Business Bricks

Local note: I just plotted a clickable map of who’s who in The Brighton Cluster (using the Google Maps API). We’ve also fixed the details for our first meet-up: Wed 14 June 6-9pm at The Robin Hood pub, Brighton BN1 2PF. Email us if you can make it (and include your postcode, so we can add you to the map).

Who cares about the FTSE 100? I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of picking up newspapers with business sections that rent half their column inchage to FTSE 100 news (low mileage journalism, E14 to EC4 = 3.8mi) and the other half to media business (editors like to write about other editors). What about the FTSE 4,xxx,xxx? (very approx. number of 1-10 person self-funded micro businesses in the UK). Or am I reading the wrong papers?

Take the Gunning-Fog website readability test (thx, Stuart Bruce). Can you beat our 7.56?

I won’t write much here, but - and this explains why I’ve been awol from this blog the last few days - we have news: a bellisimo baby girl we’ve called Poppy - born by emergency c-section* at 5.27am on Fri 19 May in Brighton, and weighing in at 6lb 8oz. *her umbilical cord was about 1/3 the length it’s supposed to be, so instead of Jo’s contractions dilating the cervix, they were sort of yo-yoing Poppy up and down some canal or other. We have pictures of varying blurredness, taken mainly in theatre by the anaesthetist (sp?) and of young Pop surrounded by her inappropriate toys, Shaaark and Lenny. If you click on the photos, they enlarge. We’re home now, and I’m taking paternity leave on demand (a bit like feed on demand, and a perk of being self-employed/ work from home) for the next however many weeks.

I’ve started putting together a short style guide on how to write how you speak (see previous post). About half of what follows I bastardised from George Orwell’s “economy of words” blueprint: [i] “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” On average, we use longer words when we write than when we speak. [ii] “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” [iii] If you’re stuck, shut down the word doc you’re working on and start again, from scratch, in an email (putting the name of a close friend in the “To:” field can help). [iv] Turn your nouns into verbs. [v] “Never use the passive where you can use the active.” Er, I found a good explanation of this here. [vi] Don’t be afraid to use strings like “um”, “er”, and “hmmm”. They might be fillers, but fillers help conversations run smoothly. [vii] With this school of writing, punctuation and syntax are there to describe how you speak, not to prescribe how you write.

The thing some people miss about word-of-mouth and word-of-mouse is that if you don’t buy any advertising or do any PR whatsoever i.e. if you rely wholly on word-of-mou(th)(se) - it makes every new customer/ reader/ fan think (s)he’s had an invite to join. cf. Popbitch - about the best e.g. of this I can think of, and Paddi Lund the Dentist - about the second best. Incidentally, this week’s thing that I believe is true, even though I cannot prove it: customers that join via these kinds of implicit invites are, on average, at least five times as profitable. Er, discuss.

I’m trying to compile a quick and miscellaneous list of what works and what doesn’t when advertising w/ Google AdWords: a Google AdWords Cheat Sheet, if you like. What’s weird here is that there doesn’t seem to be much of an existing pool of knowledge from advertisers - plenty of how-to essays, but few real-life examples or shared anecdotes. I was looking for stuff like: My First Day As An AdWords Advertiser, Google AdWords for Wineries: How NOT to do it, and The Google AdWords Happening. But so far, that’s about all I’ve got. Can you help?

Don’t just cut your site in half, cut it to one-page

Line of the moment: “Make sure your website is obviously run by and for humans”. Source: reid’s comment, #5 on this post. This isn’t just a throwaway line. I’m no futurist, but it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s a big gape opening between sites that are humanised and sites that are dehumanised. As usual, I blame SEO. How to be human? Write how you speak. Learn how to use photos. And let your users read/ write, not just read.