Posts

Irony overkill Andrew!

Worrying article ... and I suspect it's right about paid ads taking over. Damn!

Actually your and my family got "welfare" when we were kids via Child Benefit and we'll certainly be getting "welfare" (the state pension scheme) when we're retired. Depending on age, self-employed people are also entitled to state-funded sick pay when ill or injured; and some (all?) income replacement private insurance schemes work on the basis they'll top up what you get from the state.



Agree with you that's how it should work ... but it doesn't. There's a drive on to get employers to pay the "Living Wage for London" (around

And if you did need welfare support, the vouchers would much diminish the very inadequate amounts you'd been allocated to pay for food, transport, heating, light bulbs and the rest of it ...

Shopping around, getting the best deals from markets, best buy small shops and supermarkets, is absolutely necessary when state benefits are less than 80% amount required to fund a basic lifestyle.

Most of those claiming are in one or more of the following caetgories:-

- people who've worked and paid into the system and who now need to draw on it for reasons beyond their control (illness, redundancy, the Osborne factor, etc)

- people who will work and pay into the system in the future when the politicians finally come up with an economic plan that works for the whole country; and

- working people who earn too little to pay the inflated costs of housing.

In theory, the extra people are cost-neutral. There's no reason to suppose they're not paying into the system, assuming the extras aren't too young or too old to work.

Hi onlinemarketing

You're trying to attract business in what's a heavily competitive field. Like most people, I daresay, every time I look at my emails there'll be a number of them offering services similar to yours.

Maybe the way to attract business is to do things differently? To become the person the business community trusts to do online marketing work for it? Sadly, attracting business this way takes much more time than doing it "electronically" - however, if the electronic route doesn't work for you maybe you'll have to try it.

Could you try offering your services as a specialist online marketing advisor to business associations such as Chambers of Commerce? Doing sessions for "A" Level and BTEC Business Studies students (NB you'll probably need a Criminal Records Bureau check to do such work in schools)?

Personally, I start with a very vague idea that's career, jobs or work related (what my site is all about), then I look for the search terms this potential blog item should contain to get high on Google, then I write the blog.

It's the Geoffrey Archer ( spelling?) approach to writing text (results focused rather than giving a hoot about the quality of the writing).

Having produced my 400 -500 words, I then look for as catchy a title as I can manage (given the constraints of having to have the key words at the beginning of the title) - eg Graduate Talent: Our Fears, Our Future, Careers Offices In Crisis.

The last stage is to place a mini-ad - using the SEO all in one package MLF IT experts helped me find -that Google will use to describe that blog item when my key words are used.

This approach is time-consuming and constraining so I'm bad at keeping up to date with my blogging. On the other hand, so are most other people!

Hope this helps. Linda

Wouldn't it be easier to go to your trade association and ask whether they've a list of insurance companies that specially target businesses like yours? Then you wouldn't have to plough through umpteen offerings by insurers that obviously don't have a clue about your requirements.

I think it'd be a good move ....

Obviously you want your blogs to appeal to human visitors. Don't forget, though, that if you use the right search terms (defined here as not too competitive - see Google keyword tool) wisely, you might have a chance of getting some of them to Google pge 1, at least for a short period. Good luck!

I so hope so ... my maternal grandparents both died earlier than they should have because of tobacco (chain-smoking Grandad of lung cancer, Grandma of throat cancer acquired through passive-smoking). Even the poor budgie fell off its perch at an early age.

It saddens me deeply when I see teenagers and parents with kids in tow lighting up.

I didn't see any huge benefit for my site either. The benefit there was came mainly through slight enhancements to Google's positioning of important key words.

I've used key word anchor text linking within my "resource box" a lot on my GoArticles - I understand Google's now much less happy than they used to be about this technique. Damn!