Sell yourself on YouTube!
Went to the Business Link Entrepreneur Awards on Wednesday (18th July) night and was nominated by Science City York for the Young Entrepreneur Category, I was one of three finalists, didn’t actually win but pretty pleased Artstop has been recognised as an upcoming creative business. Good chance to network with about 140 like-minded people, which is so important to a young business.
I’m not doing badly on a local level thanks to a good amount of regional press coverage, but ideally would like to get a bit more targeted national coverage now. The product I’m offering is a fairly specific high-end luxury product and to generate enough business I need to sell nationally.
I think one way I’m interested in going to help promote my company is getting in on this new wave of internet marketing, which really helps portray your business as alive, changing and developing. I’ve been on a few useful training courses recently, one on ‘Press and PR’ run by Business Link that included a lot of really helpful stuff on working with media online, and another run by Sandford Technology on Web 2.0. It was about the potential in the new generation of web users that are accustomed to using the Internet to connect with people and express themselves through sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook.
It’s becoming apparent that the next generation of business owners and buyers are currently teenagers and considerably familiar with using such systems; they’re very proactive, spend a lot of time online information seeking, and want an active online environment. Therefore you need to gear your website towards them, perhaps using systems like the tag clouds first used on the Flickr website where there are no menus just lots of words that link to different places.
I think it’s really important to go on these courses, because the online world is changing so fast you need to keep up with it to keep your business interesting. I’ve already got a Gmail account and do use MySpace but probably haven’t exploited it as much as I could because it’s maybe not so relevant to my product. There is one site that is like a Facebook for businesses, LinkedIn that I think could be worth investigating.
In the light of this over the next year I’m going to try and redevelop my website to really take account of this new style. One word of warning though, I think while there needs to be a lot of different information available on your website and especially links to information living on other websites, you have to be careful not to just put everything on and confuse the user. The idea is that they come away enthused and clear, and then you know you have really succeeded.
