Today I want to talk about the use of negative language on websites.

I’ll explain 5 examples of commonly used words, phrases and techniques you should avoid in your copy. Read the rest of this entry »

It can take a lot of time and effort to build up trusting business relationships with people on Twitter. Unfortunately, it’s all too quick and easy to tarnish or destroy these.

In this article, I’ll look at 5 ways to ruin your Twitter relationships. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I want to discuss how costly inaction can be for small businesses. Using some recent examples I’ve come across, I’ll demonstrate how doing nothing is often the worst thing you can do.

Like rabbits caught in the headlights, small business owners can often be paralysed by fear. Without mentioning names, I’ve given some examples below. Read the rest of this entry »

We all like to get ‘do follow’ backlinks from relevant websites with a high domain authority. However, if you focus solely on this approach you could run into trouble.

Discover why it makes sense to target a wide range of websites to help you build a natural looking backlink profile. Read the rest of this entry »

The new series of The Apprentice is upon us. If you tuned into BBC1 last night at 9pm you’d have seen the teams working on a task that involved creating a new flavoured beer and selling it to the trade and public.

In this article I’ll look back on what happened and discuss the lessons I think every small business owner can learn as a result. Read the rest of this entry »

I was driving to a meeting this morning and heard a radio advert that sparked this blog post. Keep reading to discover what it was and how it stresses the importance of timing in getting your marketing messages across.

The advert was for a well-known takeaway food retailer and started with a question asking if I couldn’t decide what to have for dinner before telling me about their deals. Read the rest of this entry »

Getting high quality, relevant links to your website is one of the main ways to improve your Google rankings.

As well as creating great content people want to share, interviewing high profile people in your industry is another way to attract lot of incoming links to your site. In this article I’ll explain how to go about it. Read the rest of this entry »

This post was inspired by a small business website I looked at the other day. There was a Twitter feed on the site’s homepage  with a selection of their ‘latest’ tweets.

The problem was that the most recent tweet being displayed was in fact 67 days old, with the rest being even older. Read the rest of this entry »

There have been a few high profile news stories recently in the UK where people have had their timelines trawled for offensive tweets and been retrospectively punished/held to account.

It got me thinking about how this could affect small business owners on Twitter too. In this article I’ll discuss a few of the issues surrounding this topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Just do it. Think different. Two very simple calls to action from two very powerful brands: Nike and Apple. What does your brand say to your customers? Does it inspire them to take action? Do you even have a brand? You should and here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »