Welcome to Blossom Stream Limited Chartered Certified Accountants and Business Advisors.
Our experience spans a range of sectors and business sizes, from serving the owner managed business community of Birmingham, Solihull and the West Midlands through to working in the blue chip and fortune 500 arena. We have the qualified experience and know how to support our client base through the challenges of today’s business and taxation environment.
To find our more read our about us section.
For a free consultation to discuss your needs please don’t hesitate to contact us on +44 (121) 314 8246 or contact us here to arrange a call back or appointment at a time to suit you.
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Small business web advertising is a critically important touch point for businesses to connect to their customers.
Of vital importance are cost effectiveness, quality and depth of the service provided by the advertiser.
You should look for an advertiser that incorporates the latest in web technology, framing it’s offering within a web 2.0 interface. This means providing your business with an environment which enables customers to engage in a conversation about your products and services, taking the traditional listing or advertisement to a discursive level of exposure.
Our business internet directory, interlinkdirectory.com, can do just that for your organisation. By offering the traditional directory listing capability and then layering web 2.0 functionality within this, we have constructed a tool which can feature your business in a quality web advertising environment.
Interlinkdirectory allows you to list your business, post articles about your products and services, and in turn allows its visitors to engage in discussion about you. All this creates a continuous stream of content, building value and fluidity within your small business web advertising.
Click here to visit interlinkdirectory today and find out more about what it has to offer
The western hemisphere is barely limping its way out of recession, and many skilled people have been laid off. The number of new start ups is rising more than ever before as these cut loose workers fight for their right to a piece of the global economy.
For start up businesses, getting off on the right foot is absolutely crucial to survival. We’ve prepared a five point plan here to help you stay on the track to success.
Build a coherent marketing strategy.
Find out where your customers are and what they read. Once you have these identified find out how you can get yourself into these places. For example, let’s say you are a new firm of accountants, book an appointment with your local chamber of commerce or business link office. Present your services to them and leave them with your business card featuring an offer, say a 10% reduction on all fees for new businesses. Ask that they pass on your card to every new business they meet. They will be constantly meeting new businesses and will be more than happy to encourage you as a new venture. This idea is transferable to many other business types, so give it a try. Your local chambers or link office can be invaluable in the early days of launch.
Keep on the right side of the authorities.
Remember to research out your responsibilities as a business before you begin to trade. Consider your accounting, taxation, employment law and regulatory requirements from day one. This can be a hard circle to square for any new business but its expedition is a necessary evil. If you are unsure of anything within this fold, always consult a professional before you make a move. A small amount of professional fees at the beginning can save you a fortune further down the track.
Secure a web presence from day one.
Having a web presence as a start up and small business will be crucial to your survival. In today’s information age it is an essential, giving you the right image and tools to communicate with the world from day one. Starting this journey at the beginning of your business is crucial, that way your web presence can grow with you. Far too many businesses get midway or fully through their launch before considering the option. It doesn’t have to be that way; websites can be built now for tiny prices and are scalable quickly and easily.
Know you market.
Be fully aware of your customer’s wants and needs. Go that extra mile in profiling them, for example use some keynote market analysis reports. These will tell you about buying habits, patterns and trends. Often these can be obtained at your local library for free. Once you have this data, relate it back to what you competitors are doing, if their missing something you may have found yourself a niche.
Never give up, but do be prepared to compromise.
The never give up attitude is an essential commodity for any new start up. Some days it will feel like nothing is going your way, but stick at it, fortune favours the brave.
Sometimes you will have to compromise; very rarely will everything go to plan. Having the ability to change and adapt to the circumstances in front of you is a vital characteristic for success.
As a small business, asking yourself the question, do small businesses need a website? Is something that is likely to rattle through many of your dreams at night. The answer to your questions is yes but with caveats.
You should not invest significant sums in a website without investing in some search engine optimisation or SEO. SEO is often an element of web design that small businesses neglect. This can lead to disappointment when customers don’t come visiting after a website is launched. SEO is essentially what convinces the search engines to list you and list you under the search terms relevant to your subject.
We consider our relationship to our customers a partnership, if we make you successful we’ll be successful.
