In my work as a digital marketing consultant* I’ve come across a lot of small businesses which have been given bad advice. It might be that they’ve had an agency managing their social media accounts, and they’ve not been happy with the results, or it could be that they’ve invested in a new website, only to discover it wasn’t really fit for purpose. All in all, it seems that running your own business can be a bit of a minefield.
(*I always feel very grown-up when I call myself that. It’s hard to reconcile that persona with the fact that last week I bought myself a plush grey and pink tortoise and called it Alan.)
It can actually be a very costly minefield, as being on the end of bad advice isn’t just a case of ‘Oh well, that didn’t work, what next?’ It can have a real impact on your business – financially and in terms of your reputation.
As the person giving the advice then, the pressure is on.
I’ve noticed a growing trend in the last couple of years for bloggers to start offering advice, particularly with things like web design and social media. This is great – it’s brilliant to see opportunities opening up for people to run their own businesses – but it also comes with risks.
Did you know for example, that customers could claim for compensation if they think your advice is negligent and has caused them a financial loss or damaged their reputation? Many clients may also ask you to provide proof of professional indemnity insurance before they work with you, especially if you’re working with local authorities or large companies.
If you provide a professional service, be it design, marketing, accountancy, IT, photography, or one of many other professions, it’s worth investing in professional indemnity insurance. This is the insurance that covers you should the worse happen, and your clients lose out due to any negligent advice or service you provide.
**Twitter party plug alert**
If you’re not sure about the types of insurance that your business needs, why not come along and join my Twitter chat on Tuesday 22nd September at 1pm?
Last weekend Belle and I were in London and we went to see the musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That wasn’t the only reason we were in London though and we actually ended up booking the tickets last minute on a great new app called TodayTix.
This review has been written by my fiancé, in lieu of him having to cook us tea…
When I moved in with Jo and Belle, I was adamant that I wanted to do my fair share around the house.
“You can cook supper,” Jo said, almost before I had finished asking what she’d like me to do, “I’ve always hated having to think about that”.
Sure. What’s so hard about that? I felt I’d got off lightly. I started perusing the internet for wholesome yet tasty recipes, and even started ploughing my way through recipes in a new cook book. What a fool. Cut to a month or so later, and the end of a stressful day at work and I’ve walked home through the rain. I get through the front door, peel off my wet jacket and put my bag down.
“Hello”, I say, wearily.
“What’s for tea?” Belle asks, without raising her eyes from her iPad.
“I’m not quite sure yet. I’ll have a think about it”.
I’m met with a look that could have killed. It tells me how ridiculous it is that I haven’t been planning some culinary masterpiece since the second I finished wrapping up sandwiches for packed lunches that morning.
Jo is smiling. “Welcome to my world” she whispers, and with that, I understand.
It’s not so much the cooking, it’s the thinking. I’m well aware that there are far worse aspects of parenting, that I’ve spectacularly avoided or side-stepped, but I do get why this is something Jo can do without.
Recently, there has been a spurt of new restaurants opening in Taunton and we’ve been lucky enough to try some of them out. It’s popular with everyone in the house. Belle, because the food is prettier, more exciting and nicer than mine, Jo, also because of the above and because it’s an outing, and me – because I don’t have to think about it.
The Italian chain, Ask, has been coming to Taunton for a while, and as the evening of our free meal approached, I wondered how they could possibly have turned Taunton’s Old Post Office into a restaurant. Surely it wasn’t big enough, and how could they have got rid of that rather soulless feeling?
I don’t know quite how to articulate how good a job they’ve done. Firstly, it doesn’t feel like another Italian chain. The design spec and the quality of the finish is superb. We’ve been to a couple of places recently that looked okay, but after a few minutes we started to list the tiny glitches and faults. Not so in Ask. Everything from the flooring to the bar tiles, to the glasses to the cutlery, was stylishly put together, without feeling like a formula that you’d find in every other town in the country. It feels like Mad Men meets Breakfast at Tiffany’s meets glorious Technicolor. In fact, it feels like Jo designed the place, and that’s the highest praise I can give.
A photo posted by Josephine Middleton (@slummysinglemummy) on
The girls are looking at the menu, which is varied and well balanced. I’m so hungry I would be happy with pretty much any dish on the menu. Belle has her serious face on – after all, these decisions are very important. We choose a variety of dishes (and wine) from the menu so that we can say we’ve tried most types of dish – fish, pasta, meats and of course, pizza.
