Got a leaflet from the council today about grants for insulation and advice on heating. Important stuff. It was titled something like ‘Make sure you keep warm and keep your heating bills low’. It arrived on a sunny April day.
Thought I’d post a few of my less-written-about ecommerce tips for your eshop. There should be some superfly marketing ideas here for even the most maveric eshop owner, all helping you maximise your business in this crappy economic climate.
I always make a point to contact people who look like they need help with their sites. It might be a e-newsletter I’ve been sent made out of block graphics and that definitely hasn’t been tested in Gmail, a flyer with a URL that produces a 404 page or a business card that has a URL that leads to a ’site coming soon’ message. Read more…
Photo by M Guy
…but not really. I met one of the people who taught me photography the other evening (and, by the way, another person who taught me photography is really quite well known now – see his work here). We were talking about digital photography and how it killed the high street camera shop and development labs. That got us talking about the other career killers out there in terms of technology: affordable computing, desktop publishing, WYSIWYG editors, digital printers, blogs. All things I’ve made use of and made money out of, but all of which (apart from the first, maybe) have devalued my expertise in the fields I trained in – print design, web design, photography.
All of which makes technology a bitter-sweet thing for me.
I thought that I’d do a post on how I made www.lightweightlaptops.co.uk number 1 in Google’s search results for a niche, and as such it generates me up to £200 a month in revenue. I take you through the steps so you too can create nice little side revenue streams. Which should be welcome in this economic climate.
It was only when I went to a workshop on Strategy and Risk last week that I realised: I didn’t have a strategy.
I have values – the moral framework that I take with me into the work I do and the connections I have with people – and I have goals – things I want to achieve within the world of work. But Do It Properly didn’t have a strategy. The guy leading the course was calle d John Hector and he defined this as a list of actions to take, a game plan, a vision, a unifying definition.
I’ve been questioning some local small business owners and hearing how they are changing their products and communication methods, to retain existing customers and gain new ones, in this upside down economy. Hopefully, there will be some inspiration in here for you.
More Wordle fun – this time with all the blog content to the beginning of March. Still fascinated by the way they convey information. Personally I expected more soup in there.
I’ve just got back from a 2-day Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) E-business consultants’ briefing. I’m now happily up-to-date on the consulting products that we are going to use to help businesses, from an ICT perspective (Information & Communication Technology) throughout the glorious country of Wales.
Apart from meeting some really hot (technically) consultants, some clued-up (and friendly) WAG staff, and having a few beers (at our expense, rather than the tax payer), I’m stoked and ready to move from my role as a consultant and delivering agency, to an objective E-business consultant.
My first impressions are that the E-business WAG team headed by Michael Groves, have really got their onions together. It’s out with all the multiple confusing funding brands inside the Welsh Assembly and they’ve bought in 3 shapes of ICT product that will help business in Wales, in a Flexible Support for Business (FS4B) package:
A great new toy – www.wordle.net. I’ve always found tag clouds a bit pointless and gimmicky but applying the same rules as a way to express a body of text gives a really interesting result. The post I’ve used to create this one is instantly recognisable.
Paolo - glorious leader of South Wales web empire Refresh Creative. Paolo also reviews cheap laptops for his other website.
Andy - runs a web consultancy based in the sunny city of Bath. He has been working in the online industry for 13 years. His mission is to get his clients to "improve their business, achieve the results they want and not get suckered into spending money on things they don't need!".
