You’re a small or micro business owner about to meet a new client, so where do you meet them? Do you invite them to your home office, or do you arrange a meeting at a coffee shop? Is a coffee shop a professional place to meet?

Unless you have a home office which is self-contained with a separate entrance from the rest of your home, choose the coffee shop every time. Your client doesn’t want to see your living room, or your personal possessions, photos, pets or kids’ toys. Nor should you want them to see them. It’s different if it’s a long-term client and you’ve got to know each other pretty well, but first impressions count.

You want your new contact’s attention to be on you: how you present yourself and your business. Likewise you want to concentrate on them, not worry about whether your new contact noticed that mark on the wall or that stain on the carpet.

That’s where a neutral location such as a coffee shop is an ideal place to meet, and these days meeting at coffee shops is increasingly a professional option for many of us.

All coffee shops, however, are not created equal. Having said that, it’s hard these days to get truly awful coffee in Australia. Most baristas know their stuff, and if you frequent a particular coffee shop and can be confident that its service is always excellent and the coffee hot and delicious, you have probably found a good place for regular meetings.

Bear noise in mind. Most cafes these days have wooden or polished concrete floors, and the very hip places eschew all window coverings. It’s going to be noisy. Even if the coffee is good, you’re going to shout to make yourself heard, particularly if there’s music playing too. Sometimes it’s quieter to sit outdoors if the weather is favourable and outdoor seating is available.  If your favourite place is also the favourite place of mothers with babies and small children, you might consider finding another location or choosing a time when you know it’s quieter.

Find a place with free wifi if possible – and there are plenty about. Most of us use our mobile devices with cellular coverage anyway, but your contact may bring a laptop and want to show you something which requires internet access. If your contact didn’t bring an internet dongle, having free wifi to hand is a boon. (Be a little wary however – don’t use free wifi at coffee shops to access sensitive sites such as your online banking.)

Coffee shops are ideal places to hold informal meetings and shorter meetings. If you think your meeting is going to go for more than one hour, consider other locations – or be prepared to buy another round of coffee! If your client has an office, arrange to meet there instead. You may be able to book a meeting room in your local library (particularly if you are in the not-for-profit sector). Other alternatives include renting a serviced office meeting room or hotel meeting room – these are obviously costly options, and you will need to factor in the value of overall business your new contact can bring to you.

Increasingly however, we are all using coffee shops to do business. Most business meetings I attend with clients and potential clients take place in cafes. And you know, there’s an added bonus to this: by meeting in a coffee shop, you’re also helping the local economy.

Mine’s a mocha. Thanks.

Next time you get newsletters from fellow small business owners, scroll down to the bottom and check what software was used to develop or send them. Increasingly, you’ll find they are being developed and sent using MailChimp.

Until the last few years sending an email marketing campaign was costly for micro business owners. It was a tool used mainly by larger SMEs and big business. You’d pay a setup fee, a monthly fee, a fee per email…  Along came MailChimp, which offers a free service. If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers, right now you can send up to 12,000 emails a month.

With MailChimp you can select from a range of templates which can be customised fairly easily to match your corporate look. The system will even visit your website and grab your colour scheme. You can customise the code further to create a truly unique template, too. For the beginner, a few clicks will provide you with a smart-looking template which complements your website and branding.

You can track click throughs, see whose email bounced and why, and you can be assured your email campaigns will comply with the CAN-SPAM laws. MailChimp takes its security very seriously, and your subscriber lists are totally private. They are for your eyes only. You can further protect your list by using AlterEgo authentication, which makes logging into MailChimp a two-step process with an additional passcode.

The snag for some people is that your emails will have the MailChimp logo at the bottom. Even if you are on a paid plan.

If you don’t like the idea of emails with an email marketing company’s logo on them going out under your company name, you can run your own newsletter from your WordPress site, using plugins such as Newsletter. Like MailChimp, Newsletter allows new users to opt in via a form on your website and existing users to unsubscribe with one click. You can have unlimited subscribers and send unlimited emails, all for free.

