Special Offers 
Cartoon Shorelines Art Supermarkets in the UK and around the world often advertise new product ranges and wider ranges of products than their competition but did you know… Asda in Wrexham in March this year sold tickets for a local football match Tesco sell its own label anti virus software for £10 Tesco sell a Pole dancing kit in stores that supply fitness equipment Lidl last year sold one way European airline tickets for £19 Wal-Mart sells a computer game in which a player can take on a role of converting non Christians Sainsbury’s sell electricity and gas Tesco extra stores last year sold a full equestrian outfit Costco in the US sells coffins for less than $1000 Asda in Carlisle is selling a six bedroom bungalow in Carlisle as part of its property sale division homes-in-asda.com Tesco in China sells live turtles
Source the Grocer Chinese restaurants in the UK started out by selling food to Chinese seamen. Owners of these restaurants selling basic food to sailors had often converted their shops from laundries. In the early 1900’s there were hundreds of Chinese laundries around the UK offering cleaning for households and businesses. The introduction of washing machines led to their decline and owners switched to serving food. The early restaurants gradually attracted local people who adapted to the new Chinese food but in the 1960’s everything came with chips. Alongside the early restaurants selling basic Chinese food were more up market restaurants. Famously the Asiatic in London opened its doors in 1949 following the closure of the Chinese Embassy during the cultural revolution. Staff from the embassy opened The Asiatic restaurant which served fine Chinese cuisine alongside quality French wines. Their clientele included the rich and famous. Source BBC History Attention all entrepreneurs The Royal Bank of Scotland and The Sunday Times have launched the Entrepreneur Challenge, which is a nationwide competition offering £25 million of prizes for four businesses. The five winners will be chosen on a regional basis by a panel of judges. The judges are looking for entrepreneurs who have the drive and motivation to make their businesses one of the leaders in their particular market. One overall winner will also receive four days free mentoring from Sir Phillip green owner of BHS and Arcadia who is one of the panel of judges. Go to www.theboschallenge.co.uk for more information and download your application form. the drawback? Applicants businesses must have a turnover of £2million. Linking your web site What is it and why should you do it? Everyone talks about it and all business owners are very keen to do it. But how do you increase the number of links to your web site, what is the point of linking your site and what difference do links make to your web site anyway. The number of links associated with a web site affect a web sites ranking. Search engine optimisation and internet marketing are complex subjects and links are not the whole picture. However for any business web site the number of links can make a significant difference to site ranking and drive traffic to your site. There are four different types of link associated with web sites. Mutual links Outgoing links Inbound links Internal links
Mutual links are reciprocal. For example linking to your business associates and suppliers and they link back to you in return. Are these links worth having? The answer is yes and the more closely related to your business the sites you link to the better. Rather than simply listing the web address you are linking to add some text e.g. exclusive personalised handbag designs. Take the opportunity to provide a short keyword rich headline for your site link. Outgoing links which point away from your site to other sites are not as you would imagine to be avoided. However you should think carefully about where to place these outgoing links as you are in effect sending traffic away from your site. Place them further down your hierarchy of web pages. Outgoing links are a trade off between providing information and helping your customers and sending site visitors away from your site. Overcome this disadvantage by making sure these links open in a new window. Inbound links these are the golden links and the most difficult to acquire. Sometimes called back links, these are the web sites pointing back to your site and these type of links carry much more weight with the search engines. Start by registering with the major search engines, Google, MSN, Yahoo and then directories such as the open directory. Then spend some time researching the minor directories that exist for your business type. Lastly check who your competition are linking to. Internal links work in a different way to the other three types of links but are still worth including in your site. The search engines value internal links, particularly if you include some keywords in the linking text. Internal links are of great value to site visitors and help visitors to scan your web pages and find what they are searching for more quickly. As with all things marketing a mix of the four types of links will help towards your site ranking, will make your site work more effectively and will make your site more appealing and more useful to site visitors. To help you with your linking strategy we have included a linking tool to help you to check links to your site. It can be very revealing, but is even more value in checking the links of your online competitors. Web site News New on the web site this month is a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. View it on the home page to catch the latest marketing and business news from the U.K. We plan to modify the feed so that a wider selection of marketing and business news from different sources will be available for you. Recycling Martin Meyerscough has spent eighteen months inventing the Green Bottle, a new fully recyclable milk bottle made from cardboard with an inner plastic sleeve made from corn starch. At present the majority of plastic milk bottles are not recycled and take up a lot of room in land fill sites where they take 500 years to biodegrade. Asda is trialing the new milk bottle in its Lowestoft store and plans to roll them out nationwide if they are a success. Source The Week Meanwhile............ Remarkable is an online stationery business that uses UK recycled materials to make a variety of unusual items that includes pencils made from polystyrene cups, notebooks made from car tyres and from fruit cartons. The company philosophy is 'to create recycled items that are well designed, great quality and a joy to own'. Information about every item online tells you their recycled credentials. Prices range from £1.60 for a small notebook and £18.72 for a box of 50 black pencils made from car parts. And finally… A baker in Weymouth has had to rename the cakes she bakes because Trading Standards officials say the names of the cakes do not give an accurate description of their contents. Robin Cakes which feature a likeness to Kermit’s nephew Robin must be renamed because they do not contain robin meat. Miss Piggy tarts do not contain pork and Paradise slice is not made in heaven. Source the Week. If you enjoyed reading this newsletter please E mail it to a friend Return toTop of Page | 