Promoting Your Offline Business Online _ Guest Post

I’ll let Mathew introduce himself, he is a regular writer here at TheInfoPreneur, great guy and one hell of a business man;

My name is Matthew Needham, I am a qualified accountant and an interim manager. Basically, I help organisations during times of change, helping them reduce costs and improve business processes. Some of you will know my website www.bigredtomatocompany.co.uk.

Like many of you who earn money from the internet, I am a freelancer. I am an employee of my own company and I work with clients.

With the worldwide economic downturn many organisations are laying off employees. With the recession hitting multiple industries all organisations are suffering and consequently many good people are finding themselves unemployed, often for the first time, after many loyal years of service.

With the recession being what it is, people who are struggling to find full time work have now moved into temporary work in order to make ends meet.

For some people this will indeed be temporary work, as they use the temporary work as a stop gap until they find permanent roles.

For others this may well be an enforced permanent career change in order to meet their financial commitments.

As is typical in all markets, where supply exceeds demand the price falls until it reaches the price the employing clients are willing to pay.

Consequently, for those who made a conscious career choice to move into interim work (project based and the opportunity to work with many different clients) in a commoditised market (i.e. people) it’s important to differentiate from the competition.

Whilst skills and experience is of course very important, it’s about differentiating the services I offer from those of other interim managers, consultants and coaches.

It’s all about building a brand.

About 5 years ago I read a book by Tom Peters called the Brand You 50 which basically said that you need to think of yourself as a brand and think about the services you uniquely offer and suggested ways (50 to be exact!) you can build set about building yourself as a brand. A key message being was to think of the activities you do as projects rather than work.

A couple of years ago I read Seth Godin’s book, Small is the New Big which changed a lot of my thinking especially how I think of differentiating myself from others and working in a Web 2.o world. These two books basically led to me creating The Big Red Tomato Company both as a brand and the website.

So for me, I use www.bigredtomatocompany.co.uk as a means of promoting my offline business i.e. me, as well as building an online business with my offline services. For example, a lot of the work I have undertaken with clients and when I worked as an employee, was coaching and mentoring others and these services can just as easily be delivered via the internet.

My site is aimed at entrepreneurs, whether they are small business owners or those working in a larger organisation who want to make a difference. All potential clients.

photo credit: Marco Raaphorst

So that’s how I promote my business and build a brand – how about you, what do you do?

Tagged as: bigredtomatocompany.co.uk, Guest Post, offline online