Unlike MailChimp it has a limited range of templates however (six at last count), so in order to make the best of your site you’ll have to do some HTML coding or pay a designer such as us to develop a great template for you. To comply with CAN-SPAM laws it will only send up to 100 emails an hour from your website. (MailChimp sends your whole campaign instantly as it is a dedicated email marketing website.)  It’s also not as intuitive for a novice to use as MailChimp.

We’ve trialled MailChimp, Newsletter and other WordPress newsletter plugins on some client sites. Out of the plugins Newsletter has been the standout, however on one site we installed it on we had trouble with getting it and the SMTP settings to talk to each other and decided to MailChimp instead, allowing us to get an account, template and campaign up and running inside one hour.

Overall, we are recommending our clients use MailChimp. It’s secure, it will cost less to have a great-looking template in place and it’s very easy to use. Having the logo at the bottom of your emails is a small price to pay.

If you are on a paid plan you can share your MailChimp campaigns on your social media sites with one click, however, you can also view your email on MailChimp and copy/paste the link yourself on a free plan.

If you’d like to know more about email marketing campaigns and software, do contact us for a chat.

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, according to the old adage. But when does imitation blur the line and become plagiarism?

It’s very tempting to copy and paste from the internet; after all the information is there and who is going to notice? People copy and paste all the time, right? Here’s a quick reference to keeping out of trouble online.

There’s a right and wrong way to use other people’s work you come across on the internet. Let’s have a look at the definition of plagiarism according to plagiarism.org, a website aimed at the education industry but relevant to all of us:

“…To plagiarise means:

• to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
• to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
• to commit literary theft
• to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source”

The site goes on to say,

“ALL OF THE FOLLOWING ARE CONSIDERED PLAGIARISM:

• turning in someone else’s work as your own
• copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
• failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
• giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
• changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
• copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not (see our section on “fair use” rules)”

For business owners being original is essential, whether you are blogging or stating what your capabilities, products and services are.

Here’s what the Australian Copyright Council (ACC) says in its Internet Copying and Downloading Fact sheet: “You do not infringe copyright if you express in your own way (for example, by using your own words or diagram) information or ideas you have found on the internet. You may, however, infringe copyright if you copy all or a “substantial part” of someone else?s expression (for example, a document)…” Talking about ‘substantial parts’ the ACC says, “Copying part of a work may infringe copyright if the part is a ”substantial part”. In this context, a “substantial part” does not mean a large part: it means any part that is important, distinctive or essential. You need to consider the importance of the material you copy to the work from which it is taken, rather than its importance to the web page or the website (which will usually be a collection of separate works – for example, a number of images and some text).”

So, let’s say you regularly blog and read others’ blogs, and find someone else’s blog post or news story truly strikes a chord with you and you want to reproduce it on your site. You have options which cover yourself:

You can contact the writer and seek their permission to reproduce in full, including giving a credit or citation to the writer and, preferably, a link to their website.

You may quote phrases, sentences and paragraphs from that website in your own post as you talk about why that post or story floats your boat – but you must always put them in quote marks and give a citation/credit. This also goes, obviously, for any hard copy written content you wish to quote from; retype it but do ensure you make it clear you are quoting from someone else’s work and credit them.

What you mustn’t do is simply copy the contents of other website pages onto your own site without citation or credit in the hope that it will increase your site’s visibility, particularly if those pages contain popular keywords. RSS feeds however, which pull web posts to your site, automatically credit the ‘parent’ site and they are a different animal.

For some business owners, writing about their own business can be difficult. YOU know what you do, and you may be utterly fantastic face to face with people, and with great skills and ideas to impart when you talk with your clients, but you may have trouble putting it into words – in which case you ask somebody like me to sit down with you and help you draft web copy which brings your personality, as well as your skills, to your website.

