“In Business” by Roland Millward

In order to improve your business skills and indeed to learn new things I am a great believer in having a mentor. A mentor can pass on their experience and encouragement to help you be successful.

Get to know people who can help you maybe through local networks or the Internet through Facebook, Twitter and My Space. Build up a rapport with people and be generous yourself in sharing ideas and helping others. If anyone views help only in one direction they will soon be dismissed as someone not to be helped.

Each of us has our strengths and weaknesses and these change over time. Use your strengths to help others and get help with your weaknesses in return. Great business people will always tell you that you that they always have people they look up to no matter how great they become themselves.

The secret of good business management is really getting a good team of people to help you. These do not have to be employees as you may simply like to run a small business on your own. You can though use others skills and pay them for their services. Typically this would be a good accountant or bookkeeper to help you manage the financial side of your business and avoid trouble with the tax man.

Other skills that would be useful to tap into would be website designers or if you build your own may be someone who does just part of the design where you are not as proficient such as graphic design and scripting.

Getting a list of contacts who can help you on either a regular or ad-hoc basis is essential. You can develop such contacts locally through business networking clubs such as 4networking. Alternatively there are many ways of meeting online the people that you need. This could be Facebook, Myspace, Twitter or many other routes. Get to know people and build a trust and it will pay dividends for both parties and really help your business to grow without the need to employ people and have the responsibility that brings with it.

Advertising a business can be very expensive. How about though doing it for free?

Many businesses have found that they can generate a good amount of business from free sources.

Two that I like are Gumtree and Craigslist. Both of these sites allow free advertising in various categories and by city. Take a look at the websites and get a feel for how they work. To get the most benefit you would really need to submit your ads daily as they are listed in date order the most recent at the head of the page. It is easy however to resubmit ads without having to write them out. Just keep a note of the reference numbers for the ads.

In addition to these methods you may find free directories, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter where you can promote your business.

Having your own company blog can also be a great way of generating interest in your business and keeping existing clients up to date with your products and services.

Go for it! It’s free and so what have you to lose?