RESOURCE CENTRE

Because being small doesn't stop you from being smart.

It doesn't stop you from finding the killer apps, the deadly strategies, or those life-changing, impact-making breakthroughs that can propel your small, ordinary enterprise into the profit-making, market-leading firm in your niche that you are dreaming about.

Here are ten ways you can act smart to beat the big guys as well as everybody else:

1. Be faster - this is all about being able to find a way to be quicker off the mark than anyone else. For example, faster delivery, quicker production lead times, getting a new product onto the market before everyone else.
2. Be easier to do business with - you're small so take advantage of that fact. Your customers can speak to the right people in your firm without hassle. You can make it as smooth and as painless as possible for your customers to order, pay, get their money back, get advice and feel good about dealing with you.
3. Be flexible - this is where the big guys often struggle and the small firm can win hands down. You have fewer decision making levels, no politics to avoid, and can just make the difference your customers are looking for.
4. Be seen as an expert - you should carve your niche and exploit it. Work out what you're better at doing than anyone else, and then let everyone know about it as often as possible and in as many ways as you can.
5. Be open-minded - don't just look inside your own sector for new ways to do things or promote yourself. Try and find new ways of doing things from outside your industry by looking at what's working and what's successful in unrelated sectors, and then try and apply these in your own.
6. Find opportunities that others don't - spend as much time as possible looking for new business opportunities, get out and network, do joint marketing deals, find strategic partners, and sniff out areas for doing business that bigger companies would never have the time to find.
7. Be first - innovate all the time and get a reputation for always trying things first in your sector, even if they don't always work - because often enough they will and you'll get noticed for it.
8. Be caring - make it clear that you care about every aspect of your business - i.e. your quality standards, your customers, your staff, your local community - and again, you'll soon get noticed for this.
9. Be different - in all aspects of your business, not just your products and prices. Make your marketing, IT, after-sales service, and terms and conditions unique and attractive to your audience.
10. Be a fanatic - this is your biggest opportunity. Get yourself known for your beliefs, knowledge, madness about your business and sector, and make sure you strut your stuff as often as possible, so that everyone knows about you and what you and your business stand for.

If possible, incorporate and act upon as many of these things as possible in your business, go out of your way to apply them every day, and make sure they form the backbone of your USP and marketing strategy.

Weekly business tips

Do you believe, as many small business owners do, that submitting your website to thousands of search engines will magically send floods of new traffic in your direction?

It's a myth.

Businesses selling bulk search engine submission services want you to believe this, as that's what makes them money. But the truth is that most of the search engines they submit your site to simply gather your e-mail address and bombard you with spam. According to search engine marketing resource MarketPosition, if you include your real e-mail address when you submit to a scheme like this, you can expect to receive upwards of 400 junk messages within 24 hours.

There are countless search engines hanging around in cyberspace these days, but more than 95% of search traffic comes from the top 20. You need to maximise your potential to get a high ranking on these select few engines in order to gain any noteworthy level of visibility.

One of the most effective ways to improve your ranking is to purchase a pre- owned, expired domain name. These are often available at low prices, and have tons of other benefits, including the following:

1. They might still receive a lot of traffic if they've only just expired - this traffic will now be directed to you, without you having to lift a finger.
2. If you buy a domain name that's highly relevant to your business, it might still have active links to it from other sites - these will direct the sort of traffic that will be interested in your business right to your door.
3. The expired domain name might be a better fit for your business than the one you opted for when you set up your website, or it might be full of relevant keywords that will shoot it to the top of web search results.