What you don’t do is copy text from the website of someone in the same line of work as you (particularly if they are better known as they may find you out!) and use it on your own website. Even if you are offering exactly the same service – ie you may be a consultant in a particular field offering a very specific service – your words about your service offering must be your own. If you are a reseller for a product, then it is perfectly acceptable to use copy supplied by the reseller when onselling those products and services. This also applies to franchised businesses.

If you have concerns about having been plagiarised, you can check here with Small SEO Checker, which will match content if it exists elsewhere on the web. It works best with paragraphs rather than one short sentence.

With tradies it can be harder to be original – after all most plumbers, for example, offer much the same services as each other. Look at most tradies’ sites and the lists of services will be pretty similar. What does make a difference, and what might be the dealbreaker for you as a consumer, is the human touch: the tale behind the business, whether it’s a family business founded in the 1940s and proudly passed on from generation to generation or a larger organisation with a more impersonal feel about it.

The same is true for images as well as words. If you find a original diagram or concept on someone else’s site that you’d like to use, ask permission and credit the image (ie, “reproduced with permission of XYZ…” with an associated link), don’t just download it and use it. Stock image libraries are an excellent source of royalty-free images which, in most cases, don’t require a credit on your site and give you a professional edge. Yes, it will cost you a few dollars, but you can sleep at night knowing that you have used an image legally.

Get in contact with me if you’d like to learn more about good writing practices and how to ‘sell’ yourself in your own original way.

You be you now!

We have been working with OctoberFirst Consulting for several years now, and assisted with web development, marketing and promotion for last year’s inaugural Africa Australia Infrastructure Conference.

Getting a new international conference off the ground is always a challenge, and the hard work paid off, with the Conference a success and plenty of interest from sponsors and speakers for this year’s event.

This year the website we have developed has a new face and a streamlined booking system. We are assisting with conference management too for the 2013 conference, and look foward to a lively and multicultural event.

Every now and then we all meet people who give us a lightbulb moment – or more than one. It could be about work, it could be about life. It could be about both.

I met up with David Solomon of Quiddity Business for a chat today, and lightbulbs were flashing left, right and centre as we talked over a cup of tea. The sky may have been grey but suddenly it was a much, lighter, brighter shade.

Because I love words, I was interested to know the background of Quiddity as a business name. There’s a hint of ‘making a quid’ about it, which brought to mind the way David can show his clients ways to run a profitable business. But he explained it’s actually an Old English/Medieval Latin word. Its meaning is along the lines of “the quality that makes a thing what it is; the essential nature of a thing.” (This definition is from dictionary.com)

David works with female entrepreneurs who run SMEs. In particular, he helps them find their core purpose with their business, which often overlaps into non-business life. It’s all about feeling and being fulfilled with what you’re doing. The saying ‘find a way of making money out of doing what you love’ is key to this, but doing what you love for a living might not always be profitable (ask any writer or artist starving in the traditional garret); in steps David to look at your business and find ways to help you become profitable, and not all of these are a matter of business tools and balance sheets.

I won’t go into David’s methods, because they are his IP and because every person is different. What is relevant and right for me might not be right for you. If you want to know more, David runs seminars and webinars, and it’s through a recent webinar I attended led by him that we met up. David also offers some free stuff on his website so you can get a taste of what he is about.

When you talk with David there’s a real sense of universal energy around him, which envelopes you and engages you. We spoke about the subconscious and its impact on client perception among other things. It’s funny; after an hour I could sense I was being more aware of what animated me in a conversation, and how my demeanour changed when I spoke about things I am passionate about, such as writing.

With a long weekend ahead of me, I’ll be spending some of that time pondering new directions, new ideas, and new energies as a result of today’s meeting.

If you’re looking for a lightbulb moment too, do get in touch with David. You’ll be glowing with ideas afterwards!

Graham Evans of The O’Connell Group has been our valued client for more than ten years, so it was a pleasure to revamp his website earlier this year.

Visit oconnellgroup.com.au and have a look at the slick Services page with the side tabs; a cool way to display your capabilities.

