Thoughts on: Survive and Thrive - How to manage your business in tough times

Today I attend an inspiring event hosted by IoD YDF & Business Link Yorkshire at Gandhi Hall, Leeds Met Uni.

Andy Chapman, IoD YDF Committee collaborated with the team at Business Link to put on an informative event. Which aim was to give practical tips for business owners in Leeds about how they can manage their businesses in tough times.

The line up of speakers was a good spread of the key aspects that business owners should consider:

• Jonny Abraham, Barclays, gave a concise and topical talk about how to raise finance from banks
  
  
• Simon Riley, Yorkshire Forward talked through the current funding and grants available for businesses
  
  
• Iain Brown, Business Link Yorkshire - talked through how Business Link operates to support businesses
  
  
• John Holroyd, Mazars, talked through some really practical advice on managing debt and improving cashflow
  
  
• Keith Arkle, Sage - talked through how software can help manage cashflow, forecasting and reporting
  
  
• Gary Bristol and Maurice Sibar - talked through how to win business with Leeds City Council. The new procurement website for the Councils within the Yorkshire and the Humber region should definitely make this more accessible along with the implementation of Purchase Cards
  
  
• Andy McMenemy, 2Inspire talked through how to sell yourself in tough times
  

What really stood out for me was that to survive and thrive in tough times, you need to make sure that you:

1. Find out if there's any grants or funds which could assist the growth of your company
   
   
2. Have the management information (such as your accounts, aged debtors creditors, cashflow forecast) up to date
   
   
3. Act on the information - whether it's chasing up debtors or information from your business advisers etc
   
   
4. Use other software such as CRM or sync-ing your outlook calendar with sage, so you can streamline some of the business processes so you can work smarter
   
   
5. Need to have a good relationship with your bank and ensure that you are in frequent dialogue with your bank manager.
   
   
6. If you need funding (loans, overdraft, business investor) you need to act in good time, rather than leave it too close to the decision
   
   
7. Look at tendering for public sector projects - as this could be a good source of regular revenue
   
   
8. Build key relationships with your clients, management team, key contacts and network will put you in good stead for building your business.
   
   
9. Stand out from the crowd at networking events and invest the time in building your network - as after all it's people that we do business with, not brands

For many emerging leaders, this is the first recession that they will have lead their business through. Building a network of contacts is essential so you have a reliable support network that you can lean on.

The information shared today is certainly wise, relevant and definitely has inspired me to look at new opportunities and smarten up on a few tasks!

Did you go to the event - what are your reflections on it?

Reflections on BarCampBradford

Yesterday was BarCampBradford. It was my first BarCamp so I didn't have any set expectations of how it would be or what I would get out of it. I certainly had a sense of anticipation and excitement when I arrived at WowHub yesterday morning.

I was struck by the buzz in the room when I walked in and as I started talking to the folks there what struck me was the distance some people had travelled to attend the BarCamp. One of the first people I spoke to was David Batty who had travelled over from Lancashire at some early hour of the morning.

Ian Green was the organiser of the event and opened the unconference around 10am. There was then a mad dash for the white board to put your name up for a presentation. As it was my first BarCamp I hadn't written a presentation, so decided that I would be an active participant instead.

The topics people started writing up varied greatly in themes - from Second Life to Internet Round Table to Goal Setting to Legal Challenges of Web 2.0. I wasn't sure what I had expected from the themes of the presentations, but the wide variety of topics certainly exceeded my expectations.

The first presentation I went to was by Ian Smith. His inspiring presentation was about 'Rethinking the Presentation'. Which was a light hearted but serious presentation about how we all spend time in presentations which are neither worthwhile or engaging. His tips on how to improve presentations or event not use ppt were warmly welcomed.

I knew as I walked in the room that I recognised Ian - and after a few minutes pondering , I realised that we had worked on the ASDA Internet Shopping project some 12 years ago!

