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Is Your Small Business A Zombie?

Zombie busi­nesses are out there, and whilst they aren’t exactly coming to eat your brains, it takes brains to avoid sharing their fate. Your small business may even already be a zombie business — or slowly becoming one, without you even knowing it! If that doesn’t sound healthy, that’s because it isn’t.

What Is A Zombie Business?

A zombie company is a business entity that barely manages to stay oper­a­tional. It may earn just enough to keep running or may rely heavily on lenders to stay afloat, but isn’t earning enough to pay for its own growth, or to reduce its debts. That often puts it just one unlucky event away from col­lapse — making it a high-risk pro­pos­ition for investors.

To be fair, most busi­nesses start like that.… Read the rest 

How To Start A Small Business Website: The Essentials

If you have a small business, or are thinking of starting one, you need a website. There’s a lot to con­sider though — and many small busi­nesses fail because they’ve over­looked one or more of the essen­tials. So here’s how to start a small business website.

Ready? Let’s begin!

What Every Small Business Needs

First, there are a few things every business needs. Hopefully you’ve con­sidered these already, but let’s cover them briefly, just in case.

A Good Offer And A Realistic Target Market

The key words here are “good”, “real­istic” and “target”.

Startups often hope to sell some­thing they like to “everyone”. That rarely works — espe­cially if no-one else sells any­thing similar. If there’s no com­pet­ition, the market may not exist, or may not be sus­tainable.… Read the rest 

Small Business SEO 101: What You Need To Know

Small business SEO 101Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vital for small busi­nesses. Yet many don’t know where to start. So here are a few things you need to know about small business SEO.

Why Small Business SEO Matters

All web­sites need vis­itors, but vis­itors who are searching for your ser­vices are among the most likely to convert into cus­tomers. Unfortunately, most are too busy to read past the first Search Engine Results Page (or “SERP”). So for any given search phrase, sites on the first page tend to get 75% of the traffic available for that phrase, with almost 20% going to the first result.

We all do that from time to time. As site owners, though, we need to focus on the next step in most searches.… Read the rest 

How To Avoid The Cheap Website Design Trap

How Cheap Websites Often Kill Small Businesses

Small busi­nesses often search for “cheap website design”. That’s under­standable, but there’s a catch.

Underinvesting in your website will cost you far more in the long run. It can even cost your entire business.

This is not a pitch. It’s a warning. Over the past 25 years, I’ve rescued many small firms who made this mistake. So I’d rather help you avoid it. It may not be what you want to hear, or what flaky mar­keters want to sell you, but it’s the truth. This page explains why it’s true.

Also, that does not mean every website needs a five or six figure budget. What it does mean is that simply seeking the cheapest web design you can find is likely to cripple your business.… Read the rest 

Affordable Websites: How To Set A Website Budget

Affordable Website BudgetSmall busi­nesses and startups often seek affordable web­sites — but what makes a website “affordable”? How do you set a website budget?

In fact, it mainly depends on whether it’s a per­sonal site, or a business site.

Why? Because whilst per­sonal web­sites often cost money, suc­cessful business web­sites do not. In fact, con­trary to the hype of DIY plat­forms and cut-price cowboys, a cheap business website can easily cost you more than a pro­fes­sional one.

How To Budget For A Personal Website

Personal web­sites aren’t built to make money. So traffic isn’t their pri­ority, and even if mon­etised with ads or affiliate income, that isn’t their key goal. They aren’t expected to pay for them­selves. They also often depend on “boot­strapping” — per­sonal funding from savings, friends and family.

Read the rest 

How Procrastination Kills Projects

I was going to write about how pro­cras­tin­ation kills pro­jects seven months ago. That article wasn’t going to be so personal.

Then life got in the way. As it always will, if you let it. So what happened?

Out of the blue, my partner of over 25 years got a dia­gnosis so ter­ri­fying that we had an emer­gency wedding. “Emergency” as in, we woke up that morning not knowing we’d be married by teatime.

Eternal thanks to the Newport Registry Office, the Royal Gwent Hospital, and the Velindre Cancer Centre in Cardiff for facil­it­ating that. Even more so for making her con­dition more man­ageable for now.

Yeah, writing a blog post pales into insig­ni­ficance in the face of that, doesn’t it?… Read the rest 

Why Small Businesses Need Professional Websites

Professional web­sites can seem like big invest­ments to small business owners. Online mar­keting is such a huge topic that it can be hard to work out where to begin.

So why do small busi­nesses need pro­fes­sionally designed web­sites? Here’s an analogy that may help.

Professional Websites Are Marketing Vehicles

Your website is your main mar­keting vehicle in the non-stop race for sales. To extend that analogy, hosting is the garage you rent for it, and your domain is the address of that garage. Site vis­itors are pas­sengers that you pick up briefly, and some of them convert into customers.

However, your vehicle won’t get far without regular main­tenance (support and updates) and good driving (active mar­keting). Leaving it in the garage achieves nothing, no matter how pretty it is or how much work you put into it.… Read the rest 

Why Cheap Web Designers Often Disappear

Cheap web designer disappearingEveryone loves cheap web design — until they learn that it takes far more than low prices and fancy graphics to build a business website that works. That can be a hard lesson about cheap web design risks, but it often gets worse. Because cheap web designers often disappear.

This can be a touchy subject though, so let’s be clear: most exper­i­enced web designers I know are tal­ented people who only want to help. That said, exper­i­enced web designers are rarely cheap web designers.

Still, I have just spoken to yet another dis­tressed small business owner. His cheap web designer had left him in the lurch with a broken website and no access to fix it.

Other business owners had told him this was “typical” of “flaky” designers.… Read the rest 

Google Web Vitals – What’s The Fuss?

In case you haven’t heard, Google’s latest search algorithm update focuses on your website’s tech­nical per­formance. Specifically, on a group of metrics that Google calls “Core Web Vitals”. So what are these Google Web Vitals, and what’s all the fuss about them for?

What Are Google Web Vitals?

Google’s Core Web Vitals are a small set of key metrics focused on page speed and user exper­ience. Check these three impactful metrics first before under­taking deeper optimizations.

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the largest content element (e.g. a hero image or heading text) on your page to become visible. Aim for an LCP of 1.2 seconds or less.
  • Total Blocking Time (TBT) tells you how much time is blocked by scripts during your page loading process.
Read the rest 

Freelancer Pricing

A Freelancer Pricing Poem For National Freelancers Day

Freelancer pricing is a serious matter,
It’s not just a game that you play with your mates,
Though you may think I’m as mad as a hatter,
When I tell you freel­ancers must know THREE DIFFERENT RATES.

The first is the cost of staying in business,
Your break-even salary plus all business costs,
Divide by the hours that you expect to be working,
If you sell below this, your business is lost.

Next comes the rate that you’d get in job markets,
Those costs, plus your worth as a full employee,
You won’t last for long if you sell below this one –
Morale cannot live on a sub­standard fee.

But the last is the rate that you really should aim for,
The one that will let you do more than survive,
The fair price returned for the value you offer,
That lets both you, and your cus­tomer, thrive.… Read the rest