It all starts with your Mission –

• Why are you in business and where do you want to take it?
• What is mission critical?
• What barriers to success are in your way?
• What sets you apart from your competition?
• What do your customers really need/want?
• Have you researched it?
• What kind of service do they expect these days?

Endless things to consider.. all you know is turnover and profits must rise and stress levels must fall.

What’s needed are a new Mission Statement and an Action Plan to get passionate about. You need to research, innovate and develop your offering to attract more and better business, boost client/customer satisfaction and reputation.

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We filmed the Sealed Knot in Stafford last Saturday and the BBC will be showing some of our video footage  during the early evening BBC West Midlands News on the 19th March 2009. The videos will be within a piece about the forth coming Hopton Heath Battlefield Memorial Stone unveiling ceremony.

The ceremony itself will be on Sunday the 22nd March 2009 in Hopton in Staffordshire – why not come along if you are interested in English history or the English Civil War. A large group of Sealed Knot re-enactors in period costume/uniform will be in attendance. See our other piece about the ceremony for more detail.

See the BBC news article on the project

The Battle of Hopton Heath Memorial Stone

On Saturday the 7th March and Sunday 22nd March we will be doing some charity filming work for the West Midlands Branch of the Military Historical Society (WMMHS) and The Hopton Heath Battlefield Memorial Project.

This is to help them promote their fund raising for the erection of a memorial stone and interpretation panel on the site of an historic Staffordshire battle. On both occasions a large group of Sealed Knot re-enactors in period costume/uniform will be in attendance.

Photograph taken by Mark Warwick – Captured Times

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Getting leads from Colleagues, Internal Business Referrals,  Inter-departmental Referring or Cross-selling, whatever you call it – either way you’re maximising the value of your clients. Here’s some simple tips – but be aware of the common problems.

This post is for any firm or individual that has clients,  rather than customers. It follows on from our other blogs on Referral Marketing and from info on our main website. Referral Marketing is the best business development strategy there is for Service Providers…

Some firms are good at inter-departmental referring others are not; either way your strategy for dealing with this should be included in your overall Marketing Plan.

Human nature needs to be used to your advantage rather than disadvantage.

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LOOK!

The key to successful copy-writing -  for blogs, press releases, marketing literature, web pages, sales letters, tele-sales scripts, leaflets, posters, brochures, adverts, book titles, articles, white papers, etc.

……is having a High-Impact HEADLINE or TITLE

Draw people’s attention to reading the body text using a strong attention grabbing headline.

Grab them from the start. It’s about the HEADLINE TEST; if the title makes people read further – you have succeeded.

The headline should make sense, get ATTENTION and ATTRACT enough INTEREST for the reader to have the DESIRE to ACT by reading more.

If not, your copy headline is not strong enough.

To labour the point here’s a video of Dan Kennedy…

Leadership begins inside; with the inner character not the outward personality.

Being a Great leader requires a combination of skills, character traits, experience, mental strength, intelligence and principles.

If you are a leader and you lack any one of the following YOU WILL ultimately get found out and crash and burn:

• Can articulate a compelling vision of the future that’s clear and focused
• A good communicator with a simple message
• A charismatic and enthusiastic character
• Able to mobilise people and hold their company/team together
• Can inspire confidence and empower others
• Can bring out the best in others
• Is credible, courageous and proactive
• Has admirable principles which guide decisions
• Makes decisions intelligently, quickly and with commitment
• Has high expectations in self and others
• Can establish a success formula and achieve tasks efficiently
• Searches for new opportunities for their company to consider
• Is flexible and can refocus in light of new opportunities or threats
• Predicts future demand and trends and plans for them
• Embraces technology
• Puts health and family before work (within reason)
• Can take advice and knows the right people to get it from
• Can manage change effectively

Alexander Bullivant
Roxbourne Marketing Consultants

One of our favourite websites for assistance with Search Engine Optimisation is, you guessed it. SEOBook.com.

In particular they provide FREE tools as add-ons for Firefox.

We’ve been using:

A few features of Rank Checker worth mentioning:

• It enables you to check all your keyword rankings within the SERPS of Google, Yahoo and Live Search (MSN).
• You can specify which Google to check. We’ve been using the .co.uk version of Google.
• It performs quicker than a lot of other tools we’ve tried out. (Web CEO for one…painfully slow)
• The top 200 results are checked for a rank, if you aren’t found you’ll see a dash.
• After using it for a month or so we’ve found it to be not always accurate, but its usually within 10 places or so.

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