Guest post by Martin Clark, Ripple Effect Sales Training.

They fail to understand the fundamentals of selling!

First of all to clarify, when I say ‘sales people’ I’m also referring to business owners who are responsible for making sales.  If you’re in business, then one of the many hats you must wear is that of a ‘sales person’.

There are 2 key fundamentals that drive ALL sales…  Failing to understand these is why most ‘sales people’ struggle and businesses suffer… continue

Guest post by Alex Hearn, The Big A.

How do you instruct a designer in order to create an effective brand that works for your company?

To instruct your designer effectively give them useful information but also allow them to do their job freely, or you won’t get the best out of them.

How do you allow them to utlilise their expertise while ensuring you get what you want?

Express yourself clearly but in general terms. Too much detail and you’ll be telling them what to design, which is what you’re paying them for and is something they’re better at than you! For example, instead of specifying a particular shade of blue, try to identify the feeling or values you are trying to communicate, such as ‘conservative and stable’. continue

When you are talking to someone face-to-face, you have a lot of visual cues to help you – your tone of voice, gestures, movement, eye-contact. But with none of these visual cues present in our written communication, how do we earn trust and confidence when we write letters, reports or e-mails? In written communication, especially e-mail, we have to find other ways to evaluate the person who is ‘speaking’.

Style in written communication means attention to proper spelling and punctuation, proper sentence construction and full spellings instead of abbreviations suitable only for SMS messages. Style includes being creative in what you write and how you write. It also means making your communication look visually attractive. Finally, considering appropriate tone and structuring your message logically forms part of the business writing style.

Benefits of good writing style:

• Relevant, precise communication appropriate to the reader’s level.
• Logically structured.
• Easy to see what action is required and when.
• More approachable because our language is less formal and more friendly (unless you are writing a legal letter!).
• Saves your and your readers’ time and increases business efficiency.
• Enhances understanding and increases your professional image.
• Creates better rapport with customers and business partners.

Effective writing gives a professional impression of you and your company. It is perhaps the most demanding work we do on a daily basis. If you learn to pay attention to all the various aspects of style in your writing, you will increase the value of what you write, achieve better results, and gain a distinct advantage in today’s online world.

If a business does not develop people effectively they may decide to move on, taking with them knowledge about the business and its products, good experience and an individual link for clients to an organisation. In its place is the cost involved in recruiting a new staff member, put at £5,500 by recruitment consultant Angela Mortimer.

In order to create the right learning environment to enable your employees to benefit from Continuous Professional Development (CPD) you could follow the following steps:

1. Define a clear structure of what development solutions there are available and who they are suitable for.
2. Use development solutions that include a variety of techniques.
3. Agree the investment in development in terms of time and money.
4. Create visible ‘role models’, providing insight into the role of senior positions.
5. Help your staff develop both their strengths and their weaknesses.
6. Establish objectives around CPD and review.
7. Measure and evaluate continuously.
8. Remember the little things like ‘Thank you’ and ‘Well done’.

If you want to create an environment where continuous learning and development is an integral process, you will have to invest time and energy. In the long term the benefits can outweigh the costs. Spot and nurture talent as talented individuals can be an organisation’s biggest asset.

In this second part of The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses we will be looking at technical SEO considerations, to help you market your online business in the search engines. If you would like to start at the very beginning, you may wish to check out the introduction “What is Search Engine Optimisation?”

Objective: Our objective is to ensure that our technical set-up and foundation is optimal, so that anything we build on top of that can be more easily found and indexed.

To read the complete article click here

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.