If you’re a new small business owner you probably concentrate on trying to grow your business, and might not even be in a position to think of selling it or getting out of the business. You probably don’t want to run the business for the rest of your life, and will probably want to retire at some point. Making sure you get an exit strategy in place is important as it will help you maximise the value of your business when you come to sell it.

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Yorkshire Bank have recently been looking at the motives behind small business startups, and also what the key issues are that small businesses typically face. Almost 60% of small business owners stated that their primary reason for starting up in business was because of a desire for more flexible working, and for a better work / life balance. Ironically it is small business owners and entrepreneurs that according to a Barclays Bank survey (2006) spend 60% more time at work than any other group. Small business ownership quite frequently necessitates a different approach and results in different qualities than initially expected…

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Guy Kawasaki has written an excellent article entitled “The Art of Bootstrapping“, which gives tips for small businesses who are starting up without funding or venture capital. These aren’t just another set of ‘frugalifying’ tips, there are various methods of cost saving and doing business which are beneficial to low-cash businesses.

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If you’re like me, you’ve undoubtedly received a variety of scam emails requesting money for the assistance of an ex-Government official, usually asking for your account details to transfer a large amount of money into your account! Unfortunatley a lot of people believe these emails, and fall victim to fraud. Your best chance is to just ignore any email that requests your financial information or wants to transfer money into your account as you can place a bet that it will be forged or fraudulently obtained. There are a range of other types of scams that occur, and there’s one in particular which can seem quite innocent, but is actually another scam and relates to business to business transactions, particularly small businesses…

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If you’ve never heard of the term ‘long-tail keywords’, you’d be forgiven for wondering what on earth I’m talking about. It is a search engine optimisation (SEO) term which implies that you shouldn’t just target one or two extremely competitive and searched for terms, but should go for a variety of less popular keywords. It’s better to be on page one of the search engine results for four less popular keywords than it is to be on page four for a highly popular keyword phrase. An example is targeting “Web Design Newcastle” and “Web Design North East” etc instead of just “Web Design”. For the same amount of effort you’ll get much better rankings. Here’s how you can target these long-tail keyword phrases…

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This article looks at the impact of a part of the Google algorithm called Google TrustRank, on the ranking of your site in their search engine. Although no-one except those high up in Google actually know the exact formula for their algorithm, there is generally a widespread consensus between search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals as to the existence of TrustRank, especially since it was registered as a Trademark by Google in 2006. So what is TrustRank and how can I develop it?

TrustRank comprises a variety of features which can contribute to your rankings in Google, and is aimed at removing spam sites from their listings, thus increasing the quality of the results they provide. They are just a selection of criteria which are used to automatically ‘judge’ your website, effectively calculating the authority and trustworthiness of your site. The other aspect of TrustRank is a manual editorial review by Google in determining what the characteristics of high quality sites in each topic are - other sites are then compared to the benchmark ’seed’ website. In my opinion the five most important criteria for which we can influence are as follows… Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us spend a great deal of time reading, whether it be a blog, emails, articles, or news releases. Reading can occupy quite a lot of your time without you realising it - even if you only spend one hour per day reading, that adds up to a lot of hours per year! You might have heard about photo-reading or speed-reading, or heard what seem to be unrealistic claims about increasing your reading words per minute (WPM) to many thousands, and those that claim to read thick books in a few hours. Well speedreading can definitely improve your time reading, and for the mere mortal of us, even if you can’t make the 15,000 WPM, you can at least double your current reading speed if you follow some easy to use techniques, and practice with a fun free website application…

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If you work in a small or micro business with few employees, it is likely that you don’t have to do as many presentations as you would in a larger company. Delivering an effective and engaging presentation isn’t just something which you practice a few times at school or college and then forget about – you never know when they might come in handy. There are a variety of situations from networking events to delivering speeches to customer groups that require good presenting skills, and as with most things, practice definitely helps, especially with reducing nerves. Whilst it can be difficult to get all of your important ideas across effectively and in a structured manner in just five minutes, it’s by no means impossible. I came across a short 5 minute video narrated by Vera Hughes (very RP accent by the way) on the Videojug website whereby they describe the key features and aspects to creating and delivering a presentation of this short length. These can be summarised as follows…

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When designing a website, one aspect to consider is what colour hyperlinks to display on the website. It sounds like a trivial choice, with a few potential strategies to choose, such as…

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I’ve just discovered a handy (and best of all free) text replacement application which will help to save you time if you regularly type similar text. It’s called Texter, and is available completely free to download.

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