Another caveat to consider is how I am I going to benefit from an investment in a website? What are you going to get back? Yes you can put your website on your business cards and stationary, but we are sure you want more? And you should. So think about how you can integrate your business into your web presence. Perhaps open a dialogue through it with your customers, introducing a forum to discuss their industry related problems. This is a powerful reason that will keep them coming back to you. That way your customers will start to see you as an authority site and so will the search engines. Believe it or not you can get this functionality quite cheaply.
You can build a social media hub around your website achieving similar results to a forum, looking to cool for school with a Facebook page and Twitter page. This might sound a gimmick? So go now and check out what companies like Vodafone are doing with social media, still think it’s a gimmick?
The last caveat should be, can I sell it over the web? The answer to that question should always be yes, it’s how and how to do it effectively that will keep most people up at night. We have a lot of solutions to that problem. For instance, how about hiring a team of crack Internet marketeers who will do it for you and work on the basis of no hay no pay.
For more soluctions to your small business website, contact us here.
Now you might immediately assume the answer to the question do I need a website for my business? To be yes, but the real answer you are looking for is why?
If you are are considering building a website for your business, ask yourself why you need one? We think the most pertinent reasons for why are as follows:
The audience you can reach with a website is truly enormous, it really is the world. The only limitation is how can you use your business to supply that market. The Internet and a website will enable your reach. If you already know how you can supply that market, you really are well on your way to exploiting the most the Internet can provide.
Using the Internet and a website as an operating platform can leave you with truly tiny running costs compared to your competition. It is now possible for some businesses to be entirely virtual or extremely close to it. All you really need is a PC and a place to run it from. Even for what are considered smoke stack or old industries it is now possible to be almost 100% virtual. Take estate agencies as a case in point, do they need high street offices? Absolutely not, it is possible to conduct these kind of businesses, and many many more who don’t even realise it yet, entirely online. In the process massive cost savings can be achieved, making your business truly competitive.
Staying ahead is critical for any business and without a website as a platform to access the latest technology, this could prove truly fatal. Just consider the evolution in technology over say the last two years. Communication is changing radically, virtually all mobiles can now access the Internet. There is now not a single piece of modern communication technology that does not interact with the net or need it as an essential to function. Now consider how people and businesses communicate with each other across the net.
Heard of Linkedin, Alibaba, Twitter, Facebook, Mixx, Redd it? If you haven’t I suggest you do some research now. The list goes on and on. Now run them through a search engine, see how many businesses have Twitter pages, Facebook pages, Linkedin pages, and Alibaba pages. Still think you can afford not be there with your web presence? A website connecting to these social hubs is the only way to extract the most from them. If you need more evidence on how these social networking platforms are for right now and tomorrow, consider how they are affecting the recruitment industry. Look at all those employees marketing themselves on Linkedin. Now think how many businesses really need a recruitment consultant if they know how to use Linkdedin and are properly connected to it through their website.
Ok still not convinced? Think about this then? Look at how other businesses communicate with their customers across those platforms, telling them about new offers, products and savings they can make. Now factor in the ingredient that all that advertising and exposure was free and went global at the click of a button. Still not convinced?
Ok, let’s take the most stoic, technologically resistant business in the UK, no offence intended here, but let’s say it’s a small engineering business making fasteners and struggling to access global markets. Now lets build them a website with a store and install a payment engine, hook it in to every associated online social network, and give it exposure to 4 billion customers letting them know that UK quality is the best quality. You know that business it going to start taking orders. That’s a fact. If you don’t believe us, log onto Alibaba and have a look at all those other companies doing just that. Even with a tiny budget , you can be there with them and in places on the Internet that they haven’t heard of yet. It’s possible.
There is absolutely a social hub out there for your business and market niche, and they are holding your customers in a pool ready for you to access them. Now try and access them without a website.
Tired of hearing, “the cheques in the post”, with a website you can collect all your payments online and know their there, safe and secure. You can do this without a merchant account and any credit checks. With a website it’s possible to take payments from anywhere in the world, instantly.
In conclusion having a web presence these days is truly an essential part of any businesses trading and marketing strategy. The way it’s used is the key ingredient for success. A web presence can make you competitive, punch above you weight and deliver a hoard of customers battering down your door for more.
If you would like a web presence or would like to discuss how a web presence could benefit your business please contact us here.
