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lol, thats the first time I've heard an SEO firm advising people not to do SEO

Personally I think you should concentrate with on site SEO, all the things you can easily do, and forget link building. Do what the Google god is trying to get us all to do, let your links grow naturally.

Thats pretty clever. So do you write these or adapt for relevant career paths yourself, or is this something that you get from a specialised source? Just curious, interesting stuff

Now at risk at inviting controversy, and please no racist slurs, but our local highstreet is following the trend of whitewashed windows, poundland shops, more charity shops etc.

Then today I had to head into the centre of Birmingham, so followed the usual route up the A34, taking me through Sparkhill and Sparkbrook, predominantly Asian areas, and the High Street looks no different than it did 5 or 10 years ago. The majority of shops are small independents, and the streets are jampacked with people and footfall. In otherwords business is booming.

So why is Sparkhill booming and Stratford is a ghost town? Why do Asian independent shops survive? Is it a culture thing? I know they are much more focused on family than white counterparts, and Asian friends talk about responsibility of helping out family members, and utilising skill sets within the family circle.

As the traditional UK highstreet is set to be transformed into housing, eateries and coffee houses, I wonder if there is something we can learn from Sparkhill and similar towns?

Proper headline grabber, but thats the finding of a report conducted by the Centre for Retail Research (CRR).

After the last few years, I suppose it's not really that shocking. So for you online retailers, this should be an opportunity!

Well bored nippers on a plane isn't something I want revisit soon!

But only a 3 hour flight to Malta, so not too bad Nice to see some sun for a change and recharge the batteries.

Shame I didn't bring it home with me! Good to see we are moving into a traditional UK summer... rain....

Well it was supposed to a biggie, but judging from various SEO forums it seems to be a bit of an anticlimax, with little obvious impact across the board. Some early analysis showed some obvious targets, porn sites and gaming sites, with some friendly fire on the poor old Salvation Army

But there doesn't seem to be the same post analysis that followed earlier releases.


That's actually pretty good advice, and everyone should have a good look in their webmaster tools once in a while. It gets more and more user friendly, and Google likes to post any messages there, such as you have been naughty, fix it now

Pretty sobering reading!

Shows security needs to be taken seriously, but there's still a lot of user education required out there as well.

As part of our Trading Standards contract, we had to move parts of the site to SSL (data encryption) and we show the extended validation bar in most browsers:


But I'm genuinely surprised by the number of people who have no idea what this means, or it's importance especially on things like payment and transaction pages.

I'm even more amazed by the number of people that fall for spoofed and phishing sites, such as the emails from your bank asking you to download a form, open it and fill in the details...

I thought originally this was down to maybe older and non internet savvy folk, and as the internet became more common place, people would get more street wise. But it seems a lot of youngsters give little thought to online security, be it personal, or financial. I guess the same crosses over to business owners.

Maybe we need better education?

Must confess to being quiet on the forum as of late, but things starting to settle down (ish) a bit now with all this Trading Standards malarkey. But it's time for a dose of R&R so off for a week, and back on the 27th May.

Shall bring back a stick of rock and maybe some sun!

Have you been living under a rock for the last 10 years?

E-mail marketing is the cornerstone of online marketing. As Jamie says, you have to make sure you collect emails in the correct fashion, ie you have consent and they understand what they will be used for.

But sending bulk email is very effective, and stands little chance of diminishing in the near future. You know if you are sending actual spam, but others may perceive marketing upsells or promotional emails as spam. Trial and error. If you get loads of complaints, then your copy is crap If you really are sending spam, then expect to get buckets of complaints and booted off your ISP.

We sent out 60,000 yesterday, and got a 24% open rate, 80 unsubscribes, a few moans and one abusive reply. But made a few quid, and generated plenty of genuine enquires.

This day and age, it's never been easier. Have a look at crowd sourcing. If you have a genuinely good proposal, then go to someone like crowdcube.com

Otherwise its the more traditional route of flirting with various angel investors.

Either way, make sure your business plan is first class, the numbers add up, and you can handle the pressure of having outside people having some of your equity. Plus you must have a clearly defined exit strategy, as most investors are looking for a clearly defined return.

But raising money doesn't have to come from investors, why not keep your equity and get a bank loan. If your business plan stacks up, regardless of what the media are saying, banks are lending money.

Another route is crowd funding, similar principle to crowd sourcing, ie the power of the crowd making small investments, but this is a straight forward loan, so no equity loss. Check out fundingcircle.com becoming more and more popular with small businesses.