My Business Blog | Paul Palmer

When you want to promote your business on line why blog? Of course it is not an essential part of a commercial web site but there are many functions in a blog that can bring traffic to your site.

Looking at the platform itself first a blog is designed to link to other sites easily and to make it easy to maintain. There are of course many choices to make; wordpress or blog spot, hosted or generic, template design, domain registration and of course target audience.

Any business starting out online should have a blog and post to it regularly. By regulary I mean every couple of days and at least three times a week. This can be a little daunting at first, many people ask me; why blog at all?

It’s simple really, all the search engines like web sites which are contributing. A static site may hit top rankings at first, but it won’t last if the competion are offering new unique content.

It doesn’t have to be something amazing, just something about you and your business. Many people treat their blogs simply as a record of what they have been doing.

Then as well as the blog they have additional sales pages as well as advertisements on their blog so that visitors will still see what is on offer. Keeping your site fresh, new and regularly updated with new information will improve your chances of bringing more people to your site.

Paul Palmer

So why blog to keep the search engines interested so they send people to your site.

Is it really that easy to start making money on line? Surely there must be more to it than that, well of course there is. The key point I was making yesterday was that if you know what you want and where you are going then do it.

Many business owners spend 6 months or maybe even a year planning their business on line before they even consider a domain name. As for keywords, what’s that they’ll ask and spend another 6 months working them out as well to fit their business.

When you are new to making money on line it’s more important to get on line and start learning than it is to have a perfect web site the looks amazing. Imagine setting up a fantastic new shop in a new shopping arcade that no one has heard of. Are you going to make your fortune immediately? Without any passing trade or existing customers?

No of course not and it’s the same on line, but a bit harder in some ways. using the same analogy you could pay someone £2000 or even more for a fantastic flash front page and matching pages inside all about your business. However no one will come because they don’t know how to find you. Just because you are online doesn’t mean search engines like google will find you at all nor will they start sending you customers.

Now I have started here with some of the pitfalls, having said yesterday that you have to start. What then should you do to get started? I recommend starting by building your own trustworthy reputation. Surf a few forums, be helpful where you can and ask questions when you feel it is relevant. Set up a blog and start posting about 300 words a day, about you. Never start with a hard sell. get yourself a few social networking profiles set up like Twitter and Facebook and use them.

One thing though as you get started you must always remember to be positive. Nothing will kill your reputation faster than complaining all the time and being negative. That’s enough for today do you know what to do to start making money on line now?

Paul Palmer

I hope you remembered, you have to start as soon as you can whether it’s today this minute or this evening you must start.

A journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.

Have you thought about what success on line would mean for you. For many moving their business on line seems the only way forward, but extremely daunting. whenasked they say, “yes we know it’s the trend these days”, or “we are just waiting for ..”, or “it’s something we have on the to do list.”

Sound familiar, many successful business people are procrastinating when it comes to establishing an on line presence. It is not an issue that they don’t want to. The plans are often there, even the designs, images and logos too. What thenyou might ask is stopping many successful people making the same success on line? It’s simple really, the trouble is the Internet is so far out of their comfort zone that they procrastinate.

The one thing which prevents many people taking their business on line is not anything to do with ability. Nothing to do with time or even money. It’s quite simple the most important thing you need to do to achieve success on line is start.

It really is that simple, it doesn’t matter if your first site is perfect. Domain age is very important,, just as changing and improving your site will help too. Now what are you waiting for? Is everything sat is a drawer waiting for … who knows what?

Paul Palmer

Go ahead punk make your day, start today.

Many consider business on line but so often they find it hard to move forward becasue it isn’t really clear how you should start unless you are already on line youself or working with someone who is online. This can be a real show stopper for many people when they really do have the potential to make it big in their own niche business opportunity.

I was out last night at a business party in Copenhagen, Denmark, it was quite hard for me to network and I didn’t really have anythign in mind when I arrived. I am a qualified person and Quality Assurance Manager for a pharmaceutical company, but I also have a residual income from my on line businesses. The party was with the Pharmaceutical company so I was just there looking to have fun.

At the end of the night though feeling tired and ready to go to sleep, because I thought I should, so I could make my flight at 9 am the next day I got talking to one of my team from the event. He is working in a manual job after a period of being out of work. I didn’t really think much about his role at first, he’s young, then again most people seem young to me these days, so I thought he was just starting out. I spoke to him for about an hour about hsi background and of course business.

It turned out he has 2 degrees, his first in business and his second as an Architect. Now to me that is someone going places who with the right impetus can make it big. Why I thought as I sat there are you doing a minimum wage manual job in my company then on a temporary contract basis. Me being me I was interested in his story so I asked a series of open questions. By the way I’m a trained auditor so questioning techniques are something I really do know a lot about.

I found out he and his best friend had made some money already while in college simply travelling to Germany buying soda at 50 to 66% off (his words) and selling them to his “friends” back in university. Now here’s an entrapreneur I thought so why isn’t he making money on line. As I dug deeper I began to realise he simply didn’t know how. I found out he had taken the job because he had been out of work for 8 months so had taken on a couple of contract jobs in a row to get some money coming in rather than none, one of them was even designing a web site for a sole trader like me. All along the way throughout the discussion I was still thinking this guy could be going somewhere, should I offer to help him in business on line.

When he told me he was just doing the job for 7 months and waiting to see how it goes alarm bells started to ring for me. I asked him several different ways about his plans for his future and I could see he just didn’t have any, not a single goal to his name. It struck me then that he was a well qualified graduate going nowhere in a dead end labouring job. It’s a shame because he could have so much more.

I have decided this morning as I prepare to fly back to the UK, I’ve been awake since 4:30 am how rediculous, that its time I dedicated my business blog to helping people to lear how to do business on line. The opportunities are there, the guy I was talking to last night had some excellent ideas and even others to work with and make them happen. What he was missing was a leader, a mentor who can help him overcome his lack of motivation by showing him how easily he could start testing his ideas on line.

Paul Palmer

Business on line, starts just like every opportunity we take, with the first step.