The BBC has been following the owners of ten small firms throughout the year. From November to December, three of them gained confidence in their businesses. Two lost confidence and five felt about the same. So nine out of the ten owners rate their confidence at least a seven out of ten.
That’s great given the circumstances. They represent a range of business sectors and different regions in the UK. One is a hotelier on the Isle Of Wight.
Even what’s troubling the business owners is encouraging. Four of them were issues relating to banks, which is what so many people are trying to fix right now. One’s worried about finding qualified employees, which implies that his company will expand. Do you have similar issues to any of the business owners? How confident are you feeling? Let us know. Read more here
General
Business, Tourism
As mentioned in previous posts, there’s a great opportunity to promote your business using AdWords abroad, but, if your foreign language skills are like mine and limited to ordering coffee and beer then you’ll be pleased to know that Google can help.
Google has a free translation service at http://translate.google.com/?hl=en give it a try!
We use it for finding foreign key phrases to bid on too, it’s become an invaluable tool
Google doesn’t stop there either, remember, if someone from Germany (for example) does a search for your business, Google will offer an option in the results to translate your page into German, give it a try with your own company name, just go to http://www.google.de, do a search for your company and then click on “Google-Suche”, once you see the results, click on “Diese Seite übersetzen” to see the German version of your site!
A final note, Google can’t read any text in images so that bit won’t get translated!
Genießen Sie Ihr neues Spielzeug von Google!
Google
advertising, adwords, foreign, Google, overseas, Tourism
Many people don’t know that you can use Google AdWords to advertise your business on websites too
Rather than having people search for you, you can publish your Ads on other people’s websites, such as information sites, blogs and the likes, Google call this “The Content Network” and they deliver these Ads using something called AdSense, you may even be doing it already and not even know!
In September 2008 this got even more exciting (in a sad online marketing kind of way) as Google introduced it’s AdBuilder service in AdWords allowing you to make your own image based and animated Ads
Here’s an example of a site displaying these type of Ads (you can see that these are text Ads in this example at the top right)
Content Network / Adsense Example
You can also make a bit of money yourself by publishing AdSense on your website too
Google AdWords
adsense, advertising, adwords, Google, Tourism
Have you claimed your free local listing in Google?
Want to see your business in results like those below for free?
Results displayed in Google for a search for "Hotels in Cornwall"
Believe it or not, Google offer this as a free service to every business in the World
Not signed up to it already? what are you waiting for?
This is a great way to promote “bricks and mortar” businesses, and is especially good for tourist accommodation as well as local services
to sign up, go to Google’s Local Business Centre online at www.google.co.uk/local/add
Google Local, Google Maps
adwords, cornwall, free, Google, local, maps, Tourism
There’s still a huge opportunity to attract more business from abroad using Google AdWords that people just aren’t taking advantage of.
Creating new AdWords campaigns and targeting them at different geographic regions is one of the many ways you boost the amount of visitors to your website.
Many people are worrying about exchange rates, but don’t forget that this makes it particularly attractive now for customers overseas to buy from you
UK tourism related businesses (particularly accommodation) should see a big boost in the number of foreign visitors, but they wont make the best of it unless they start promoting themselves abroad now.
There’s a double bonus in that general key phrases are less competitive abroad and therefore cheaper, with that and the fact that it’s cheaper for foreign customers to buy from you and visit the UK, why not give it a go now?
Don’t forget you can bid on key phrases in different languages too!
Google AdWords
adwords, cornwall, foreign, Google, overseas, Tourism
