Enterprise Mastermind interviews Emma Jones of Enterprise Nation

1. Introduce yourself

Hello! My name is Emma Jones and I’m founder of Enterprise Nation, the home business company.

2. What is Enterprise Nation?

Enterprise Nation is a company dedicated to helping anyone who is starting and growing a business from home. We host the home business website at www.enterprisenation.com, manage the Home Business Awards and produce the annual Home Business Report. I brought out a book in May called ‘Spare Room Start Up – how to start a business from home’ so I suppose you could say home business is well and truly our business!

3. What gave you the idea for starting Enterprise Nation?

The idea for Enterprise Nation was borne out of personal experience. After 5 years working for a big international accountancy firm, I left at the age of 27 to start a business from my spare room in a Manchester apartment. Within the space of 2 years I had started, grown and sold that business so started to think ‘what next?’ – I could see that many more people were starting up at home yet there was no place for them to turn. That was the start of planning for Enterprise Nation. We researched the market and planned for 2 years before launching the site in January 2006. It’s gone on to become the most popular site of its kind; a free resource for anyone starting and growing a business from home. Visitors enjoy the lively features, webchats, free e-news and … meeting each other in the forums.

4. How important do you rate the internet for a new home business and why?

The internet is, in a word, critical for new home based businesses. The Internet is used in the start-up phase to research markets, competitors and partners and, in the growth phase to keep costs low and sales and productivity high. Without the Internet we wouldn’t have online stores or tools like Skype, Basecamp and Salesforce.com that are the foundations for so many home based businesses. The Internet (and advances in technology in general) has been a key factor in the dramatic increase in the number of people avoiding the daily commute and working from home.

5. What is your top tip for business on the web?

My top tip for business on the web is to keep your eyes and ears open at all times. To always be on the look-out for new ideas, opportunities, customers and technologies that will help push your business to the next level. This is all the information we aim to provide on www.enterprisenation.com so tied in to this tip is the suggestion to visit my site!

Enterprise Mastermind interviews Ian Blackford from BloggingRocket.com

1. Introduce yourself

Hi I’m Ian Blackford from www.bloggingrocket.com and by day I’m a website designer and by night I’m a blogger – except, the two do tend to overlap a little at the moment. I’ve been a website designer for almost 10 years, ever since the time when almost over night I saw a major drop in the graphic and print jobs that were coming in and an increased interest in the ‘Information Super Highway’ (as it was called then). It was around November 1999 that I settled down with an early copy of DreamWeaver and a HTML book and just started learning from scratch. There was no looking back really and I went self employed about five years ago.

2. What is Blogging Rocket?

Blogging Rocket is a recent thing for me, I’m a WordPress fan, the way it punches the search engines in the stomach and says ‘Come and look at my pages’ always impresses me, so it was obvious to me that if I was to start blogging WordPress should be my niche topic. There are hundreds of other sites out there covering blogging but they are mainly focused on how to make money from blogging, but unless you can set WordPress up right you won’t get very far. Blogging Rocket was launched (pun intended) to help people set up their WordPress blog correctly from the start, first time and so far it’s been a success.

3. How did you get into using blogs?

This is an interesting story. As a web designer in my day job I have had clients ring me unhappy with their search engine placement, I explain to them that there could be many reasons but namely: lack of copy, lack of promotion or the site being neglected etc. So it came as a real bolt from the blue when a client of mine rang me late on a Sunday evening in a mad panic. The site that I was developing for them, which hadn’t gone live, and was not linked to from anywhere was firmly in the Google listings. Never in all my years of working on design projects had I ever had a client unhappy with success like this.

To be fair to this client the project was supposed to be hush hush and was scheduled for a ‘launch’ not just quietly ‘going live’. So I had to try and work out what had happened because I knew there was no Google sitemap yet, I hadn’t submitted it to the search engines and I had done no promotion of it at all. This was the first project I had worked on where WordPress was being used, so I wasn’t completely up to speed with all the settings and I had missed the setting in the wp-admin that said ‘Block all search engines’. Even though I had done my best efforts to hide the site, unknown to me it had announced itself and the search engine loved it.

The realisation of this converted me in that second to using blogs as websites.

4. Why would you advocate using a blog for someone’s business website?

In my example above the site I was developing wasn’t actually a ‘blog’ as we know them to be. My client needed to be able to admin the site themselves and they didn’t have the budget for me to write a bespoke back end system for them. WordPress has a fabulous admin system and was therefore a perfect choice.

When working with a WordPress blog as a website you first of all turn off all the commenting options. Then with a little theme hacking you can remove the date, author and comment reporting code and make the site look for all intents and purposes like a normal website. So now you have a dynamic website that has an admin interface which announces its content to the search engines for you. It is a fantastic base to build on, and it gets results!

5. What is your top tip for business on the web?

Getting your website online is just the tip of the iceberg, don’t assume that just because your site is live that you will magically get orders and enquiries. There is one killer tip that will work for you time and time again and it’s extremely simple: Tell people what you do and how it can benefit them. Honestly it really is that simple. Do it at every opportunity, get the word out about what you do and impress the benefit of your product and service, forget saying “We do this… we can do that…” start saying “The benefits for you include…” Use your new site as a tool and change the way you promote your business.