Mentor - Marketing - SEO

[jen]

Hello everyone,

I have few questions to ask.

I wonder if some of you here have mentors or business advisors whom you could perhaps email from time to time when you want to go through with ideas you have or maybe just to check that you're going on the right track when it comes to marketing/promoting your business or simply to have someone experience & trustworthy to contact whenever you need advice.

If so do you have to pay and how has it helped you & your business?

Another thing do you guys use a company to do your marketing & sales? Roughly what budget do you allocate for marketing (if that's ok to ask)

and do every online business has to SEO their website (is that the right term :? ) Is it neccessary to pay someone to do the pay per click and it's suppose to get your business on top of the list when searching. If you've used any of these services, how has it benefit your business? How much would it cost?

Many thanks. Sorry too many questions :oops:

Jen

[Jayne]

Hi,

The people on here have been my mentors (Many Thanks to All of you)

You can find out anything you want to on here, just by reading old posts. If you cannot find what you are looking for, do a new post. When you make friends, you can PM them with ideas and SEO questions. You don't need anything else.

I love this forum :D

Jayne

[Russ]

Hi Jen

First of all I would suggest you contact your local business link, they can appoint an advisor that will give you a lot of advice "for free" or if you are only going for an on-line presence check out your local e-business club

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?r.s=tl&topicId=1073861197
http://www.ebusinessclubs.co.uk/

The other questions about SEO and marketing are probably better answered by other members of UK BF.

Good luck

Russ

[mrbusiness999]

I think there is a mentor type section on www.shell-livewire.org

[multilingual]

SEO and Pay-per-click are different areas of web marketing, so you would need to get an all round idea of where you want to take your business and then talk to someone who can help you achieve it.

As for having a mentor, I must admit that I never had one personally. I was far too cocky and sure of myself to listen to advice. However, that was 20 years ago and ended up learning the hard way all those things that people had told me for free.

If I had listened in the first place it would have saved me a lot of time and money!!! (I was too busy trying to invent the wheel to realise it had already been done).

I am much more open minded now and will gladly listen and learn from others.

However, I don't regret anything or underestimate my own knowledge, so I am also quite happy to pass on any tips I learned.

But I will understand if people are too cocky to listen. :wink:

JB

[duenna]

SEO and Pay per click.

If your SEO is right then you will not need PPC! SEO is the techniques employed by companies to ensure that their website gets natural hits from search engine pages.

So your web document has to contain certain elements to increase those hits. If you want excellent natural and FREE traffic visiting your corner of the Internet then your website needs SEO. However, if your business model uses the website for an information point only and you really do not need a great amount of web traffic (i.e your web address is on your letter heads or your marketing budget enables you to promote your website in the national press etc) then the content on your website will be sufficient to see you through at that level.

DK

[daveashton]

People pay us for this because that all we do! We help companies grow sales (please note we are not management consultants) and telephone support starts from £500.00 per year.

As for the PPC

BMM sell a pack ( you can also buy through us for slightly less) that works out your key words , writes your adds ( vital for add words not so for overture) and explains how to make the most from your online bidding strategy.

[jen]

Hi,

Thank you to everyone for your kind advice. Jane you're right - what a helpful bunch. What I like about the forum is the people here seem so down to earth, friendly and very helpful. Some forum I've visited seem suffucating, too corporate if you what I mean.

I thought I know about the internet thing but now SEO /Pay Per click has lost me completely but I'm learning.

OK, we just need some help on raising our business profile, sales and marketing too. And sometimes it would be also nice to have someone on the other line - to contact whenever we need some sound advice. Someone who's trustworthy and experience in the field.

We've made initial enquiries and have made some contacts but sometime it's good to hear some recommendation plus most of the services we're getting quoted on are way out of our budget . Plus we don't want to just read a book and learn about sales etc. otherwise we'll still be planning until we're old and gray - we want to be doing some action.

I'm interested to know how do you guys do your marketing, sales etc.. which company do you use? Do you allocate big budget for your marketing?

We don't really know what the going rate for these services - we don't want to just spend the funds on one area just for the sake of having got one - we need it to deliver good result too.

Russ - thank you we have visited business link and we'll make contact with them in near future. A friend of mine had a business advisor from them and he was not very helpful at all - more patronising rather than encouraging.

JB - thank you for great advice - guess nothing wrong with being cocky - you're just confident probably the best way to describe it. What I don't like is sometimes company would offer their product/service just for the sake of getting some business in.

DK - thank you for great info, not so in tune with it yet but I think I'll leave it to the expert - we've contacted someone from the forum about PPC.

Dave - what kind of service do you offer? What telephone support is it for? Is your service catered for start-up and small businesses ie: start-ups have smaller budget than bigger guys.

I look forward to your recommendation & more great advice.

regards,

Jen

[Russ]

Russ - thank you we have visited business link and we'll make contact with them in near future. A friend of mine had a business advisor from them and he was not very helpful at all - more patronising rather than encouraging.

I look forward to your recommendation & more great advice.

regards,

Jen

Hi Jen

I can relate to your friends experience of Business Link completely. I do think they have a use though, especially as they are currently offering matched funding for specialist advice outside of business link of up to £2000 per annum. You might be able to use this for marketing/sales advice?

I think the problem with the Business Link advisors is that although many have come from senior management (via redundancy) in to business link, very few are entrepreneurs. I find the breakfast club that I am a member of is better in many ways but expertise from this arena always has cost implications.

You raise some issues about learning about sales that I think you might be worrying about unnecessarily. If you have something that you believe in and are passionate about (your business is your baby) and you have identified a market place for; all you really need to do is pick up the phone and start talking to potential clients about it... Ask them the questions that lead them to ask for your product or service (sorry I don't know much about your business) and build on your customer base steadily.

All the best of luck

Russ

[wheelie2]

Hi Jen,

I try to go networking with local businesses as much as possible - you make friends and meet people going through a similar thing to you. You find you naturally mentor each other without realising it.

As for SEO, I'm in the process of doing mine and have learnt as much as I can and will be producing a free guide based on what I've learnt so other people can try the DIY route as well. Unfortunatelly the rules are always changing so there's only so much you can do and it's not an overnight process. I've always been puzzled as to who gets 1st position when most people have their sites otptimised?.... Pay per click works. It gets traffic to your site but I've learnt that if the site isn't right when they get there you can soon waste money.

Keep an eye out for the new site as I'm hoping to put loads of useful links on there to help small businesses and some guides on marketing methods. I'm not saying that they'll be gospel, but they will be a good starting point.

This forum is great, as are the people on it.

Best of luck

Sarah

www.glodisplay.co.uk

[jen]

Hi Russ,

Thanks for the info about Business link and great advice on sales. Yes it is quite daunting to do sales at first but I think the time will come when we feel a bit more confident - we'll see or to make it effective but not so cost effective is to hire the experts.

Sarah thanks for great advice. Post your info here of your new site once it's ready - sounds interesting. We've contacted someone here for some advice on PPC. So we'll see how it goes.

Many thanks

Jen

[DuaneJackson]

Re mentors, I've been very lucky. I have a few very good mentors (including the VP Sales/Marketting EMEA of Veritas/Symantec) and don't pay for any of them. The downside is that you don't want to ask them for too much of their time.

As Sarah said, go to Networking events and build relationships.