Business Skills and Tools

Many entrepreneurs fail to understand that marketing includes everything from having a clear website to responding promptly to customer e-mails. Chris Cardell, a marketing specialist (http://www.cardellmedia.com/), says the golden rule is to test and measure the effectiveness of all marketing activities. We’ll overlook problems with the audio link on his home page because it contains useful tips on advertising.

There are two key ways to bring people to your website. You can pay by bidding for keywords that appear as sponsored links on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Or you can learn how to be found by the search engines. This is a dark art but http://www.bizmove.com/ has useful tips. It sells this information on a CD for £50, but you can read free extracts on the website.

It’s easy to unearth invaluable information about your competitors at http://www.companieshouse.com/ for a small fee and also cheaper to file your annual tax return online. And if your site conducts online transactions http://www.clearlybusiness.com/, a Barclays company, has handy hints on web-based selling (three clicks is the maximum potential customers can be bothered with). The creators of http://www.baddesigns.com/ have had fun spotting fundamental web design errors that you could learn and profit from.