Belle is my pizza hero. We have the same tastes in what we like on them, and she always leaves me some of hers. Recently, she created a pizza especially for me, and it is in the top five meals I’ve ever eaten.Luckily, Ask didn’t let Belle or the rest of us down. The food was delicious. On any other day of the week there is no way we’d have tackled pudding, but for the sake of research we felt we had to indulge.
*happy sigh* A photo posted by Josephine Middleton (@slummysinglemummy) on
Before our outing, I thought Taunton didn’t need any more Italian restaurants. I left knowing that Taunton did need this Ask. It’s bright and friendly, and the food was delicious. We’ll definitely be going back, perhaps the next time I forget to think about what is for supper at home. Either that, or when the girls can face no more of my cooking.
Thank you to Ask for inviting us as their guests for a meal.
Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity is asking people from across the country to take part in their annual baking campaign, Bake it Better, taking place 19-25 October 2015.
Taking part is simple: register your interest at bakeitbetter.orghold a bake sale whenever and wherever suits you and sell your yummy homemade treats for a donation to the charity.
It’s not going to be like the one I had for my 31st birthday, where I turned my garden shed into a cocktail bar and made everyone dress as burlesque dancers, (although that was fun), this one is going to be all about running your own business and it’s taking place on Twitter.
For this one, rather than build my own bar from a bookcase and old plank, I’ve made a nice little advert instead. It was far less messy and I ended up with fewer splinters, which is always nice:
I’ve been running my own business now since 2009, and so I totally understand all of the worries that come with it, whether it be the practical stuff like completing a tax return, or the more emotional issues, like striving for that ever elusive work life balance, or dealing with kids who are sick of you being on your phone when you’re meant to be reading through their homework.
The added dilemma when running your own business, especially in the early days, is that you’re on your own, with no one to answer your questions. It can be hard to know where to go to find the answers without feeling silly.
The truth is though, that there’s no such thing as a silly question, we’ve all been there, and that’s where I come in.
Although I know the common questions, I don’t always have all the answers, so my Twitter chat is going to be supported by experts from Direct Line for Business and Business Support Helpline. Between us we’ll be able to offer tips and information on everything from tax and insurance to social media marketing and more.
If you run your own business, or are considering it, then please do come along on Tuesday 22nd September at 1pm and join in the chat. All you have to do is tweet me with the hashtag #HomeBizChat and we’ll do our best to help and support you and your business in whatever way we can.
If you can’t make it, but still have some questions, you can submit them in advance either as a comment on this post, including your Twitter handle, or to me on Twitter, and we’ll include them in the chat for you.
It would also be fantastic if you could help to spread the word about the event by retweeting this tweet:
It’s from a company called Mooli, a London-based fashion tech start-up. Mooli aspires to create designer-inspired tech bags ideal for cameras, laptops, tablets and more. Their flagship product is the Hampton Camera Bag for DSLR photographers.
As you know, last weekend Belle and I went away for the weekend, just the two of us. I think one of the reasons that Belle enjoyed it so much was that there was no wifi in the caravan, and we only had a GPRS signal across the whole park. This meant that she had my undivided attention, something which probably doesn’t happen as often as it should, or certainly as often as she would like.
On the Saturday we went for an outing to Woolacombe, and as we drove back through Barnstaple, my phone started pinging as the 4G kicked in. In the car park at Marks and Spencer, I took the opportunity to catch up on a bit of tweeting and photo sharing.
“I am going to take ten minutes,” I told Belle, sat in the car, having just spent about a million pounds on tasty M&S treats for us, “to pop up a few pictures from the holiday.”
The change in her was instant. She immediately looked away, out of the window, her jaw set in deliberate annoyance. I was pretty annoyed myself.
“Please don’t get cross about it,” I told her. “The whole reason we are able to come away together this weekend is because I am blogging and tweeting about it. I just need ten minutes to share a few photos, that’s not much to ask is it, in return for a lovely holiday?”
Hey guys, remember secondary school?! It was fun right? Ehem. Well it might have been, if you were one of the more enthusiastic kids and didn’t spend your lunch time sat under the stairs, wearing too much cheap eyeliner and drinking Relentless, the main food group of emo teens.
I guess most people might not describe those five years as the best of their lives, but this is the time when we grow and develop into the people we are going to become in later life and the difference between being 11 and being 16 is a big one when it comes to personal development.
