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Many business are using face book to drive traffic and sale to their site. But many business are also having problems with staff using face book while they should be working. Dragon Theo Paphitis recently wrote an article about why he was banning the social networking site at his work.

On the contrary James Caan another Dragon has looked to embrace the site in his role as the chairman of an SEO company in the south. Either way you need to decide to ban or not to ban. Many staff will react badly to the news. The best option is to allow people on but only at break time and dinner time.

If your still feeling the pinch and you want to continue to promote your website it doesn’t need to cost you a penny and that’s even if you don’t have any technical knowledge.

Unless you have a CMS or a blog on your site updating and adding further pages or content to your site requires a programmer or a designer. If you can’t afford one then you can promote your site from other sites. For example set up a twitter account, or a face book account and start to add content there. Providing you use the same branding as your main site and link back to your site your customers will understand that it’s part of your site.

Jaguar Land Rover will be closing one it’s plants in the West Midlands by the middle of next decade. The company wants to shut one of the two plants in the midlands Castle Bromwich plant in Birmingham or a factory in nearby Solihull.

The counter balance 800 new jobs will be created in Merseyside at the Halewood plant which secured the deal to produce the new Range Rover. The Company is owned by Indian firm Tata. There is no news on which plant will be shut. Most people have seen that the move although bad counld be worse with both plants shutting down.

“This is a plan that recognises the impact the economic collapse has had on our business, and at the same time the opportunities that lie ahead for these two great brands,” said chief executive David Smith.

It look like the UK is currently coming out of the recession, slowly but surly business are starting to pick up orders are coming in which is great to see.

It’s important that businesses don’t then decide to take their “foot off the pedal”. We noticed that companies that decided to cut back on marketing during the resession would have a bad time the same is now correct with the recovery period. It’s important to keep on spending money and time on promotion of your product.

It could be the case that you come out of this period stronger and making more money then ever.

When I came up with the idea of creating a series of posts based around earning online from nothing, the first thing that came to mind was providing a service.  In business, those that have the ability to provide relevant and sought after services will always have business, and for those that can do it well there will always be food on the table.  In an offline context, we’re talking about plumbers, bricklayers, painters, accountants, lawyers – those service provider without whom we would struggle in specific skilled areas.  Online, we’re looking at the web designers, copywriters/content writers, SEOs.  Providing those kinds of services can be a great way to get started, and if you’re going from scratch, freelancer sites like RentACoder.com can provide the work you’re looking for.

But this presents two problems – primarily, that on RAC you are competing with other freelancers on a ‘lowest price’ basis, where quality doesn’t often guarantee you’ll get the job.  The second problem that this presents is that you have to fight for work, and lose a hefty percentage to the site from which you won the work.

A more advanced business model, then, for those looking to provide services eliminates you personally from the picture.  What have you got over the freelancers working extremely hard on their respective sites?  You have the ability to devote time and energy into winning work and managing a business, (which I can assure you beats writing articles).

Many great businesses have been built on the oursourcing model – offer your services through branded, professional channels and outsource the work to a network of freelance staff, taking a percentage on the top.  The beauty here is that you can provide just about any skill through the form of another, whilst still marking up the price.  The customer is happy, because he deals with a professional interface and receives exactly what he is looking for regardless of technical requirements.  The freelancer is happy because you provide a regular stream of work and payment – your job is to act as the middle man and co-ordinate communications and cash flow amongst both sides of the transaction.

This kind of business can be started from scratch with no resources.  All you need is a RAC account, and the ability to find work for yourself.  If you focus on winning and closing contracts online, through building on social networks and forums, you will soon realise healthy profits on what is a high margin, project management role.

One of my favourite exercises in branding and working with brand strategy is a kind of reality vs. desire task involving thinking on a critical level about your brand identity now and where you want it to be later down the line.

As an online business owner it can sometimes be easy to blur the distinctions between what your brand actually stands for in the eyes of your customers and what you would like it to stand for.

Grab a pen and paper and begin to jot down what your brand stands for. Are you an innovator like Apple? Are you low-cost, value like Walmart? Are you quality driven like Mercedes Benz? Of course it is seldom this clear cut and there are many shades of grey between each known classification of brand. Write down what your brand represents, and what you want conveyed as your brand message. When you’ve done that, the same thing can be done for your competition. In branding, it’s important to find a point of distinction amongst the competition – if you’re all competing for the quality market, who is servicing the value market?

