On April 16th last, Leitrim County Enterprise Board hosted a course on drawing up and sending press releases that will be noticed above others.

Today, I read some useful advice from Adam Maguire on this very topic.

With help from Reverb Studios, we have now set up an online discussion forum to discuss business related topics. We encourage you to register and  start dusicssions on topics of your choice and/or take part in existing discussions.

If you need any assistance with using this forum, please contact me.

From Patricia O’Hara of mycounty.ie

CD Business Card v Business Card……is it worth what I assume is the extra expense?

From Mary Dolan at Carrick on Shannon Chamber of Commerce..

Do you think that a street presence (office, shop) is necessary for a business or is work-from-home replacing it as ‘companies’ become more single proprietor based?

Do you have a business related question you would like answered or a topic you would like discussed? If so, send it to me and I will post it here as part of The Experience Club.

I will then invite network members for their input i.e. by leaving comments.

Experience Club Information

I’ve known about blogging for a couple of years now but only fully understood what it was and what benefit it could be to me last autumn.

Since then I’ve caught the blogging bug and now do it regularly. I used to write a lot as a younger man, mostly short stories, poems and songs but had lost the ability over the years, now I’m finding it again and re-kindling my love of writing through the blog.

From a business point of view, I’ve noticed that it has benefited my business greatly. There are roughly twice the number of visitors to my blog versus my main site and I’ve just recently gained a google rank of 4 after being on 3 for way too long! I attribute this to the blog, so its a great way to get your website noticed in google.

See my blog here

Leon

Experience Club Information

Top Ten Tips for building a national web portal.

1. Ensure your developer understands what your looking for.

2. When building your site make sure you have access to it to make changes etc (called a content management system “cms”)

3. Make sure your URLs are search engine friendly i.e do not contain any question marks.

4. If you are planning to sell or charge online use a secured services e.g Realex, Paypal etc

5. Update new content on a regular basis.

6. Use analytics to monitor progress e.g Google analytics

7. Google also have a “webmasters tools” which will show you broken links, short meta tags, missing titles etc.

8. Get your site listed on Internet directories to improve rank.

9. Use Google adwords to improve weak keywords.

10. Be patient there are millions of websites and search engines may take time to acknowledge that your site is providing unique and invaluable information.

“Always imagine your website as a business card in a box with 1000 others. People will take the first few from the top of the box and will call the ones that explain the services they provide in the most efficient way.”

So always ensure that

1. You can be found in the top of the box.

2. The information you provide is displayed in a simple but efficient way.

Martin

Slideshare allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations to your website and share them with others. See a basic sample I have added below. It is a very useful way for training companies for example to embed their presentations in their websites and visitors will now have to download large PowerPoint files. Also, Slideshare protects your presentations from ‘cut & paste’ plagiarism.

| View | Upload your own

As part of the Leitrim Business Network, I would like to start what I call an Experience Club (learn from each other). This stems from a blog post I wrote here a while back about spam email. This post received 13 comments from people sharing their experience and knowledge about dealing with spam. The need for this idea was also reiterated by the cost saving items we discussed at our last network meeting.

Contributors (network members who share) will be asked to tell their story on an ‘experience gained‘ or ‘lesson learned‘ basis and in return will receive recognition for their input and exposure for their business.

Stories will be short and to the point and will not be used if they are just a sales pitch for the contributor’s business.

If you would like to be a contributor to this experience club, please drop me an email – johnnyREMOVE@leitrimenterprise.ie.