We all know that being a teenager is never plain sailing, but did you know that according to recent research, 75% of school children and young people living with mental illness go undiagnosed? In my opinion, this is totally unacceptable at such a crucial age.
I remember being 14 years old and one morning breaking down to my head of year in her office that I just “never felt happy, any of the time.” I remember feeling terrified, because I had no idea what was going on. While she was perfectly nice and sympathetic about it all, there just weren’t enough support systems in place for me to get the right help at the right time, and in fact I found that I didn’t really receive the correct professional support until I had started university and it was clearly established that my depression and anxiety wasn’t a “teenage phase”. The Health and Wellbeing Team at my Uni are great, and I wish I could have received the same kind of help in earlier education.View Post
I had a bit of a moment yesterday, and I can’t quite decide in my head whether it’s a proper achievement or a bit lame.
Yesterday, at (roughly) 6,42pm, I got my 60,000th follower on Twitter.
It’s been brewing for a while, and when I got to within 10 I became a bit obsessed, checking my phone repeatedly, refreshing the screen again and again so that I could take a screenshot of the moment when it said 60,000. (I think this was possibly the lame bit in the proceedings.)
It was an awkward moment for me, because on the one hand I wanted to be proud and excited, but at the same time I was struggling with that little voice in my head saying things like ‘yeah, but come on, it’s not a real thing is it? Who plays with Twitter as a job?
“But it is real!” I say to the voice. “It’s important for people to connect online and create content that’s interesting and engaging…” and then I trail off for fear of sounding like a bit of a goon.
This isn’t about looking for praise, because I genuinely believe that anyone can build up a decent Twitter following if they really want to, (come on my workshop next week and I’ll show you how), it’s more about wondering what motivates that nagging voice and how we can stamp it out.
Why is it do you think that so many of us still suffer from that imposter syndrome, even when we’re successfully managing careers and families? At what point does that annoying inner voice shut up and let you get on with things?
Do you remember a little while ago I hosted a post from Jon at The Money Shed about ways to earn money from home? Well, I have another post from Jon today – and easy matched betting how to guide. I’ve had a go to test the theory, and it worked, but Jon is an expert at matched betting and makes thousands! Why not give it a try and let me know how you get on? (Be careful and cautious with your money of course.)
Hi everyone – Jon again here from The Money Shed, the UKs largest community website for earning money from home.
I believe it was 90s one hit wonder artist Betty Boo who announced her arrival with the profound lyric “it’s me again, yes, how did you guess? ‘Cause last time, you were really impressed”
Indeed the last time I guest posted on this fantastic blog I told you 4 ways to earn over £600 a month from home and now I’m back with 1 way for you to earn over £1000 a month AND it’s TAX FREE. It’s called matched betting. It’s easy to do, 100% legal, very easy to follow and will have you earning some serious cash in as long as it takes you to make a bet online. It’s also worth mentioning that all this is RISK FREE. You will not lose money doing matched betting – it is not betting in the traditional sense. Basically you earn money by taking advantage of all the free bet offers that bookies give out and harnessing GUARANTEED PROFIT from them.
I’ve been personally doing matched betting for the last 5 years and have earned over £40,000 so far (Which I’ve detailed on our Matched Betting Guide).You can do this even if you have never placed a bet in your life!
In this post I’m going to do give you enough of an understanding of how Matched Betting works so you understand the basics and should set you on the path to earning some major money from home. If you are after a more detailed guide then take a look at our 7000+ word Beginner’s Guide to Matched Betting.
To get you in the mood, here’s a very short video to set the scene:
I am going to make you around £15 with zero risk in the next few minutes so listen closely.
The bookie we will be using is Coral and the exchange we will be using is Betfairso click through to both of those and make your setup your accounts now so that everything is ready for your to use!
Our Qualifying Bet – OK, it’s time to get our hands dirty. Bookies offer free bets all the time to both new and existing customers. Usually to get those free bets you need to do something like bet £20 and get a £10 free bet free. If you were betting normally there is a chance you might lose your £20 on your qualifying bet just to get access to the £10 free bet. We are going to overcome that problem by laying (betting against our bets) at the exchange (betfair).
Coral have a very simple and easy to follow sign up offer.
Bet £5 and get a £20 free bet.
To qualify for this £20 free bet we need to place a £5 bet at odds above 1.5. When we are doing matched betting we work in decimals so if you look at the VERY top of the coral website you will see you can select to use decimal – click that first.
