October An effective website generates revenue 24/7, and it’s a tireless salesperson that can handle multiple transactions simultaneously, right around the clock. But, as I’ve covered in the last few newsletters, getting visitors to your website is hard, unless you pay. And no visitors equals no business. The fact… Read more
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Text of my newsletter from 11th October The Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp 6-hour outage last week was a wakeup call for businesses that base themselves on any of those platforms. Their ads stopped running, and their business pages went offline. There have been reports of some businesses losing thousands of dollars. And those who use Facebook as their… Read more
Photo by Slidebean on Unsplash
Text of my newsletter from 4th October Last week I looked at getting visitors to your website from the search engines, focusing on Google. As I showed, it’s becoming more difficult. So this week I’ve covered four alternatives. None of these will deliver an instant rush of visitors, but they can all build your stream… Read more
Photo by hk on Unsplash
Every time we talk about setting up a website for your business, the question of how to get visitors to it comes up. There are lots of ways to get visitors, but the two basic ones are through social media marketing and Google (or Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc). I’ve talked plenty about social media marketing… Read more
I’ve written about Social Media Marketing often in these newsletters, with good reason. Despite it being a time hog, no business, online or off, can afford to ignore it because of the huge numbers of people that use it. Today that’s true, and for now it remains an important channel. But what about in 5… Read more
Photo by Antenna on Unsplash
Text of email newsletter sent on 13th September Traditionally, a new business would start by developing a great product and taking it to market. Sounds sensible, right? But there have been countless spectacular (and sometimes hilarious) failures by businesses following that approach: Colgate’s beef Lasagna Google+ Watermelon Oreos The Delorean DMC-12 Those efforts led to… Read more
Photo by Jeremy Enns on Unsplash
Text of my newsletter from 6th September. Podcasting has been around for a while, but it has seen huge growth over the past 18 months. I shied away from it for a number of reasons – I didn’t have the equipment, I didn’t like the sound of my own voice, and so on. Any excuse… Read more
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
Text of my newsletter from 30th August. I remember the ‘features and benefits’ mantra being drummed into me at every sales course ever I attended, years ago. As a result, I slavishly attached a benefit to every feature I ever talked about, in anything I ever wrote, in the hope of being able to sell… Read more
Photo by Luke Peters on Unsplash
Text of my newsletter from 23rd August. Last week I described how the business I ended up starting was completely different from the one I originally imagined I would start. One of the reasons was because I had been thinking about self-employment for years. But what if you don’t have years? If you find yourself… Read more