Meeting positive people gives you energy

Meeting up with other people who have a positive attitude to life and business has given me a real boost over the last few weeks. I've been very lucky - attending a speed networking event run by the IOD in Reading, meeting up with a very positive group of Skillfair members in London, and topping all that off with a team meeting this week. The result has been that I feel really energised and have started tackling a whole range of challenges that I'd left on the back burner. So if you're not sure what you should do next, why not get out and about and pick up some energy from your fellow businesses? 

I'm booked to speak at quite a few events over the next few months so I'm hoping the energy will keep coming, if you're around Derby, Birmingham or Central London it would be great to meet up.

please don't use premium credit cards

Being an entirely online business we take all of our payments online - and over the last 18 months we've been hit by successive increases in the costs of credit card transactions - each transaction costs us around 3.5% of the gross payment (including the VAT) and the percentage has increased steadily. It's always amazed me how much public discussion of credit cards only talks about the interest rate charged to customers and ignores the fact that the banks now take a cut on almost every retail transaction in the UK.

This morning I've had yet another letter from my 'friendly' bank saying that any transactions on premium cards will cost an extra 0.7%. 

This is affecting all retailers, on and off line - so if you want to keep your money out of the banks clutches please avoid the premium card - and you'll be helping the retailers too.

Useful social marketing sites and tools - can you add any?

One of the most useful aspects of our on-line marketing workshop last night was being able to pick up on new facilities and websites that other people suggested. This table is a summary of all the ones we discussed - if you have any others please let us know.

Google	Search Engines  -The amount and quality of your content is important in making sure your site or blog is indeed. Links to and from other related sites are also useful
Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine)
Yahoo
MSN
Wikipedia	An authoritative site with definitions of just about everything. Look and see if a subject you know about is in need of an editor – but be careful to be unbiased and non-commercial in what you say
Delicious	bookmarking sites where people can search for articles and blogs.
Digg
Twitter	A micro-blogging site – people post 140 character messages about what they’re doing. You can follow people you find interesting and other people can follow you.
Google Buzz	Google’s version of Twitter
Facebook	Used heavily by teenagers and increasingly adults to run their social lives. Post events, pictures, messages and play games
LinkedIn	Much used by professionals, particularly those looking for work. Can post a detailed CV, start discussion groups, post events etc. There are many LinkedIn groups for professional disciplines and other organisations – or set up your own.
Viadeo	Similar to LinkedIn – some different features on each. Generally business oriented
Naymz
ecademy
YouTube	Video sharing site – great time waster!
FlickR	Photo sharing
MySpace
Free index	Business directory and forums for small business
Hotfrog	Free Business directory
Plaxo	Online contacts/address book
Hi5	Like facebook but (allegedly) more fun

Wordpress	Sites that allow you to build a blog very quickly – just subscribe and you can have a blog within a few minutes. Then you just need something to say!
Typepad
Blogger
joomla
Technorati	An index of blogs – mainly US dominated
Feedburner	A way of providing people with feeds from your blog/twitter account
Moonfruit	Template based website building sites
Webeden
google
Crazyegg	Shows a heatmap of your website, tells you where people click
Google analytics	Shows you how many people visit and what they look at
Google Wave	Tools to help you collaborate with partners and clients eg share calendars, co-edit documents
Google Wiki
Huddle
Tweetdeck	Have multliple twitter personalities and/or searches going
Twitterfeed	Link your blog or website feed into twitter
Hootsuite	Similar to tweetdeck - Other twitter clients here http://www.twitstat.com/twitterclientusers.html
friendfeed	Allows you to pull together feeds from friends and display in one place
slideshare	A place to share slide presentations on LinkedIn
Xobni	Link your Outlook email to LinkedIn – similar facilities are also part of the next release of Office.

Would tenders say anything without the banned words?

Just seen a post about a new list of 'banned words' that IdEA say shouldn't be used in public sector communications. The list builds on an earlier version here - trouble is for a lot of the tender we post if you removed these words they quite possibly wouldn't say anything at all!

Crowdsourcing for new ideas

As you might expect with a workshop on on-line marketing looming I've being doing some reading around to make sure I'm up to date on current thinking - and a phrase that's cropped up a number of times is 'crowd-sourcing'. Essentially, this is the idea that the more people you can get involved in solving a problem or designing something the more likely you are to hit on a novel and effective result. I'm a little sceptical of how useful this is as I think the quality of results will always depend on the quality of your crowd, but I do think there's real value for independent consultants and small businesses generally in tapping in to the ideas and knowledge of other people.

In many ways this is the main benefit of networking, whether on-line or face to face. Other people have different approaches to life and business and the more new people you meet and exchange ideas with, the more chance you have of coming up with your own new ideas. I'm often amazed at just how varied the businesses are that I come across at networking events - and the stories of how people decided what business to start. I also find that approaching events with the aim of listening to other people's stories is much less daunting than going with the aim of selling and is generally more productive anyway! 

We're very lucky at Skillfair to be able to use your collective experience and ideas to help us improve the service and come up with new ways to help you and other consultants. In that spirit we'd like to invite ideas for topics that you'd like to see covered at our conference in the autumn. It will be in London in November and we plan to use a similar format to last year, 3 or 4 short talks plus a variety of longer workshops, but we're really keen that the agenda should reflect the issues and problems you're interested in. So if you've seen a great speaker or have a topic that you think is worthy of a workshop session then please let us know

Why are consultants like old bananas?

No idea really why consultants are like bananas, but having raced back from picking up a sick teenager from school I got home just in time to be interviewed about consultants & freelancers fee rates on Radio Essex. Trying to compose my thoughtful and articulate comments I was slightly thrown to hear the presenter rattling through assorted uses for old bananas - including a slightly bizarre 'banana coat'!

Things got a little more serious when he started to introduce the subject and we covered all the thorny issues of working for yourself, finding clients, setting fees and the dreaded 'feast and famine' issue. It was nice to be able to promote the concept of freelancing as a useful means for businesses to access highly skilled people and hopefully any of you live in Essex and caught the broadcast won't have found me too embarrassing!

Skillfair members get higher rates than average

Having so much data to analyse from the fee survey last week, I didn't get round to checking the regional variations, so I've now added them to the detailed results. As last year, people who say that they work 'all over the UK' do better than anyone and the table is still topped by this category, London and the South East. What did surprise me though, was just how many people are truly mobile as this category made up well over 33% of the responses. More interesting still is the fact that Skillfair members report fee rates on average 11% more than the overall average!