In this example I am going to be using my £5 qualifying bet on Vitesse vs Cambuur. As you can see below the odds of Vitesse to win are 1.5 so this is perfect.
We now need to open up Betfair and go to their exchange to bet AGAINST this win from happening. That way no matter what the outcome we won’t have lost our full £5.
Login to BetFair, click on EXCHANGE at the top and use the little search bar at the top to search for the team / horse / whatever you are betting on.
Once you find it you should get a screen that looks a bit like this:
The pink section is all we care about on the exchange. Just to help you out a bit here, when we BACK an event at the bookie (ieVitesse are going to win) we always LAY it at the Exchange (ieVitesse are NOT going to win and will either lose or draw). We then have every eventuality covered.
As you can see the odds for laying Vitesse are 1.58. Ideally we want our odds to be as close together as possible so this isn’t a bad match at all.
Before we place our back and lay bet we need to use a special matched betting calculator. There are lots around but I find TrickyBet is a good one to use. Open up the calculator are we need to enter a few numbers.
FOR MY EXAMPLE:
The Bet Type is Normal
The Bet is £5
The Back odds are 1.5 (You would enter your OWN odds here normally)
The Lay odds are 1.58 (You would enter your OWN odds here normally)
The Lay Commission needs to be set at 5% as that is the commission that Betfair charge for using their exchange.
Press Calculate and your calculator should now look something like this (although obviously with YOUR odds in it):
By looking at the bottom we can see we are going to make a very small 34p loss doing this qualifying bet. That is ACCEPTABLE as we will be making our money with the free bet. We nearly ALWAYS make a very small loss on the qualifying bet – we only do the qualifying bet to get access to the free bet.
Go back to the coral website and now place £5 on your chosen bet (in this case Vitesse)
Deposit around £10 into Betfair and now place your lay bet. Simply click on the pink Lay odds for your chosen bet and put in the value that the calculator tells you to which is this case is £4.90
Out qualifying bet is now done. No matter what the outcome we will have made a 34p loss, it doesn’t matter if the bet wins at the bookie or wins at the exchange.
After the event has happened (or sometimes as soon as you have placed your qualifying bet) you will get given a £20 FREE BET from Coral. Now it is time for us to make our money.
Here we can go for whatever odds we want, I would suggest something around 4.0/5.0/6.0 as you won’t need too much money in the exchange then.
Find a race / match that offers odds on the coral website of 4.0 or above.
For this example I have decided to bet on a horse called Faintly with odds of 6.0 in the 7pm race at Wolverhampton:
When I look him up on Betfair I see his lay odds are 6.2:
So we have all the figures we need and now it’s back to the TrickyBet calculator.
FOR MY EXAMPLE
The Bet Type is SNR (Stake Not Returned)
The Bet is £20 (This is the value of our free bet)
The Back odds are 6 (You would enter your OWN odds here normally)
The Lay odds are 6.2 (You would enter your OWN odds here normally)
The Lay Commission needs to be set at 5% as that is the commission that Betfair charge for using their exchange.
So as we can see we are going to make £15.45 profit (which minus our 35p loss from the qualifier is £15.10). We have done this in the time it takes us to place 2 bets and it is GUARANTEED PROFIT
Next we need to go back to coral and place our £20 free bet on our chosen horse. Once you select it on the right you will get an option to select to ‘Use your free bet’ simply choose it and put £20 on your chosen event.
Over at the exchange (Betfair) I am going to lay £16.26 just like it is telling me to. I need a liability of £84.55 so deposit some more money into Betfair if you need it. Liability is just BetFairs way of wanting a small guarantee for your lay bet as the chances of 1 horse NOT winning the race is FAR higher. Don’t worry, you will either win at the bookie or the exchange again so you won’t be out of pocket.
And that’s IT!
If you follow those instructions you will have made £15 for a few minutes work – totally RISK FREE and TAX FREE as you don’t pay tax on UK Gambling winnings.
So, how do you go from £15 to £1000 a month – VERY EASILY.
What I’ve just shown you is just the mechanics of Matched Betting. Basically I am just showing you how it works and how you can make money from it. What you really need is a Matched Betting service that can spoon speed you offers each and every day with full instructions and idiot proof video guides showing you what to click and where when placing your bets.
If you’re the sort of person who likes to make an informed decision, The Money Shed Blog has both an in-depth Profit Accumulator Review and OddsMonkey Reviewthat compares the two main matched betting services in the UK with extremely detailed reviews to help you choose one that is going to give you what you want for your budget.
