The innovative party was planned by the company to demonstrate how businesses can use emerging technology to cut business running costs while adding new and exciting ways of promoting their businesses.

The party began at 12.30 on Tuesday (29th July) when a link was published on the old UKNetWeb site. Guests were told to go to the company website, UKNetWeb.com and follow the on-screen instructions to enter a virtual room.

On entering the room, guests could select their own music from a selection of preloaded tracks and carry out conversations with other attendees via on screen text based chat. At 1.00pm Managing Director, Toby Parkins, made a speech to the room where he introduced the new site and recession guide.

All guests were given an opportunity to introduce themselves to the room, following a similar structure to conventional face to face networking events. Guests came from all over Cornwall and further afield, with at least one international guest signing in from an Icelandic advertising agency.

The launch of the new site and recession guide was well received with over 300 people accessing the site and over 150 downloads of the recession guide within the 24 hour period after the launch.

Toby Parkins, MD, UKNetWeb

Managing Director, Toby Parkins said, “The possibilities opened up by emerging technology offers exciting prospects for businesses that want to cut costs and attract new sales. This launch party demonstrated that there are alternatives to travel and we hope that businesses will adopt some of the ideas within the guide to help them through more difficult times.”

“Since the event we have been inundated with interest in similar events. It seems everyone who attended has been telling their friends about it and now there is a real buzz for more virtual events to be organised.” Toby continued.

The new website can be found at www.uknetweb.com with the recession guide available for download at www.uknetweb.com/recession-guide.

Even if you haven’t noticed any effect on your business just yet, it is clear that all the talk is having an affect on consumer confidence and eventually the results will be felt by many businesses.

Now is the time to take stock of your business and implement changes to your processes that will lead to increased revenue and higher profitability. After all, the worst that can happen from taking action now will be better profits at the end of the year.

So, assuming that we are heading into rockier times, who will be the first businesses to feel the effects?

Go to the next page to find out some of the areas that can expect a downturn.

Well there a number of different areas that the use of good technology can bring about benefits to your business and it’s bottom line. To make it simple we have broken down the areas into the following list or sections to be covered within this guide:

• Improving Efficiency
• Marketing Effectively
• Cutting the Costs of Communication

Each section provides you with our take on how technology could aide your business during troubled times. Where possible we have provided links to more information, advice and tools.

Over the coming days, weeks and months we will continue to build on these areas with information on how to set up any systems referenced, as well as any additional uses for the tools available.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to our RSS Feed or go to www.uknetweb.com/keepmeposted and sign up for email updates.

The first stage in solving this imbalance is to sit down and evaluate your internal processes, time spent on various areas and the income generated from each activity. Once you have undertaken these evaluations of your efficiency, consider some of the following as means to further improve efficiency

• Have a Plan
• Automate Processes
• Stock Management
• Time Management

Take time to sit down and evaluate where you are, where you want to get to and what you are going to do to get there. During the process try and establish firm goals for your business such as; increase customer base by 10% or cut costs by 20%.

By having a plan you can ensure that you are on track at any stage of the process. You can set down at the beginning exactly what you are going to do and then ensure that you stick to it, making minor tweaks as appropriate.

If you don’t know where to start consider the ISO 9001 process as a possibility. The process of acquiring ISO 9001 accredited status forces a business to take stock of internal processes, setting down on paper each process for use by anyone in the organisation.

Once you have your processes on paper look at how you could go about automating them. It may be that you could put in place technology to handle the process or processes for you, freeing up valuable time spent doing routine tasks.

At the most simplest end this could be using a mail merge to send out customer invoices, and at the other, it could involve bespoke programming added to the back of your website, handling all supplier and customer relationships.

As an example, one client of UKNetWeb had an e-commerce store with over 25,000 products from 150 different suppliers. They regularly spent six days a week on processing orders and dealing with suppliers. After analysing the processes and developing a custom back-end system we were able to reduce the six days down to one.

These applications can vary in quality with some offering higher levels of integration with other business systems than others. Ensuring that your package can work hand in hand with your website or accounting system can drive efficiency and cut costs.

These systems will alleviate many of the associated costs of carrying out manual stock counts, dealing with administrative errors and time lost from stock outs.

Whether your business is online or not, a good stock management system is an investment for your business that will continue to show a return for many years after its original implementation.

Time management software does exactly what it says on the tin – help you manage your time. By tracking and recording how time is spent you can see where you are wasting time and more importantly what activities actually benefit your business.

There are numerous packages on the market, from simple one user editions to full enterprise editions running across multiple machines or locations. The one we use here at UKNetWeb tracks time by the minute, has space for adding costs and expenses, has multiple users, has various task and client levels and a good set of wizards for generating reports for a range of factors.

The screenshot below shows the type of system we use, you can find out more about the package here.

If you’re just starting out in business, or act as a freelance consultant, it may be worth looking at some of the free packages available on the web. There are a number of free or low cost services to choose from here.

The key to success in more troubling times is to work hard to attract a larger share of the market followed by aggressive retention strategies to ensure that you retain those new customers.

With the rise of digital marketing, and the growth of online tools such as social media and social networking sites, there are now many opportunities for businesses to promote their business without breaking the bank.

Areas covered in this section include:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• The Rise of the Blog
• Email Marketing
• Social Networking including Facebook Pages, Advertising and Networking

One major area to consider if you have a website, and let’s face it most of us do, is search engine optimisation (SEO).

There are two forms of SEO to consider; natural search listings and pay per click. The first of these is driven by a number of factors relating to a mysterious algorithm used by major search engine, Google. The second is a pay for service where companies bid for clicks on keywords or phrases associated with their business.

Chances are you have received literally hundreds of spam emails and telesales calls from agencies promising to get you to the top of Google but don’t be fooled! Unless you operate in a niche market, work within a small specified boundary or have a massive advertising budget, getting to the top of Google is not an easy task.

You need to start the process of optimising your site by making a list of all the words and phrases people are likely to associate with your business. Include all the variations you can think of and play around with regional identifiers as well i.e. soap, organic soap, natural soap, beauty products, soap Cornwall, soap UK. If you get stuck try out Google’s Keyword Tool.

Once you have your list, you need to start working out the competition for each of these words or phrases, after all, the phrase may attract 1,000 hits a day but there could also be 2,000 companies fighting for each and every one. The best way to track the number of searches performed against the competition for each word or phrase is to use a service such as Wordtracker which collates searches and the competition for them.

So now you have the list, what next?

This list of keywords or phrases now forms the backbone of your SEO strategy. They can be used to target customers through pay per click or written into the content of your site to improve your natural rankings. Further still, they may even affect the structure of your site with you deciding to dedicate whole pages or sections or your site to a particular area highlighted as a good search term.

The benefit of the SEO approach to marketing your business is that it gives you tangible, measurable results to analyse. This will mean having a suitable tracking code installed on your site, such as Google Analytics, which not only tells you how people arrived at your site by keywords or phrases but also how long they spent there, where they went, who referred them and much more.

This section is only an introduction to the subject of SEO. It is a big area on its own and you should take time to study the process in more depth if you plan to carry out the work yourself. Alternatively, you should consider hiring the services of a professional SEO consultant; recognised by Google and carrying the ‘Google Adwords Qualified Company’ mark shown above.