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Cloud computing
August 17th, 2010
So, what is this cloud computing stuff anyway….
Well, looking at it from a small business perspective, it could be a way to get most of your day to day software for free and it can also be somewhere to store all of your documents either free or for a small monthly fee. It also means that all of the documents you use day-to-day are available from any pc with an internet connection, so you’re not tied to being in the office to work. One of the biggest players to get into the cloud computing world is Google – with Google Docs. This fully web based service lets you make Office compatible documents through your browser that are saved on Google’s servers, not on your PC, and this means that you can open and work on them anywhere and
Choosing the right keywords
June 28th, 2010
I was going to call this post ‘don’t start a fight you can’t win’ – but for the minute we’ll stick with choosing keywords, but it’s a tough call as to which is more appropriate!! For those of you who are interested in developing the web side of your business, you might already know a bit about SEO and how important choosing keywords that let your site rank in the search engines is – for those that don’t, read on to find out probably the single most important thing you’ll need to get your site ranking in google.
The basic theory of search.
Right, just to get everyone up to speed, the basics of how search works are this. Your small business website gets launched into the world, the search engines ‘read’ your website and try to work out what your site is about – it does this by looking for words or phrases that repeat throughout the site, your keywords. Now, when people search for the keywords that feature in your site, the search engines know that’s what your site is about and your site appears top in the search engine results, thousands of people click on the link, buy your products and you get rich very quickly. Back in the real world, there are also thousands, or possibly millions of other websites all over the world trying to sell exactly the same thing as you – so the search engines use backlinks from other sites to judge how important your site is in relation to the others in the list
Small business marketing
June 15th, 2010
Small business marketing is a huge topic, people write books about it that still don’t tell you everything, so what we’re hopefully going to do here is let you know the really important bits about small business marketing and how you can use them in your business. What you think marketing is now, might well change as you read on, but hopefully we can show you how you can use it in your particular business.
So what is marketing?
Selling, promotion, research, finance, planning? Well, it’s all of those things and also a few more. Marketing is all about how you run your business – it isn’t just about how you sell your product or service, a very common misconception. To understand small business marketing and how it can affect your business, you really need to understand a couple of the key ‘theories’ of marketing – it’s all textbook stuff, so please bear with me!
‘Produce and sell’
Marketing has changed a lot over the past fifty years or so. The original way of doing business was based around production or ‘what can we make?’ or ‘what service can we offer?’ questions. What a business did was linked to what it could do rather than what their customer actually wanted. The process goes something like this – someone in the company sees that the production line making widget ‘x’ isn’t making as many widgets as it could. This person speaks to the research department about adding a new widget, lets call it widget ‘y’, to the production line. The research department adds a new button to widget ‘x’ and has designed widget ‘y’. The new widget goes into production and the production line is full once more. Now the sales and promotion team has to go to work – they have to sell as many of the new widgets as possible to make sure the company doesn’t lose money by making them. And here lies the main problem with ‘produce and sell’ marketing – nobody actually knows whether anyone wants to buy widget ‘y’ – it was only made because it could be. What if people thought that widget ‘x’ was good enough and don’t want to pay the extra money for widget ‘y’? One of the most obvious signs of this type of marketing is in high volume advertising – products or services developed in this way will normally get far more television and other media exposure to make sure that people understand the benefits of the new product over the old.
The principle still applies whether what’s being sold is a product or a service and applies to businesses large and small and it’s not necessarily the wrong way to do things, it just has to be applied to the right
Writing for robots – small business seo
June 11th, 2010
If you have a flick through our blog, you’ll know how much we believe in SEO for small businesses – your website isn’t going to be the asset it should be, if no-one can find it! And this is how we arrive at the difficult part of writing the content for your site – you need to write for two audiences, the search engines that deliver your site to your potential customers and the customers themselves – the problem is they both want different things. In an ideal world, you hand over your basic idea to someone who knows what they’re doing and let them do the hard work, but in the real world, this costs money and it’s not always an option, so we’ll try to shed some light on how it’s done.
So what are the search engines looking for?
Essentially, the search engine spiders ‘read’ the code behind your website and try to pick out words or phrases that appear frequently throughout the text – your keywords. The trick is guiding the search engines through the text and make the occourences of your keywords seem natural – they’ll very quickly pick up on people trying to ‘stuff’ their page with keywords, so if your text looks anything like this, you need to be having a re-think:
“If you need big trousers, come to the Big Trouser Emporium for all your big trouser needs. The Big Trouser Emporium has all the big trousers you could ever need, so if you need big trousers, the Big trouser Emporium is the place to be.”
So that’s the over the top, wrong way to do it. Unfortunately, the right way to do it isn’t so black and white. There are many theories about what the search engines are looking for
