How to grow your business for entrepreneurs

Alex Blyth

Freelance journalist and all round nice guy Alex Blyth is launching his book this week for entrepreneurs about how to grow their business. It is available from Amazon for less than a tenner and also has free delivery. Below is a synopsis for the book:

Entrepreneurs face a constant struggle to make a profit. They are entirely caught up in the day-to-day race against ever more demanding customers, rising material costs, a mounting tax and regulatory burden, increased international competition, and an ever more challenging labour market.

They rarely have time to get away from this ongoing struggle, to think about what they could do to find new customers, manage existing customers more effectively, cut operating costs, minimise their red tape, and get their staff working more productively. Yet, they know that if they could make even small improvements in those areas they would be able to revolutionise their businesses and their lives.

They are not alone in this. Few executives at larger companies have the time to address these issues. However, executives at larger companies usually do have the budget to hire consultants to advise them in all these areas. Entrepreneurs don’t. They have neither the time nor the money to address these issues.

Furthermore, entrepreneurs tend to be conquerors, rather than empire builders. Very often those who are best equipped to make it through the early years, are least well-equipped to build on that early success. Yet they are desperately keen to see a reward for all the work they put in to get their enterprises off the ground. They have both a need and a desire for advice on how to take their businesses forward.

This book is a practical guide, showing them how they can make those improvements with minimal investment of time or money. The ideas will be simply expressed, the action points will be clearly achievable, and the theory will be illustrated with examples of small businesses that have already grown by following this path.
By reading this book, and by following each of the action points, every entrepreneur will be able, over time, to cut costs, increase sales and boost profits. It will revolutionise those businesses.

Good luck with the launch Alex.

Mood button

Mr Grumpy not Paul Stallard

Last week I spoke with Wendy Grossman, a journalist I hadn’t worked with before on an article she was producing for IT Expert magazine. As always I wanted to provide my client with a couple of examples of the journalist’s work so I ran a quick Google search and found her website.

I’m not sure how often it is updated but there was a feature which I really liked. There is a page where Wendy highlights what sort of mood she is in:

• Red = WATCH OUT!
• Yellow = Proceed at your own risk. Possibly safe.
• Blue = All calm. Here there be no dragons.
• Green = Green??! Not in the original specification. Meaning unknown.

Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if everyone did this?

How do the media use Twitter?

Source: www.pressgazette.co.uk

I met with Richard Abbott the deputy editor of Marketing last week for a lunch briefing with one of my clients. During the course of the conversation I brought up Twitter and in particular how the publication was using it.

To set the scene, the Marketing identity currently has over 5,500 followers and the individual journalists also manage their own individual profiles.

Richard explained that they have experimented to see how to get the best out of this medium and found that the greatest successes have come from simply asking questions. Rather than just putting links to headlines to drive traffic to the site, the magazine is using it as a journalistic tool.

According to Richard, for every question they post, the magazine currently gets over 100 responses. It get so much information from each question that the journalists have almost all the leads that they require to pull a story together. Not bad a bad return from just 140 characters.

Twitter is obviously a great source of traffic for sites, as Alan Burkitt-Gray said when I interviewed him, but it is also interesting to see a publication using it as a journalistic tool with such success.

Breaking Tweets

Source: www.Breakingtweets.com

I stumbled upon a new (to me) site tonight which I thought I would share. Breaking Tweets compiles the latest world news and includes Twitter feedback on that story. Interesting concept and it makes for strangely addictive reading.

According to the site it has two main goals: 1. to help people enhance their worldview or perspective of global events; 2. to increase dialogue about international news and make the world smaller through conversation and interaction, both on this site and on Twitter.

I like the philosophy behind the site which looks to record how people are reacting to particular news stories.

UK Media Step up SEO

Source: www.findandconvert.com

Laura Oliver wrote an interesting article on Journalism.co.uk at the start of the week which is well worth a read. The piece looks at how more and more newspapers are beginning to rethink their search engine optimisation strategies which not only improve the online experience for the user, but also lead to a rise in traffic.

Head of audience development at the Telegraph, Julian Sambles, said the paper’s plans were about empowering staff with “the knowledge and understanding that they need so they can apply it to their daily production process and make informed decisions about content when they’re writing or publishing it.”

This reminded me of the answer Alan Burkitt-Gray gave me when I asked him if he had to change his writing style with SEO in mind?

All professional journalists adjust their writing and editing style for the medium they’re writing for. So I’d write and/or edit differently for a weekly news magazine, a national title, a monthly technology magazine, a bi-monthly business magazine (which is what GTB is, on paper) and the web — in its many different formats. So writing a headline and standfirst for a one-page feature is very different from writing and editing an item that will appear on a website. Of course.

