My childhood was a wonderful time but my family lived on next to nothing. I’d have given anything for the toys I saw in the shop windows. This experience meant I was determined to earn money for myself early and by the time I was 14, I was running between two jobs and unintentionally entered the entrepreneurship world determined to start a successful small business.

I was an electronics geek, learning the ins and outs on secondhand kits from the market. I proved a dab hand at circuitry and I managed to convince my older sister to let me use her car as a testing ground. I managed to figure out how to install a stereo unit and a set of speakers. News spread of my new found talent and so began my first venture. My strategy? To charge 50 per cent less than the professional businesses in the local area.

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Your social media feed is an essential tool to your business. It provides the titbits of your daily life to your followers and potential customers. It is a regular opportunity to add your personality to your product or your service.

But doing this on a, sometimes, daily basis can be a strain. To always be the happy, positive person you want to portray when sometimes you’re actually feeling the opposite is a near impossible task. Maybe you lost a client or a good lead didn’t go anywhere. Maybe you just ran out of coffee.

This is where in-app scheduling or software like Hootsuite can be valuable because when you are that happy, positive person you can smash out loads of great posts.

There is another danger though. With social media posts needing to be so regular, it can be easy to lose your personality and become robotic. This can alienate your audience because they feel they are being talked at instead of being talked with.

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Very few people feel completely comfortable on social media. Whether we are conscious of it or not, what we choose to reveal to the online world is a very carefully managed affair.

This is also true of your business. You’re are trying to portray a certain image and a brand that, once you hit ‘Publish’, will be open to public scrutiny.

For some people the challenge and excitement this brings is what they thrive off. For others, the thought of putting your business on social media is enough to send you crawling under your desk. After all it’s become your world, right? It’s too precious to expose it to the ravages and savages online.

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Managing your time efficiently, especially if you’re a small business, is an ongoing challenge.

Regularly posting to your social channels should be something you have built in to your week, whilst also allowing for spontaneity with as-they-happen posts.

I’ve been asked if it is better to allocate an hour every day to post and create content, or if posting and production should be staged throughout the day.

Firstly, I would be allocating a set time each week, not day, to create content, say a few hours on a weekend or week night and utilise the many scheduling tools that exist to set them up to feature throughout the week.

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I’d like to address an excellent question which I’ve had a few times before: “Do you make yourself vulnerable, by posting both personal and business related content on your business social media pages?”

I know that everyone has different levels of comfort with what they choose to share online, so to answer this questions you need to ask:

1. What are you comfortable sharing?
2. What is going to be of most interest or value to your audience?

My social channels help my audience understand more about my personality as I choose to share a mix of personal and business content. I want to show them who I am as a person, as a human being, because at the end of the day that’s who we do business with: other human beings.

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Knowing where and how to allocate your digital marketing budget can be daunting.

I’d like to address two different advertising platforms and their different roles and relevance for campaigns, in response to the question: “do you feel that Facebook can have a similar cost per conversion ratio as Google Shopping Ads or do you feel Facebook is high up the conversion funnel and is more of a branding tool?

This is effectively like comparing oranges with apples. You have two very distinct strategies here that need to be considered, based on what your objectives are.

To truly measure the two channels and how they could work for you, you’d need to run extensive split A/B testing with various campaigns. Instead, I’ll start by explaining the differences between using Google Shopping and Facebook Advertising to market your product or service.

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A great question that’s come up a few times in recent weeks is “how do I monetise my website?”

There are a couple of ways to do this. The first and most obvious being to sell through the website. For example, I have one client who has built a website to allocate Real Estate listings on it and to make some money from it.

The other way is for people or businesses to pay you for advertising their products or services on your website.

I want to keep this really simple. It can get overly complicated, but there are 3 different things you want to keep in mind if you’re looking to monetise your website:

1. Integrity
2. Value
3. Integration

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This post was inspired by a conversation with a friend of mine who operates a Men’s Fashion startup, working as a stylist and tailor.

We were chatting about ways to help grow his business and a large part of his strategy is to produce quality content that will reach his audience of male, medium to high income earners who take pride in their appearance and sense of fashion.

The question he raised was: how polished should this content be?

Comparing himself to the big players in the men’s fashion space, such as GQ and Tom Ford, he held the perception that his content needed to be of a similar style and production quality.

Our audience almost always wants one thing above all else and that’s authenticity. They want to see and feel a connection with the real you. They want to know who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it. They want to hear your story.

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One of my followers recently posed this question: “how can you effectively target the promotion and sales of luxury goods?”

Whilst marketing something that everyone uses every day might sound like an easier task than marketing a luxury, non-essential item, I would argue that it’s the other way around. Being able to identify a specific niche market typically makes the job a lot easier.

If you’re selling a luxury good or service, it may only be the top 10 to 20 per cent of the population that can afford to buy from you, however this percentage still represents a significant opportunity.

Being able to narrow an audience down to a specific market is, in fact, easier as the audience will have a very distinct set of behaviours that you can learn and use to your advantage.

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as you are probably aware, is the process of increasing visitors to your website by ensuring your site is ranked highly by search engines such as Google, ideally appearing on the first page when searching for your industry, business name, product or service.

It’s a hotly debated topic and has been the subject of scammers offering quick-fix solutions to put you on page one. The elusive page one goal and art in achieving this has earnt SEO something of a ‘witchcraft’ reputation.  

As with any industry some dodgy practices in the history of SEO and aforementioned scams have left many businesses out of pocket and even blacklisted by Google.

Knowing the basics of SEO and where to begin will help you and your business avoid hiring the wrong people and having to clean up the mess or start afresh!

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