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Katie Price or Jordan, whatever you want to call her, there is no question that where she gos, the tabloids and drama seems to follow. She is one of those people that the nation seems divided about, particularly since her recent messy split with Peter Andre. When she and Peter were together she appeared to have changed her crazy ways and turned into a loving wife, but since, her behaviour seems to have returned to that of the former Jordan. This behaviour has resulted in some heavy backlash for the glamour girl but at the end of the day this a woman who is now one of the richest women, certainly in the UK, she couldn’t have achieved that without a serious business mind.

One of the key things needed to have a successful business is a successful marketing campaign, but what is the best way to do this? There are so many issues to contend with and you have to get it right as the wrong marketing strategy can destroy a product before it’s even had time to take off. So where to start? I suppose deciding on your target audience, and then really finding out what engages the mind of that consumer, what is going to make your campaign stand out and encourage your target market to go out and actually spend their money on it and put money in your pocket.

Once you’ve decided on a business plan; what your product is going to be and which market you are going to target, the next thing to do before taking the product to the marketplace is to decide on a retail price which will enable you to make a profit. Now not having had much experience of business, this being my first venture into the world of fellow entrepreneurs, this was probably one of the more testing decisions for me and especially with the product being a small commodity it seems to make it more difficult. I thought the only way to work it out was literally to price up all of my individual ingredients and then find a price which was reasonable for the consumer but enough for me to take something away. I’ll have to see how my costs go down with the punters.

Following on from my last blog, I now had to try and match my product to the right market hopefully finding a niche for me to showcase my cakes. The baking I do is not fancy or frilly it’s just homemade classics done well, gooey chocolate brownies, victoria sponge cakes, flapjacks etc so where is the best place to sell? There is the internet, but there is a ridiculous amount of competition out there for someone starting up, and then of course the option of renting premises but that would be a huge gamble, the market that seems to best match my product and a good place to start are small farmers markets where people are looking for homemade local products. I’m going to go and see how I get on at a regular local market down the road and see if I can make any profit, fingers crossed.

After a few afternoons of baking I realised that I actually had quite a passion for it and after getting my friends and family to taste and test my efforts it became clear that I wasn’t half bad at it either, everyone was definitely giving my baking the thumbs up, one of friends actually suggested that I sell them. So I decided to start looking at what I would need to do to set myself up with a cake business. My first decision really was deciding what the business was actually going to be and which market I was going to try and target??

I think everyone deep down has a bit of entrepeneur in them, it’s just a case of whether you want to bring it out and use it. I, like a lot of people have really stuck with jobs I know best, never really seeing myself as a business woman, I don’t know why, I think I just didn’t see it as an option. Then recently, I had some spare time on my hands and decided to do a load of baking. I didn’t intend for it to be anything but an afternoon of fun and a lot of cake eating but I surprised myself.

Lots of people at one time or another look to set up there own business normally based on there favorite past times or there current set of skill that they can do to a really high level. One thing my misses is particularly good at is baking and she makes a fantastic Victoria sponge and a amazing set of various chocolate fudge or general chocolate brownies.

She has tried and tested these on not only my self but my colleagues friends and family and everyone is overly impressed so what is the next step to making money out of her talent and how does she turn her talent into cold hard cash?

What are the next steps? Marketing?

Googles business for the third quarter of the year is up once again, what will stop this giant ion the business world taking over TV advertising and word of mouth as the money that google makes every year is catching up with some of the richest people in the world and I’m sure in the next ten years it will definitely take over as the most profitable company in the word. Yahoo and Bing are trying to play catch up for the left over cash but its a big hill to climb.

Which search engine do you use?

I’m a googler.

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.