The next session was an internet marketing round table discussion. This one for me was slightly disappointing, and I left early to go to John Mclear's Google's Hidden Gems presentation. Certainly an insight into Google's Acquisition Map opened my eyes to the fact that no UK company had been acquired by Google

Lunch was a healthy dose of pizza and chips - with a glass or two of cola :-)

I left at lunchtime as I had family commitments in the afternoon, so I know I missed some great presentations that I would loved to have stayed for.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for the next Leeds and Bradford Bar Camps.

Congrats to Ian on a superb event!

If I were to choose some words which summed up the day I would go for; energy, buzzing, enthusiasm, eagerness, collaboration, eclectic, diverse, engaging, insightful and rewarding.

What words would you use to reflect on the day?

Google Analytics on blogs - it's not the full story!

On my Blogger blog I've got Google Analytics set up and I fanatically log in to see how my visitors are doing (not bad if you're interested. Blogging frequently certainly drives more traffic).

Does Google Analytics track people using RSS Feeds?

So this got my thinking.....I use Google reader to read blogs. So does Google Analytics track people who use RSS readers to read blogs? The answers no, categorically.

If they wanted to do this, fundamentally the way RSS feeds work would need to change. The only way I could see if working would be if the URL 301 redirected to the RSS feed URL. If the Tracking was on the redirected page then you could track it.

How many people use RSS Readers?
Interestingly I couldn't find any up to date statistics on this, as I wanted to estimate the hidden audience for my blog. The most up to date information I could find was from a study in 2005 by Neilson, which states:

• 11% of blog readers use RSS feeds to manage feeds
• nearly 5% of blog readers use feed aggregation software
• more than 6% use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds from blogs

Given that blogging has gone through exponential growth since this study was completed, it would be fair to say that significantly more people use feed aggregation or blog readers to manage their RSS feeds.

Are people who use Feed Aggregation Software more passive?
So this got me thinking even further about reading on the website vs reading in a RSS reader and the variances between the two behaviours.

I use Google Reader for my blog reader - mainly because I use a lot of the other Google features and I can be the mobile app for this (which is great for trains).

So does how people read, reflect and comment on your blog differ compared to if they were reading it on the website? Utimately it is bound to, as the reader is in a different mind set. I would definitely say (from my own experience) I'm a little more passive in reading all the articles. I skim read and digest posts I find interesting. I then open these in another tab, book mark them and comment on them if I deem that it is relevant to.

So how do you use your blog reader?
I'd love to hear from you:

• if you have found a way to get usage stats on people picking up your RSS feed.
• let me know how your behaviour differs reading on website vs blog reader and if you think there is any marked difference in behaviour
  

Look forward to hearing from you.

Google Merchant - are you making the most this growing channel?

Back at the end of September Google announced the split of Google Base. Google Merchant is an account where you can submit your product based feed. This information drives the data in Google Shopping. Google Base remains in place but for non product information such as houses or cars.

How do I find out where Google Merchant data is shown?

Google Shopping is on the top left of the screen. This data is how the Google Merchant data is displayed to the customer.


What is interesting is the ability to rate the seller and leave comments. Which keeps me guessing that your customer comments will ultimately have an effect on your rankings in Google.




Integration of Shopping Results in Web Listings
Since then I've been tracking Google Merchant and how Google is showing this data. On a far more frequent basis I have seen the shopping results in the first page of the search results. I have seen them near to the top, middle and bottom of the first page.





Submitting your products via Google Merchant increases your reach in Google because you increase the opportunity of your website and products being shown in the search listings.

Make sure your product titles and descriptions contain the main key phrases people are searching for things like 'diesel jeans' - as there is an element of SEO here....the well optimised Google Merchant feed will have a higher opportunity of ranking than those which aren't!


The way the shopping results are shown, I would imagine the click through on these are higher than the standard search listings, purely because they draw you to them.

What do you need to do next?
If you run an ecommerce site and want to boost the sales over this festive time. Get your web development company to set up the XML file that's need to drive this.
What I have realised over the years is that it's no chance that Google has launched Google Merchant so close to Christmas and started showing the shopping results merged with the web listings. After all, their aim is to provide the customer with the ultimate search results - and what better way to do it!