Coming Up For Air With a Search Engine Tip For Small Business
The northern summer has been known for quite some time as a period each year when the Internet seems to slow down. Traffic drops as people spend more time outdoors and away from their computers, sales drop off and online businesses take a vacation.
Of course summer is the time when savvy Internet marketers build for winter and so while business slows for others we are usually rather busy at this time of year. This year it seems that we are being taught a new meaning of the word ‘busy’.
We’re only a few weeks into summer and already we are already beginning to turn work away simply because our people are already stretched to the limit. This week I’ve had two major orders to deal with that have kept me chained to the desk since Sunday.
Fortunately I managed to get one of them finished last night and even though the other one isn’t finished I can come up for some air today.
One of the biggest problems our small business faces is a lack of people who are prepared to actually work. The longer I work in the freelance writing side of the industry the more I think that many people like to claim the mantle of being a freelance writer but few are prepared for the hard work that comes with the title.
This afternoon I’m off to speak to the local Arts Council Writers’ Group - they describe themselves as ’scribes’ while I consider myself a scribbler - it should be an interesting experience 
And before I dive back into some work let me leave you with a link to a very very interesting and thoughtful post on the SEOmoz Blog. Many of us who dabble in optimising our sites for search engines have found that, in the past, each of the big three have needed different techniques to get our pages to rank well. But Michael Martinez thinks those times are changing.
‘X-Ranks: The shaping battle of quality methodologies’ makes for some interesting reading.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:04 am
I just wanted to say that as a small business owner, I welcome downtime whenver it comes. Don’t get me wrong; I’m obviously thankful for all the regular work that I get. But having some downtime allows me to take care of the administrative details that often fall by the wayside when I’m dealing with day-to-day operations. The bottome line is that there’s always something to do, whether it’s for a paying client or for my own benefit.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:18 am
G’day Bill
Yes I can relate to what you’re saying. Over the last few months we seem to have gone over the tipping point with our business and things are just booming. Some admin tasks have just had to take a back seat while we keep up with the inflow of work.
I’m not sure we will ever get to the point of having the sort of downtime we need to catch up on those tasks so an office manager could be in our near future