Forest Software
Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business
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Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 12:46 pm
As a business you can very easily spend a lot of money on marketing, that includes everything from advertising through to exhibitions and websites and sometimes it’s very easy to forget the basic rules of good marketing and throw money at it without thinking.
The primary aim of marketing is to (usually but not always) to get a new customer to use your service or product. Of course you don’t expect that will happen the first time someone reads a page on your website or sees your advert in the local paper (although that would be nice) but you should treat every advert or page on your website as a step towards the customer making the decision to buy from you.
The other reason for marketing (why we said the aim on marketing is not always to get new customers) Continue reading
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Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 12:57 pm
As a small business, in the past we have exhibited at business to business (B2B) exhibitions and have also attended many SEO and Internet marketing related exhibitions. One thing has always struck us and that’s how to make sure that you get value when showing at an exhibition (ours have ranged from a small local exhibitions with a simple table to regional shows where we have been provided with a “shell” that allows you to put your own items out).
Listed below are seven simple tips for exhibition stands that will make your space stand out and hopefully will increase the number of visitors to your stand and let you either gain new customers or at the very least give you new prospects that you can market to in the future.
Some of these tips can be applied to any exhibition space that you my have, regardless of whether it is just a table top or is a proper shell, while others you can only really do if you have a shell or can talk to the organisers. Continue reading
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Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 12:59 pm
Recently I have spoken to several clients and prospective clients who all seem to have had the same idea. If I explain the most recent conversation with a client (any domains mentioned in the conversation below are made up) you might see what the problem is, if you don’t I’ll explain later.
Client – “I have just brought two new domains that I want to feature in the search engines.”
Me – “Ok… what are the domains and what do you want them to feature for?”
Client – “I’ve brought www.widgetmanufacturersuk.co.uk and www.widgetmanufacturersuk.com. I want to be found for UK widget manufacturers.”
Me – “Hmm… what content are you planning on putting onto the two new websites?”
Client – “Two new websites? All I want is for the domains to come up in the search engines.”
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Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 01:01 pm
Why, as a small business, you shouldn’t be afraid to say no to a customer.
Recently I needed to find a garage to carry out an MOT and oil & filter change for my car (and I thought a new tyre) so, being new to the area I looked online to find a garage – as you might expect there were many listed, in fact having driven through the nearest town I could remember seeing at least 5 garages / MOT places.
Not having anything to go on I decided to pick one at random and rang them to book the service and the MOT. I got through to an answerphone and left a message saying what was needed (and when by) and leaving my phone number for them to call me back. Having waited for a few hours I decided to ring again and this time I got hold of someone that said that the boss was out on an errand and would be back in 30 minutes, “could they ring me back?”. So I waited… Eventually the following day I rang again to be told by the boss that he was just dealing with a customer and would ring me back as soon as he could. Continue reading
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Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 01:02 pm
Today I have spoken to two prospective clients who have both said that they thought that all that was involved in SEO was adding keyword meta tags so that their website would show in the search results.
In both cases I had to explain that Google does not use the keywords meta-tag as this post on the official Google blog shows and in fact I could remember in about 2005 when they announced that this was the case. I later then noticed a tweet from someone saying that they had filled in their meta keywords and were not showing in the results and wanted to know why.
Despite what you may read on many websites (which are either very out of date or deliberately misleading) search engine optimisation (SEO) involves an awful lot more than adding keywords to the code on the page. Continue reading
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Having moved recently from Peterborough to North Wales I was prepared for a drop in broadband speed and had already looked at the estimated speeds for the new area – it seemed that I could possibly get 1Mb on an ADSL line.
When we moved and I checked the actual broadband speed once it had settled down I was concerned to see that it had dropped from 1MB to just over 0.5Mb – my work depends on having a reliable connection at as fast a speed as I could get it.
Researching on the net, I came across several articles that mentioned the ring wire on the internal telephone wiring (in particular this article at Kitz on improving your ADSL speed) and they all mentioned the fact that having the ringwire connected meant that it could act as an antenna and was not needed on modern telephones.
I decided to take a look at the wiring in the house and immediately found that there was not an up-to-date socket anywhere which meant that I had to find the master socket another way. A quick read-up showed me that the mater socket would have a capacitor in it so it was a case of opening each of the 6 telephone wall sockets (one at a time) to find the one I was looking for. Fortunately it only took me 3 sockets before I found the right one and when I looked at it it seemed that someone else had had the same idea. The ring wire had been disconnected from one side of the socket – but whoever had done this had taken it from the input side and not disconnected it from the side that ran around the house.
So, making sure that what I was doing was legal – you can’t interfer with wires on the BT side of the socket, I disconnected the ringwire and rebooted the ADSL router. I was amazed to get an immediate speed of 1.6Mb on the line (remember that I had been struggling to get anything over 0.5Mb) and since then the line speed seems to have settled at 1.4Mb – still nearly a mb more than I was getting.
If you are having problems with your broadband and have access to the telephone wiring this is something that I would recommend that you consider – although as I have said, you must make sure that anything you do is not on the BT side of the master socket, this is illegal and could result in prosecution and/or a fine by BT.