Business

I’ve been regular member of UK Business Forums for nearly 3 years now and in all that time have never noticed it being as busy as it is now.

Membership is up to 30, 600 plus, threads 60,000 plus, and posts 550,000 plus, last month saw the busiest day, with 1,286 people online and full membership now stands at 700 plus.

A search on google for Business Forums brings up over 34,000,000 results and there doesn’t seem to be a day go by without somebody setting up yet another one. Most start with a bit of a flourish but within a few weeks posts start to dwindle and users move on.

An exception to this appears to be the new Business Forum started by A1 Forums, it is just entering it’s 4 month of existence and a competition is being held to see who can guess the time and date that the 50,000th post will be made on the forum.

Membership has grown to just under 4,000 due in part to the shrewd acquisition of another popular UK Business Forum UK Small Business Forums and many of their existing members are finding that the relaxed, friendly atmosphere and the useful business advice at A1 Business Forum is encouraging them to participate more.

So when will the 50,000th post be made? It currently stands at just over 49,000, get over there now, sign up, and perhaps you could hold the honour of writing the 50,000th post and forever be in the hall of fame at what looks to be the most popular UK business forum.

I have recently found a nice site that offers small business advice and is especially useful to those who have recently started a small business or for those who are contemplating starting up.

It has various business articles, the one that caught my eye was talking about Marketing Ideas for New Businesses and how new businesses can overcome the problem of attracting initial customers.

 It is well work a look at, and is a site that I will be keeping my eyes on.

I don’t do a lot of work during the day and often spend my free time on Business Forums and SEO Forums.

Within the past few months one of the forums I regularly visit has for some reason been having problems with members arguing and bickering and it just doesn’t seem as friendly  or as useful as it has in the past.

Whilst paying a visit there today, someone had posted about a number of members being banned because they were now members of a new forum A1 Business Forums the name of the forum wasn’t mentioned in the post, but it was easy to find.

I called in to have a look this evening and it reminded me of all what was good at the original forum, there were a lot of familiar names there, the business categories were all set up nicely, it appears to have a nice mix of off-topic and time-out categories too. The information already posted looks very useful to small UK businesses and the people there all appear to be very knowledgeable.

All in all it looks like it could be a thriving community of small business owners, entrepreneurs, business mentors, sole traders, self employed people and just anyone in general. Well worth a visit.

I set up my 3rd demonstation section on my Products Showcase site last night, this time for VikingKids an online store who specialse in selling Childrens clothing from Scandinavia.

The important thing when setting up pages like this is to ensure everything is approved before going online and that the content used is unique and not just copied and pasted from another source.

To achieve this I aks whoever Iam setting the showcase up for to send me some images and the content they would like displayed. I emphasise it must be unique content, are not too worried if it is similar to the information they have on their own site just as long as it is not just a straight word for word copy.

This is a free service whilst in the beta stage, after that I will review how things are working and then maybe open it up to all people who register in my main Business Directory

During the day I spend a lot of my time on Usenet or visiting SEO Forums and Business Forums, rather than just bookmarking the ones I regularly visit I set them all up on a page within UKSBD and just go to them from there.

This gave me the idea of creating my list of Top 10 Business Forums which I did about 12 months ago. After a recent discussion in one of the top UK forums UKBF I have now updated my list to include more details about each forum. I now provide a brief description, stats about members, threads, posts etc. and a few other details.

I will also be expanding the list and are accepting requests from forum owners to be listed, all those that meet my approval are listed completely free of charge.

I recently built a new website for company who clear Blocked Drains in Lonon.

Quite a simple site consisting of a homepage, contact page and an  areas covered page. The company Capital Drainage have been operating in the East London area since 1988 and provide fully trained engineers and technicians to ensure you receive a high quality service with the minimul level of disruption.

Capital Drainage also operate in other areas of London and The South East and can be contacted via the form on the new website or by ringing on their Freephone number 0800 731 5484

Over the past months I have had problems with other directories and marketing companies abusing my data and taking advantage of the small businesses who register in my directory.

The other day I set up a honeypot listing using fake details and my own telephone number. Within 5 minutes of registering I had received my first cold call and by the end of the day had received 3 other calls.

To make life harder for these cold callers I came up with an idea of no longer displaying telephone numbers and adding a pop up box to reveal the number, whilst doing this I had an idea, I set up a unique statcounter just to reveal how many people were clicking to find telephone numbers.

At the end of the day I went through my stats chacking for the same IP numbers  regularly clicking on different numbers.  From this, it looks like I have at least 3 big companies regularly scanning my directory, a couple of smaller companies, and a well known marketing company, who I cannot name.

I have now removed numbers temporarily to stop the cold callers harrasing people, and will be emailing all businesses registered to warn them about the tactics these cold callers are using.

I set up a very small highy targeted AdWords campaign last week, very niche but with a cost per click around the £1.00 mark.

On the landing page I obviously have the product, some info and a telephone number which is set up to receive calls about the product.

Who should call the number today? A Lycos representative trying to get me to take out sponsored advertising with them. So not only did I have the experience of hearing the terrible sales pitch (to a TPS registered phone number) I also probably got charged for the rep clicking my AdWords ad.