Veteran Digital Marketer
With less than two weeks to go until the election we now have a letter from 5,000 small businesses pledging their allegiance to one party and it’s the blue party again.
Furthermore, that letter is once again published in The Telegraph where, this morning, the newspaper’s website calls it a “boost for David Cameron”…
Watching the 10 o’clock news last night on BBC iPlayer I was encouraged to see the story about British companies bringing work back to these isles after many years of offshoring.
The benefits of offshoring from a British business point of view are obvious – If you can cut costs by using foreign workers on a lower rate of pay then it makes perfect sense to help boost your bottom line and keep the shareholders happy.
I need your help to save our pub, please. If you want to skip the preamble and just get on with objecting to the current planning application then go straight to
As previously posted, I was recently looking for an alternative to Amazon. The thought process came about after I was accused, quite reasonably, of putting money into Amazon’s pockets when there were serious questions to be asked about their ethics and morality. The main points of contention are that:
1) Amazon have been accused of paying very little UK tax on billions of pounds worth of turnover (2011 – £3.35 billion turnover with a “tax expense of £1.8 million according to the BBC)
2) If that’s the case then small businesses are being subjected to unfair competition (Because they pay full UK taxes on their profits and their Goliath-sized competitors do not)
3) High streets are apparently suffering because of online retailers and some of those are based in tax havens
4) Buying from local businesses puts money INTO the local economy. Purchases to big corporations ensure that money is drained OUT of the local economy.
A recent conversation on one of the comments sections of the Friends of the Tumble Down Dick website got me thinking:
“Are there any alternatives to Amazon?”
For many years now I’ve been an Amazon affiliate and earned a few pennies here and there from my web and blog posts. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever had a cheque from Amazon, but one day I’ll probably earn that £25 threshold payout from linking to obscure Haynes Manuals for the Opel Manta.
When the opportunity came up to make some pennies for the Tumbledown campaign, I set up an Amazon affiliate account. I haven’t looked yet, but I don’t expect it’s earned very much at all. (Update: I just looked – Zero pence)
Cash Mobbing Lifts Local Business” was first written by Paul Mackenzie Ross for the is4profit small business blog
The flash mob is a public gathering where people use social media or other communications to organise and congregate on a public place and perform some usually pointless act and then disperse again. Now, after the flash mob, we have the cash mob – or cash mobbing.
So what is cash mobbing?
A couple of days ago I read an interesting piece over on the BBC News website about Totnes in Devon; the town is soon to be home to a new branch of the national chain Costa Coffee.
Now Costa Coffee is a brand that is well known in the UK with some 1,375 shops in this country, and some 800 stores abroad; so what’s so special about it that this proposed coffee shop in a southwest town makes the headlines over at the BBC?
“Independents Day 2012” was originally written for the is4profit small business blog
When I woke up this morning the first thing my American wife said to me was “Happy Independence Day”. On this day in 1776 the United States declared independence from Great Britain and the rest, as they say, is history.
I told my wife that it was also Independents Day 2012 here in the UK with a campaign being run to support local small shops. Then I struggled to think of who the independent retailers might be in our local “high street”.