Recession - Act Now

The Recession – Now is the time to act!

This article is the third in the series, and follows on from The recession- a great opportunity? and The recession-what an opportunity

The first article was an attempt to put you in the right frame of mind to succeed. If you don’t believe you can succeed, you won’t. The first article showed how easy it is to set up a small business, with little or no capital. With the current climate you have very little chance of borrowing from you bank, but it always worth a try. There are other ways of raising capital if you have to. There are grants available from many organisations. A search of the internet will reveal some of these, in additions some local authorities will help with premises, and business rate reductions. Your local Business Link and local Chamber of Commerce will help by pointing you in the right direction, and information can also be obtained from your local library. If everything else fails try friends and family, you never know, you might even end up with a partner.
Your bank is still the first place to try, even though they may not lend you any money, they do provide some support, and a lot of literature which can be helpful. You will need a business plan and a profit and loss forecast as well as a cash flow forecast, and a projection on turnover. Your research will give you some indication of what these figures should be. The second article dealt with forecasting your turnover and cash flow.

Your Website - Free Website

There are lots of people who advertise free websites. There isn’t such a thing as a free web site. The majority of those who offer free sites, end up plastering your site with adverts, and you have to close it down. Some even advertise on top of your content, so it is not readable, or fill your site with your competitor’s adverts. Nobody does anything for free! RFT Express has several sites hosted with one ‘FREE’ server, and that is ‘Doteasy’. This is free for life, no adverts[ apart from, if you use any of the free extras such as a CONTACT FORM,] you can check the extent of the advertising on our contact form or on our blog, we also have a blog hosted by Doteasy which automatically feeds each new post direct to our facebook. So we get two extra independent blogs for free, and good links by Google.[ links are how your site is found, Google is the biggest search engine in the world] If you can be found in Google, all the other search engine and directories can also find you, and they will also list your site.

Doteasy make their money on what you pay to register your site, in our case http://rftexpresscouriers.co.uk. We have an independent company checking the ‘down time’ that’s the time the server is down, so far it has been zero over the last 5 years, and they also check the loading time of the home page, which varies with traffic between 0.12 and 0.2 seconds. There may be better deals out there, so far I haven’t found one, if you have, let me know.
A web site lifts your business, generates business, and inspires confidence in your customers. It is something you should have. A website can produce all your business, but it is better designed to run along side other marketing methods, such as local advertising, sponsorship, cold calling, email campaigns, and good old fashioned referrals.
Your website needs to be optimised for the search engines you are targeting. Invariably it is best to optimise your site for your local area. There are many SEO [Search engine Optimisation] companies out there. A site optimised for Google, MSN, Yahoo and Altavista will ensure maximum cover. An example is one of our new sites we optimised for the Yorkshire area. RFT Express Parcels this site went live 69 days ago, and has only 750 back links. If you tap into Google.com search engine, the term ‘Yorkshire Parcel Courier’ You will see it is number 1 in the map section, and the top three in the organic listings. The links in the yellow boxes are paid adverts. This is Search Engine Optimisation.

rftexpresscouriers.co.uk was optomised for the Yorkshire area, but we got so many cutomers from all over Britain and Europe, we decided we should optomise for a larger area. Originally we had intended to optomise for the UK at the start of 2010, but if you type in Google.com the words 'M1 Shuttle' you will see it comes out top in virtually every country. If you type in Hanging Garment deliveries, you will see it comes very near the top in google in the UK, and most of the countries in Europe., thats all within 5 months of the site going live, helped by 35,500 backlinks from Google and countless numberes from all the search engines following Google. Use the chineses search engine BAIDU and you will see how far it has spread.

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Article by Vic Farron : staff writer for RFT Express