If you want to just crack on, one very decent service is Profit Accumulator
The Matched Betting service I recommend above ALL OTHERS is without doubt Profit Accumulator. Profit Accumulator is a Matched Betting service which like I mentioned basically feed you an endless stream of offers from the bookies that you can take advantage of. Instead of having to go out and find them yourself you simply login to their website and you are presented with a link for each bookie free bet offer available which gives you not just instructions on how to do the offer but also a video showing you what to click on.
Profit Accumulator offers a range of services for betting, helping you to find the greatest offers for you and the best ways to win big. This site can be used with both betting and bingo sites such as www.boomtownbingo.com and works fantastically across many different platforms. Profit Accumulator has over 20,000 users worldwide, and boasts an excellent dedicated support system that are focused on providing the best service for you.
You also get access to a fantastic bit of software called ‘OddsMatching’ which lets you select a bookie from a drop down list and filter the bets. So if you wanted to find all the bets available ABOVE 4.0 on Coral. Instead of manually having to find them you just go to the OddsMatching page, choose coral from the drop down list and enter 4.0 into one of the filter boxes and you get presented with all available bets and links directly to them. It saves you a huge amount of time and lets you just get on with earning money as quickly as you can.
If you are already an existing member with a number of high street bookies don’t worry about it, new free bet offersfor existing customers with different bookies appear every few days throughout the week and Profit Accumulator will direct you to those as well as it is updated throughout the day. With the football season having just started again there is MAJOR money to be made with Matched Betting as the likes of Paddy Power and Skybet regularly offer Bet £20 get £10 type deals on every match that is shown on Sky/BT at the moment. There is SO MUCH MORE to matched betting in terms of what you can earn but I just wanted to give you a small taste and show you that is possible to make money from it.
If you want to sign up to Profit Accumuator it costs £17.99 a month, with that price going down to £14.99 after a year, or £150 a year (don’t worry about those costs as you will make MORE than the money you need to pay for it without question). They also offer a FREE TIER membership where you can earn £45 TODAY from offers they present you with and then you can either take you £45 and leave or pay them some money to get access to their services.
Hopefully this post has made some sense to you. If you have any questions then just leave a comment below and I will help out as best you can and if you are looking for other ways to earn money then make sure to check out our ever popular 20 Work from home jobs for Mums and How to Get Money Fast blog posts which cover over £5000+ in income for you to earn from home! For something that’s more about fun that guaranteed income, try a promo code for Text 888Ladies.
Well, a couple of weeks ago we arrived home from somewhere quite late – about 9.30pm. I sent Belle straight upstairs to get ready for bed. About fifteen minutes later I went up to give her a kiss goodnight and she was still standing in the middle of her bedroom, coat and shoes on, looking at Instagram.
It’s not cool really, is it? My work is online, but I do try to switch off regularly. It makes me sad that children nowadays have a stronger connection to the internet than to the natural world.
To try and combat this, and make Belle look up at the real world for more than about five seconds, we packed her off at the beginning of the summer holidays to Camp Wilderness. It was a little bit of a drive, made longer by Belle accidentally entering the postcode of their head office in High Wycombe into the sat nav, but it was totally worth it.
“Do you ever worry about Belle going on too many mini-breaks?” Bee asked me a while ago.
It’s true, we do go on a lot of mini breaks. It’s one of the things I love most about blogging – the opportunity to try new things and to travel, even if it is only down the road to Devon. I try very hard not to take it for granted, but I also have to remind myself that I’ve worked hard to grow and develop my blog, that these opportunities don’t just throw themselves in my lap.
(I’m not sure where that need for a bit of self-reassurance came from. Probably hormones. *casually scoffs plum crumble for breakfast*)
I actually have had plum crumble for breakfast, on both of the mornings we’ve woken up this weekend at the Bideford Bay Park Resorts holiday park. I made it when we arrived on Friday night – an excuse really to use up a pile of nearly mouldy plums – but I’ve pretended it’s basically like eating toast and plum jam, and is really totally fine.
(Gosh, I really am hormonal aren’t I? Stop justifying everything…)
I’m writing this on the Sunday morning. I’m sat up in bed with a cup of tea while Belle watches a programme on CBBC about kids going to work in a factory in Brazil, to try and make them appreciate how much their parents do for them. I’m hoping it might inspire Belle to bring me a fresh cup of tea, but nothing has happened yet.View Post
