Recent content by MortifiedCow

  1. M

    A new venture but im scared!

    Hey Ben, You're asking all the right questions. You know that you need a compelling reason for someone to choose you over everyone else, and you've identified your strengths in customer service. The important thing now is to get started, while keeping your job. Don't try to get funding...
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    I wanna to make my business exhibition stall exciting...

    There's a whole section in "The Ultimate Sales Machine" by Chet Holmes about trade show marketing - it's well worth a read. Actually, the whole book is phenomenal. Summary: Have the most fun booth in the room, or don't bother turning up. Have a theme that ties everything together. Drive...
  3. M

    Recommendations for business card printing companies

    Two words: rounded corners. Totally badass. These are from Moo - not the cheapest, but great quality.
  4. M

    E-COM site...anyone use shopify

    Shopify is expensive, but very good. You can make it look pretty decent by taking a standard theme and tweaking it, but it's also widely supported if you need someone to design a custom skin. I set one up last week using WorldPay as the gateway, and it was pretty pain-free.
  5. M

    Facebook and Twitter

    Irony overload.
  6. M

    Advice needed for content writing jobs

    Yeah, those are the kind of clients it's not worth having! The idea is that a small number of people see our site and think "Yes! These are the only people for me!" - then price isn't even an issue. Some people will totally hate it and it'd be wildly inappropriate for their business, but...
  7. M

    Advice needed for content writing jobs

    The problem is that you're seeing "content mills" as your competition. That means you're framing your value proposition completely wrong. For clients in the world of iWriter etc, they don't care about quality at all. Are they brilliantly written or not? Who cares. They just need some words -...
  8. M

    Ending Class 2 National Insurance

    Google CA8480 - that's the form you need to fill in and send off if you're reclaiming Class 2 NICs. Fill in the date you ceased self-employment, they'll figure it all out and send you a cheque for what they owe you.
  9. M

    Need help promote jewelry webshop - where do i... ?

    Pinterest is probably highly relevant for the jewellery market. Whenever I think "must see what all the fuss is about" and log on, it seems to be nothing but pictures of clothes and jewellery :)
  10. M

    Facebook and Twitter

    Twitter and Facebook are just channels through which you can add value to people's lives by educating and/or entertaining them, and potentially convert them into customers as a happy side-effect. Email's a channel too. So's Youtube. So are forums. So's holding local events. Social networks...
  11. M

    Advice needed for content writing jobs

    Brendan Dunn has an interesting take on this: he'd argue that calling yourself a "content writer" is a terrible idea, because it commoditises what you do and focuses on mechanics rather than outcomes. Lawyers, for example, would never describe themselves as "professional letter writers". But...
  12. M

    Freelance Sites

    Freelance sites are great for certain things - I regularly get dev work done to an extremely high standard. It's just a case of being precise with the spec and screening candidates effectively. Good writers don't stay on there for long though, because it's a real race to the bottom...
  13. M

    Would you consider outsourcing?

    In theory, yes: outsource everything but your core competency so you can focus on the activities where you add the most value. In practice, I struggled with outsourcing for years because of an unhelpful control freak streak, and the egocentric belief that only I could do certain things. Now...
  14. M

    Making money from blogging, recommended?

    Blogging is, in itself, a pretty terrible business model. But most people who "make money from blogging" don't make their money from throwing up a few Adsense ads. They use a blog as a sales funnel for another product, a way of building an email list, a starting point for building a...
  15. M

    Marketing and twitter

    Exactly - and I'm surprised this advice doesn't come up more often. If you're a company that unblocks drains, it's going to be a struggle to pick up followers even if you position yourself as the #1 source of relevant, curated content around blocked drains. But if your tweets are funny...
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