The Microbusiness Entrepreneur — A blog for people with big ideas running very small businesses

Welcome

by KevPartner on 11th February, 2010

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Welcome to MicroBusinessEntrepreneur. I’ve been running “micro” (1 or 2 person) businesses for more than a decade and I know what it’s like to be juggling SO many balls. I left a secure job, took a pay cut and have had plenty of ups and downs since 1999 but I would never go back to serve under the corporate yoke.

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The Non-Designers’ Design Book

by KevPartner on 25th July, 2010

This is quite simply the best design book I’ve ever seen. Somehow, Robin manages (with some humour) to tread the difficult line between theory and practice.

The book is aimed at designing for print so it’ll help you put together professional and compelling letterheads, business cards, flyers, posters, brochures etc. However the principles she teaches are just as valid when it comes to web design and, in my view, you’d be better advised to read and understand this book that to buy here website design book which is, inevitably, dated.

The book covers what Williams considers the four basic design principles: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity (make an acronym out of that if you dare!) of which the one that will make the most immediate difference to your work is Alignment. I confess I feel ashamed of using centred alignment as much as I did… [click to continue…]

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Computer giant Dell entered into late payment Hall of Shame

The Forum of Private Business is entering Dell into its late payment Hall of Shame after the company extended the time it takes to pay suppliers by 15 days. Dell, which is one of the world’s leading information technology companies, wrote to tell what it called its ‘valued’ suppliers that it is ‘standardising’ its payment [...]

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3 Steps to Starting A Small Business: a bullet point guide

Step 1: Planning Come up with product ideas Evaluate them Plan a business around the best Set up your company Prototype and test your product/service Step 2: Build the business Build your product/service Build the website that supports it Get payment processing and support systems into place Step 3: Market the business Optimise your site [...]

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Customers don’t (always) want low prices, they want VALUE

One of the challenges of any business is to find ways of increasing the conversion rate whether that’s the percentage of website visitors who go on to buy or the percentage of people who come into a shop who then buy. The problem is that different businesses will find that different approaches work for their [...]

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The Purple Cow of Estate Agents and Small Businesses – Trust

Ask most estate agents about marketing and they’ll talk about RightMove.co.uk, advertising in papers and putting up a board outside your house. Of course, they’re talking about the marketing of your house – at least that’s what they’d have you believe. The fact is that a newspaper advert is practically useless when it comes to [...]

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When marketing can be just a little TOO clever

Chris Cardell is a marketing consultant. Four years or so ago I paid a considerable sum to be part of a series of teleseminars aimed at helping improve my business’s profits largely through better marketing. I’m not a massive fan of his particular style which I find somewhat arrogant and a little too smooooth for [...]

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71% of UK SMEs report late payments in the past year

As Microbusinesses, we often find ourselves as piggy in the middle. If your business is based around large ticket items or projects then you will, in all likelihood, have to pay your suppliers promptly but find yourself stuck as you wait for your client to pay. Big corporations are notorious for this and it’s been [...]

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Search Engine Advertising picks up in Q1: Recession over?

Internet Marketing analysts AdGooroo have released their Search Advertising Report for the first quarter of 2010. Interestingly, it shows that advertising across all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) has increased in these three months which is a good indicator that advertisers, at least, are more confident about the future. It’s an interesting, [...]

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Small Business and Social Responsibility: is the bottom line enough?

I found myself with an hour to kill last night while the wife was in the bath and, for want of any other choice, turned to Channel 4′s “How the Other Half Live“. This series is about contrasting the life stories and lifestyles of people at the top of the financial heap and those at [...]

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Finding Direction

Click here to listen Who’d be a school/college/university leaver today? Well, I would for one as the range of possibilities open to people these days is exponentially greater than when I left school. At that time (in the 1980s), on leaving college you had two choices: get a job or go onto University (at which [...]

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How to mend a broken image

Toyota has had a rough time of it lately – entirely its own fault. The business world is replete with examples of companies founded on exceptional quality losing sight of this over the years and compromising the quality in the name of cost cutting. Anyone who’s read or listened to Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits [...]

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