You should be able to come up with a list of values that your company portrays, along with the same for your direct competition. Do you notice any trend? Is every brand gunning after the same ideal? This kind of exercise allows you to spot gaps in the market, where appropriate, to enable you to channel your marketing efforts more productively.

The next step of the exercise is to think about your product or service strengths. Again, a similar list like the previous should suffice. The point here is to bring up some common ground, which when combined with analysis of the wider market should allow you to find the right direction for your brand.

From there it’s a case of implementation, through consistency and building familiarity. It’s all as simple as that, really…

The Indian economy is on track to grow to become one of the world’s largest. I read a humourous thread over at DigitalPoint forums where an Indian member has posted with a detectable trace of anger that he was looking forward to outsourcing to the US for online projects.

The main reason India in particular won’t survive is that they currently offer cheap labour, and that’s what’s fuelling their economic growth.

Cheap labour is a strong asset for any economy when it comes to dealing internationally, but the problem for India is that this is all it has to offer in the outsourcing sector. As the economy grows labour costs will increase which means that international companies will take their outsourcing operations elsewhere.

In the UK, there has been a strong backlash against foreign call centres. Largely because there can be a clear language barrier and it can feel as though there is no direct line through to the company behind the call centre operation.

The only reason that business is located within the Indian economy is to save money. There is no ‘quality’ benefits, in fact customers dislike dealing with offshore call centres. Once the cheap labour goes, the entire outsourcing infrastructure will follow suit.

It remains to be seen whether the Indian authorities will be able to manage labour costs, and indeed whether they can help differentiate their services any further that on a purely low-cost basis. If they don’t, I think the economy will find itself struggling for outside investment and anu further growth.

I’ve started working on a series of posts built around the topic of making money online from scratch. Over the course of the week, I’ll post business ideas and online strategies to make money with little or no investment to begin with, to emphasise the wealth of possibilities available online.

The first part of the series will probably be up over the course of the next week, where I will look at some of the ways to get started making money online.

The main point to remeber is it takes time, you won’t make money straight away you’ll need to work hard and be patient before you start making any money.

Working online can often raise a number of legal questions, and one that I’ve found to be particularly relevant to online entrepreneurs is copyright.  It’s a common scenario: we provide work for someone online of an intellectual nature, or we hire someone to do the same for us.  So what’s the deal, and what can you do if you feel your rights are being impinged upon?

Anything you write or create is automatically your intellectual property.  No one can use your material without your permission, and you have the right to sell or lease your rights as required, although that does complicate the issue.  If someone uses your content without your permission, you have the right to ask them to remove what you have created, and seek damages accordingly.

This is of most relevance in situations where you don’t receive payment for work you have completed for a client – if they don’t pay you, there is no way the copyright can pass UNLESS – and here’s the but – UNLESS you know someone is using your content and you do nothing about it.  What this means in practice is that if you don’t get paid, you can turn round and refuse the right to use your material.  If they don’t oblige, you can ultimately pursue them through the courts in order to win damages.

It’s important to remember your legal position in relation to copyright, whatever side of the fence you’re on.  Again, many people think they know the law, but make sure you really do know what you’re talking about before you start making threats.

Facebook might be riding high at the moment in the upper echelons of the social networking world, but I’ve got one prediction that the market won’t want to hear and it might just spark the collapse of the Web2.0 bubble as far as new social startups are concerned.

The impression of facebook is a simplistic, content heavy (i.e. photos, messages) service that relies on the interaction of its members to make it valuable. It is used by professionals for networking and marketing, students for getting to know their classmates and employees within larger organisations for similar reasons.

When you look at facebook a year ago and compare it to facebook now, there is no comparison. The service of today is significantly more complex and detailed than it was prior, and there are far too many ‘features’ that provide little advantage to the user. The problem I forsee is that this will have the effect of turning facebook into a gimmick rather than an actual functional website, which will give it a very short shelf life indeed.

From there it’s only a small step before VCs lose confidence in new start up sites causing the collapse of the market.