I am using an Irish example in this post but for those of you reading this in other parts of the world you will be able to apply your country, small village or city to this post with the same logic. Our business is based in Ireland. As I am sure you know Ireland is [...]
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The whole world seems to be obsessed with social media at the moment as a communication tool but we wanted to look at one of the oldest and most reliable online communication tools toay…Email. It has often been neglected as a sales channel and is losing out to far sexier ways of marketing like Twitter and Facebook but if managed correctly it can be highly effective at reaching your customers. We wanted to cover some of the basics of email marketing and look at a couple of the services that we use here for our own site and see if you should set up your own email marketing strategy…
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The way we work is changing with more and more of our work being carried out online using tools and online services that for the most part are free. I have assembled the following list of 10 tools and services that I use on a daily basis and that I have learned to love through trial and error. I honestly do not know how our business would function without them and once you start using them your life will be made a lot simpler and easy to manage. Most of these services will be known by people who come from a technical background and work online but I am always surprised by the amount of people who have no idea that these great free tools are out there…
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We recently won a pretty large client very simply through Twitter and as I said on Twitter at the time “It helped me feel better about the hundreds of hours I had spent dossing on Twitter”. Nobody needs to preach to the merits of Twitter to me but one complaint that I do often hear people saying to me is Twitter really worth all the effort and will I get business out of it? Just last week we conducted an extensive interview with Loraine from La Cucina a business that is using social media effectively to bring real customers through the door and she said that Twitter was the least effective tool for getting customers to come to her shop although it was good for networking with other food bloggers. The thing with social media and Twitter in general is that it changes so quickly and trends can appear from week to week so I wanted to get a discussion going and run a poll and see what the majority of people out there thought. For what it is worth here are some of the thoughts that I have on the issue…
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Social media has changed the way that businesses structure themselves, creating access to an ever-wider workforce and knowledge base. The tools of social media affect how we work on a day to day basis and also how you’re finding new employees. But how far can this virtual employment go
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I was doing a massive clean of the apartment last weekend in preparation for the New Year back at work. I wanted everything to be ordered and in place so as I could fully concentrate on growing the business in the busy month ahead without having to worry about the trivial things in life. It took me 4 hours and a massive amount of hard work. I’m not really a fan of cleaning and when I had my head suck half way down the toilet I got to thinking about outsourcing. Was spending half a day ironing shirts, cleaning toilets and taking out rubbish really the best use of my time? Before we delve in to it a little further lets look at what outsourcing actually is…
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