2014: the Year of the Entrepreneur!

Time is really ticking by now and I'm starting to wind things down for this year.

I wanted to wish all of my lovely friends and followers a very Happy Christmas: I hope you use it well to relax with family and friends and recharge your batteries.

I'm not sure why but I'm very excited about 2014; I think it's going to be year when we see real growth in our economy after some pretty dire and dismal years since the Crash in 2008.  Thank goodness; we can all start to breathe a little now.

Elizabeth Assaf was visiting the Britsh Museum the other day where she attended a SME Summit hosted by The Times newspaper and Santander, the first summit of its kind which supports growing SMEs. 

In her article for the the Huffington Post a few days ago she spoke of Nick Wheeler, from Charles Tyrwhitt Shirts, who gave a very positive talk and urged businesses to forge ahead despite set-backs.  He ought to know; he lost £70,000 in his first year of business and went bust twice.  Despite this is now runs an incredibly successful business. 

Shaa Wasmund, founder of Smarta, believes that 2014 will see the rise and rise of VISUAL social media on platforms such as YouTube.  Personally I'm also thinking of Vimeo and those little Vine video clips I talked about a few months back in a blog post.

What was even more encouraging was that James Caan talked about 2014 as "a perfect opportunity to invest and grow". 

Although Sir Richard Branson wasn't in attendance at the Summit, he has nevertheless spoken of 2014 as being the "year of the entrepreneur" in a recent blog post on LinkedIn

Who am I to argue with the likes of Branson & Caan?

On that note I want to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a fabulous start to the New Year.

We'll be back here on 2nd January 2014.

See you then! 

Nicky

Are you Killing your Website and Driving Away Business Leads?

Is your website driving away business leads by poor design and bad implementation of social media? 

We may think that we all have fabulous websites but, in fact, if you try and look at your own as objectively as you can, you may find that you need to make some tweaks here and there.

Optimise your Website

I thought I'd share this presentation with you this morning as it's incredibly informative (unsurprisingly as it's from HubSpot!)

It's also a great example of just how you can use VISUAL social media to engage more with your followers and how effective images can be in getting a message across.

So I hope you enjoy the Slideshare presentation.  If so, please feel free to share with your friends and, if possible, please leave a little +1 in the box below.

Thanks!


10 Lethal Reasons Most Websites Fail from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software

Content Marketing Predictions for 2014

Christmas is approaching and soon after that the New Year.  So what will be new and exciting in respect of social media and marketing in 2014?

I think it's quite exciting to read various predictions from the experts about what is going to be breaking new ground in 2014 and what is going to be taking a bit more of a back seat (Facebook perhaps?)

I hope you find the following article by Andrew Jessop informative and interesting. It's called "Online Content Marketing Trends to look out for in 2014".  

I'm pretty excited myself with regards to Andrew's top two predictions about Google+ and visual social media. in general  Remember the short blog post I wrote about those little "Vine" videos you can use to make your Twitter feeds more visual?  You'll be seeing a lot more of those next year, together with other visual apps. 

 

Happy reading everyone and, as always, if you've enjoyed this article please feel free to share it and perhaps put a little +1 in the box below.

Thanks!

Grow your Business, Cut Costs: Hire a Virtual Assistant! [INFOGRAPHIC]

Today was all about explaining the benefits to any business of hiring a virtual assistant ... and infographics!

I hope you find this post to be helpful.  I shall be sharing more about VISUAL SOCIAL MEDIA and INFOGRAPHICS later this week so check back here to get an update.  In the meantime, click on the link below to find out WHAT, WHY and HOW about hiring a virtual assistant ...

Virtual Assistant Infographic

For a list of the skills and services our Virtual Assistants can offer your business click over to Everyday Virtuoso