There is no doubt that journalism constantly evolves and it is interesting to see how SEO is fast becoming a major factor when copy is being produced. Ultimately, I personally think it will always be content that drives the popularity of a site, but there is no doubt that SEO is proving a major factor when trying to get those readers for the first time.

Meet the media: Sally Whittle on PR

Source:@swhittle on Twitter

In the first of a series of meet the media interviews I have conducted with prominent technology journalists, Sally Whittle covers her pet hates of PR, top tips and thoughts on writing with SEO in mind. I have to say that I was delighted Sally agreed to participate in this interview as I personally think she has done a fantastic amount via her training courses and excellent blog to educate PR professionals on the dos and don’t of pitching to the media.  She has made some excellent points and I think that everyone in our industry should read and take on board what she has said.

Paul Stallard: What is your pet hate of PR?
Sally Whittle: How much of it there is. Seriously. There are just so many agencies, in-house PRs, freelance PRs, social media consultants – they’re all using email, Twitter, phone, mobile, Facebook and goodness knows what – sometimes it’s inescapable. But it’s part of the job, too, so I wouldn’t say I ‘hate’ it – I just switch off the phone from time to time.

PS: What is the best way to contact you?
SW: Email. For me, the danger in ringing a journalist is you never quite know what they’re doing when you call. Imagine you’re a reporter on a story. If you don’t get the story and your competitor does, you’re fired. Or, if you’re freelance, if you don’t get the story, you can’t pay the gas bill this month. You spend two weeks chasing down the right spokesperson, call at the appointed hour and he says he’ll ring you straight back as he’s in a busy lobby. Your phone rings two minutes later. It’s a PR person trying to sell in a press release. By the time you get rid of them, you check your voicemail to find the interviewee left you a message saying he’s just boarding his plane and will try and call you when he’s back in the office in 2 weeks. This story? Is why journalists are sometimes cranky when you call. 

Don’t forget the telephone

Source: W3.org

You would have to be blind to have missed the explosion of social networks and tools, especially in the communications world. But, does this form of communication remove degree of knowledge about a journalist that can only come from speaking and meeting that person?

There has been a lot of talk from journalists recently about how they hate it when a technology PR professional phones them up to ask if they had received the email pitch sent to them. The general consensus is that this is a massive irritant. Having spoken to a number of high profile journalists over the past couple of weeks about this very subject when you hear the number of calls and emails received every day you can begin to understand their frustration.

That said, I always encourage my execs to actually speak to a journalist before sending an email or contacting them via Twitter. You will learn far more from a five minute conversation with a journalist you are targeting in your tier one list than you would by sending out 20 faceless emails pitches.

Traditional Publishing RIP

As a PR professional who still loves hard copy, I find it incredibly sad to see that Canadian web marketing agency Dialect has created a website called Traditional Publishing RIP. It aggregates headlines documenting the decline in traditional publishing and is billed as ‘an online memorial to the traditional media industry.’

“We love traditional media; nothing will ever rival our enjoyment of books, newspapers, magazines, radio and even (sometimes) television. Regardless, this seems to be the way of the world, and so we offer this site as an ephemeral chronicle of traditional media’s decline.”

Still, not the cheeriest way to spend your time.

Now online can win a Pulitzer Prize

 

Source: The Pulitzer Prizes

In the Berkeley PR office, we generally spend the first half an hour of the day reading through the papers in search of stories our clients can comment on or would be interested in. This month I have a Sunday paper so for the rest of the week will spend this time catching up on some on-line reading.

This morning I saw on Mashable and TechCrunch respectively that the prestigious award for American journalism, the Pulitzer Prize, is being extended to now also include online publications. Video is still however off limits.

Does this point to the increasingly important role that online news outlets are playing or does it reflect the increasing financial clout of online publications over print?

How to use Response source

I am sure this isn’t the first time it has been used in this way but it was the first time it caught my attention. A Response Source came in this afternoon from Cliff Saran at Computer Weekly which unlike most, wasn’t asking for information, an interview or dare I say it, something free to take on holiday. Instead Cliff had already written his piece and was actually using Response Source to request comments on his blog.

A novel approach and I might click through in a couple of days to see if he had much success. In an age when most online publications are looking to drive people to their online stories I wonder if this approach will generate a greater communication with vendors and end users? 

For those of you interested Cliff was asking what people thought was the greatest IT innovation – he chose the mouse.