FREE Business Resources
Here's our selection of FREE packages that some of our members are using to help them with the 7 P's of business. Planning, Promotion, Product, Pricing, Preparation, Presentation, Process
Free website
BT Tradespace has been going for over two years now (since April 2007) and what started out as a bunch of web heads (albeit BT ones) wanting to show the world how great social media can be for business has now turned into a thriving online community of people who want to love what they buy and know the people they buy from. file://www.bttradespace.com/
Getting British Businesses Online
The British government has teamed up with Google with the aim of getting 100,000 businesses online in 2010. For FREE you can create yourself a basic website, with a FREE .co.uk domain name and FREE hosting for two years. They're not great, but they're a start and they're FREE. Just go to http://www.gbbo.co.uk/
Free Business Cards
Vistaprint: Your business card will be usually one of the first items you buy for starting your business, here Vista print are offering some bargain's to get you started. Read more here
Create a Free Google webpage
It's easy and free to create your business presence online. You might already find your business listing on Google, but did you know you can enhance it with photos, coupons, a detailed description of your business and more? Read more about Google webpage
Network online!
Linked In: Over 65 million professionals use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas and opportunities, Linkedin is the online community for businesses and is easy to use. http://www.linkedin.com/
Check out how your competition's websites are doing
Alexa.com: will show how popular the site is compared to yours, including Research, Page views and more.
http://alexa.com/siteinfo
Google Keyword Tool
How many people are looking for your products and services online?
Google keyword tool: is the perfect way to look at how many people are searching for your product on the internet it looks at search results locally and globally. It will also help you forecast how many potential sales you may have if you take a realistic half to 1% of that market or less.
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
Free Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective way to reach your customers and keep them up to date with what you and your company are doing. Both have good tutorials and are easy to use.
Mailchimp is free for the first 3000 emails that you send out http://www.mailchimp.com/why-mailchimp
Constant Contact is free for 60 days http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp
Bogged down by Tax and VAT- don't be!
HMRC run workshops throughout the year to give you the low down on becoming self employed, payments, self assessment, paying employees, online filing and more...
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/index.htm
Keep Your Business Up to Date
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Takes less than 1 minute to do! http://www.google.com/alerts
Free Press Release Sites
There are a number of press release sites where you can post your release for free. Here is a list of a few that will get you started, some may want you to include a link to their site but others are ok. Later some may want you to upgrade your membership, however see how it works for you!
http://www.nationalprwire.com/
http://www.free-news-release.com/
You may be interested in submitting an article to raise your public profile or you may want some quality articles to boost the content of your website, while we can't recommend any particular site its worth you having a look around them.
http://www.articlesfactory.com/