We pulled newsletter feeds in from MailChimp for this site too, as well as designing headers for Graham’s newsletters.

The Comptel team wanted a new look for their ageing website, and with WordPress they got a sleek site they can edit themselves – another tick on their wish list.

Comptel works with businesses rather than individuals, and the new site better shows off their professionalism. Stock images in the slider are conceptual and fresh, and work well with the blue sky background.

Additional coding from Cyrius Media.

Visit this site at comptel.net.au.

Earlier this year we completed a website for Kathleen of My Musical Adventure. Kathleen’s a piano teacher in Denistone in the City of Ryde, NSW, and she teaches everyone from babies and toddlers to over 80s.

Kathleen wanted her site to be fun and colourful – and it is!

Visit the site at mymusicaladventure.com.au

Over the last week WordPress sites worldwide have been attacked by hackers. So what? you may say. We all know hackers are busy 24/7 trying to cause havoc.

But this time it’s a biggun. Apparently a botnet of tens of thousands of computers has been busily squirrelling away at any WP site using ‘admin’ as the login username.

Here’s what the BBC’s website has to say: ‘The botnet targets WordPress users with the username “admin”, trying thousands of possible passwords.

The attack began a week after WordPress beefed up its security with an optional two-step authentication log-in option.

The site currently powers 64m websites read by 371m people each month.

According to survey website W3Techs, around 17% of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress.‘

So your first step, therefore, is to change your username. Now.

(Any WP sites I set up, by the way, don’t use ‘admin’ as the username. It’s just too obvious.)

You should also update to the latest version of WordPress (remember to back up first!) and use the optional two-step authentication with a secret number. Yes, it’s one more thing to remember but a darned sight easier than rebuilding your website.

Next, install a plugin such as Better WP Security.

I also recommend installing your website in a separate folder on your server rather than in the root folder. Just don’t call the folder WordPress or Website!

If you want help beefing up the security on your site, please do get in touch with me so I can help you ward off hackers.

Remember the days before smartphones? When normal mobile phones could only send short text messages? Was it the short messages or the sheer frustration of having to tap a key several times to use the letter you wanted which led to the abbreviation abomination known as txt-speak?  I suspect it was a bit of both.

Even in those early days, I resisted using abbreviations such as ‘u’ for ‘you’. Whenever possible, I spell words out. I may, on occasions where I’m in a tearing hurry, send a text along the lines of  ”Ok, c u!” but oh dear, it’s just not me.

My pet hate in txt-speak is using ‘ur’ for ‘your’. Ur was a city in ancient Mesopotamia. That’s the first thing I think of when I see ‘ur’ in a text message or email. In high school we had a passionate Ancient History teacher whose name escapes me, but I can see her now, small and dark, vigorously gesturing as she spoke about Ur and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. She could see them in front of her, smell the smells, feel the desert heat, and she tried her best to bring it all to life for a classroom full of vaguely disinterested fourteen year old girls.

So. I was fourteen and ur was Ur. Pronounced Err. If I wanted to abbreviate the word ‘your’, I used ‘yr’. ‘Yr’ was used extensively by Jack Kerouac and the beat generation in the late 50s, and the use of ‘yr’ for ‘your’ goes back to the late 1700s. Confusingly, ‘yr’ is also a modern abbreviation for ‘year’, but unless you are extremely thick, you’ll realise which context of ‘yr’ people are using when they write to you.

I confess to using abbreviations such as LOL, BRB etc on Facebook and social media. Heck, I even speak LOLspeak, that feline language created by the Cheezeburger people. The English language is forever changing (unlike French, which is strictly controlled by l’Academie Francaise), and the way we speak and write reflects that. I’m happy to embrace change, but to a point:

I have never used ‘ur’ for ‘your’, and I never will. I just find it offensive to my psyche.

I’m a dinosaur. I suspect in fifty years time spelling and even grammar won’t matter for the majority of people; we will be a society dependent on computers who will happily spell and correct for us. If I’m still around, you can bet I will still be resisting using ‘ur’.