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?

This is a guest post from Matthew Needham, now Matthew is a great business presence here in the UK, BigRedTomatoCompany has seen a dramatic increase lately and it’s all down to Matthew.

This post was inspired by a recent post on TheInfoPreneur by Jason at Dragon Blogger. In Jason’s post, which was a great article by the way (go check it out after you’ve read this post) , he talks about the importance of hard work and doing lots of stuff in order to publish your content. This is all good stuff and I wanted to share with you how I go about writing my blog posts.

Start with mind maps

Once a quarter (and often once a month) I sit down with a note pad (usually my Moleskine) and pen (and a large mug of coffee) and give myself 15-30 minutes to brainstorm ideas for posts.

I use of lot of mind maps (a series of connecting ideas) and expand each idea into its component parts.

For example on Sunday whilst waiting for my wife, I sat down and started listing out various ideas. One of the ideas was ‘what could you do in a minute?’ and then branched off from that central idea to add ’60 things you could do with 60 seconds’, ‘giving feedback’, ‘telling someone you love them and why’, ‘automating email rules’ etc etc… You get the idea.

When I ran out of ideas for that particular series of posts I started on another; based on my favourite book the 4 Hour Work Week. Regular readers of The Big Red Tomato Company site will know that I recently ran a promotion to give 1 copy away to the person who had the best explanation as to why they should have it, so the ideas I came up with were a feature on the person who won and what they got out of it, other 4 Hour Work Week case studies. Again you get the idea.

After 15 mins I had a list of over 20 core post ideas and another 40 ideas for individual articles.

Plan what you’re going to do

I like to be organised and for me I have much more traffic in the week than I do at the weekend, so I tend to post lighthearted stuff like a video or something lifestyle related like a quick recipe at weekends (if I post at all).

I take a print of my calendar and start adding the post ideas to it. Ben Lumley, writer at 6Aliens.com has kindly agreed to do a series of guest posts on the last Friday of each month, so I add these to the calendar first.

I then add items themed around an event or a date, for example I recently posted an article about the most depressing day of the year (Jan 18 if you’re wondering) and then added the other posts around them.

I know some bloggers answer readers questions on a weekend or do some housekeeping tasks, or days to write your blog posts, you can add all these in too.

I personally use iCal to my manage my calendar as it syncs with my iPhone ( that way, I always know what I’m supposed to be doing)

At the end of each month I print my calendar out (in a month to a page view) and then go into Google Analytics,

I then look for the little (sometimes big!) mountain peaks in the chart and then look at my calendar to see what I did that day.

Sometimes it’s a page design or layout change which drives the traffic, other times it’s a post which captures a lot of imagination and comment. So, you can be pretty sure that the posts which draw a lot of traffic tend to feature as central post ideas for the following month or quarter!

photo credit: LittleMissPip

Well, that’s how I work, what about you?

What do you do to manage your blog posts?

Go check out Matthew now after you have left a comment here;