Playing Dress Ups - getting noticed just by looking the part

A very large part of the excellence of owning my own business is the flexibility that it affords me! This flexibility applies to so many things (which I am sure I will cover in future posts) and includes what I can wear to my home office on my work days. In winter my uggies are a staple and in summer it's flip flops all the way. Fantastic. However, when I leave my office to go to a meeting, pick the kids up from school, do a few jobs in town - I dress up! I put on my best work clothes (i've collected a pretty nice corporate wardrobe over the years) and replace the uggies / flip flops with a pair of heels.
I can't tell you how many people notice this. Almost every day that I am wearing my "work clothes" I am asked whether I work and what kind of work I do. Cue - elevator pitch - "I have my own small business providing affordable marketing solutions to other small businesses."
So there you go - the simple act of dressing up gets me noticed and starts conversations that could in turn lead to future clients. And that's what marketing is all about!

Standard office winter  footwear at Dragonfly HQ!

Small Business Website Challenge - when only the best will do

Wow! So all week I have been conscious to make mental notes about potential marketing challenges that I could post about. Let me tell you as a small business owner who works from a home office on a 5 year old lap top there seems to be many IT challenges that are hurled my way but luckily (for the sake of this blog) there are also a few marketing ones as well. And none more pertinant than designing one's own website. Phew! What a task! The irony is I help clients develop and maintain their websites all the time and with great ease but when it comes to designing my own - different story. All of a sudden there is this overwhelming tendancy to over think and over strategise every sentence, to thesaurus every word and look at one billion other marketing websites to see if there is anything they may be doing that I have not thought of. I've been so tempted to include every single bell,whistle and gadget and create the BEST EVER MARKETING SITE IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!
And then I had a conversation with my brother about the process and he gave the best advice ever. Just keep it simple. Keep it clean, sophisticated, relevant and simple.
So after breathing a huge sigh of "oh yeah, of course, yep, that makes sense" I wiped my totally over complicated website brief clean and started again.
This time I focused on what my website objectives are, what is the key information I need to include without overwhelming or confusing (or boring) my clients and how can I keep the site relevant, dynamic and on the first page of Google! Ha, no pressure.
Anyway, I am just about to send the brief & content off to my web developer and am so excited to see what comes back.
I'll be sure to post the results.
What's the best thing about your business website?

My marketing week - The challenges faced by me – small business owner and marketing girl at Dragonfly Marketing and how I overcame them.

I love Mia Freedman and love reading her blogs, books, columns – anything she throws out there. I’ve been planning to write a blog for ages and I pour through hers every week searching for inspiration – and finally she has now provided it! Mia now writes a weekly post titled “My week that was” – perfect. I’m going to do that too but make it relevant to what I and most other small businesses come across every week – the challenges of marketing and running a small business.

Ha! Love it. I’m not only going to talk about my challenges but I’m going to rope in any friends, colleagues, clients and anyone else who I can think of and chat about their challenges as well. So we’ll talk about that and then hopefully about the solutions to those challenges! 

I know I’d benefit from this – what about you?