Work started last night on updating all of the content on www.outside-ideas.com. We’ve been making tweaks to our web text and business offering over the past month and have started to upload content. We’re going to have a load more pictures and a load more relevant which in turn should hopefully boost us up the search engines. 

We also want more people contacting us, we have decided to include call to action buttons on lots of pages. 

Check back next week to see how we’ve got on.

We’re thrilled to announce that Outside ideas has secured our third client in two weeks. Active Autos have taken a full branding and sales package including logo and identity design, website design and promotional materials. 

Networking is way more important in business than most think.  Meeting new people, strengthening your alliances and growing your business is crucial to businesses both big and small and can be rewarding on a personal level as well as professionally. 

With the growth in home working, many new entrepreneurs and business owners can go whole days and and in some cases weeks without meeting or talking with people outside their family. Networking allows you to get out of the house or office and meet new interesting people, who all have something in common in a relaxed atmosphere. 

From a business perspective When you refer a client to a business in your network, you helping your client (who’ll get the product or service they need) the businesses you refer them to (who get a new customer), and strengthen your own relationships with your client and network by being a facilitator. You should do some networking because: 

• Very often, people will choose where to do business based on the recommendations of their friends, family and trusted co-workers.
• Personal connections are a brilliant way of building rapport. Any contact you have with a potential client, such as a phone call or an email to a potential client is much more compelling when you can say so and so suggested I call.
• In order to be successful, you need to grow your prospects,  since you cannot meet every potential client for your business in person you can instead spend the time to make good networking connections, and that in turn will result in many new clients.

I met a mechanic recently who attends networking events. He’d serviced the car of everyone in the room. I think that speaks for itself.

I paid a trip to google London today. The place was incredible. Beanbags, pillows, hammocks and telephone boxes seemed to somehow fit seamlessley into every room. The place was buzzing and I have to say, I was too after the experience. 

We were there to listen to Google UK’s managing director Matt Brittin and marketing director Dan Colby talk about ways that business could speed up in a slowdown.  Google suggest that whilst the economy slips, businesses that use the internet to market to their customers are in a strong possition to gain momentum.  The pair talked about how the slowdown is fuling online growth as bargain hunters now search online for the cheapest option before making purchases. Apparently we’re up to 17p in every pound spent online. 

They talked about the need for businesses to cut costs whilst remaining proffesional and introduced the room to the brilliant google apps suite (oi already use it) which is similar to microsoft office except its all hosted on the internet. 

There are loads of free tools that google have made available to businesses that enable them to get online and perform better online, a great resource is google.co.uk/webmasters which provides great advice for webmasetrs on how google indexes and crawls websites and ultimately ranks your site. 

They also suggested ways of increasing market share by directly targeting niche customers with google addwords. 

To find out more about what was talked about, you can visit www.google.co.uk/speedup

I’ve been doing a little cold calling for DBO over the past few days. I spend about 15 minutes over every call with research and data entry, and have had some pretty good results so far. Here they are in a nutshell:

• Researched 30 potential galleries to display DBO’s work 
• Cold Called 27 of the 30 galleries, each time I got through to the decision maker. 
• Sent out 26 copies of DBO’s .pdf file  
• Received 4 requests for more information.
• Pieces of art sold = 3. 
• Average number of cold calls to sales 9.
• I also have 27 people to phone warm next time round :)

Now I know that cold calling isn’t right for every product and service, but in many businesses it’s a proven way of generating extra income and a really cost effective method of targeting new leads. The rise of the internet has made it really easy to find the details of the company you want to target. This makes researching, cold calling and emailing promotional materials much more effective.
Coming soon, my cold calling tips.

About a month ago, my girfriends car was on its last legs. We happened to pass by a local garrage one sunday to find a man tinkering with a car. I explained the problem and asked if he could fix it. The next morning Roy (the man with the spanners) arrived and set about on the car.  He’s old school and found lots of issues, largely as a result of a build up of grime. Roy spent all day on the car and cleaned every point and cable. It now runs perfectly. 

I’m pleased to announce that Oi has been asked to provide a quote for active autos, for a full corporate identity / web design / sales promotion service.  This is very good news!

We today signed an exciting contract with AJ Machinery ltd to produce their very first website.  Over time the owners had come to realise the importance of being able to profile their current stock online. They spend a good edeal of time each day emailing pictures of machines to clients, the new website, due to be finished at the end of the week will allow them to upload their inventory to the site and save a great deal of time.