The one real benefit of having done the 100 blog posts in 100 days challenge is having changed my mindset of being a consumer to one of being a producer (even if it is now of blogs only consisting of a sentence or two) Being a producer has much more chance of leading to success.

Content marketing should be your link building strategy

In many things you should always have 1) a call to action 2) an incentive 3) a deadline But it probably applies more to sales than dating.

What's the curse of knowledge? It's using jargon instead of language that a client understands. Eg a sales pitch to a band: "I'm going to market you" The problem with that is it has connotations of selling out being sleazy. It would be much better to say: "I can get you more paid gigs" It's an easy trap to fall into when you are a web developer. Here at Onsitenow we try and speak in plain English, and if you don't understand anything we say, please, please let us know.

"You can out last those that are lucky, and out work those that are lazy"

You can take crap and turn it into fertilizer.

"The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competative advantage that startups must posses" If you are a small company you can act quicker, pivot faster, so when that useful feedback comes, take the initiative.

There's a Spanish proverb: "When someone argues with a fool, it is hard to tell the difference." I like that.

"On the web you are what you publish" Not sure what that makes me, as I'm going for regularity at the expense of quality, at the moment. As I have said many times before, I need to rethink this 100 posts in 100 days challenge.

"We keep doing the same thing thinking if we just work harder or do more it will produce different results." That's how I've felt doing this super-micro-micro-blog. I was expecting to boost my search engine rankings, but it hasn't worked out like that. So rather than keep doing the same thing or just doing the same thing but working harder at it I need to rethink my strategy.

I've heard that "persistance trumps talents". OK, I may not be the greatest writer, but I'm persistent (if also brief), lets see if this persistent blogging pays off. In about 30 days time when I will have done 100 super-micro-micro-blogs.

The Tour de France comes to Yorkshire. These are some photo's and videos from Stage 2 at the Cote De Blubberhouses

The Tour de France comes to Yorkshire. It's one of the biggest sporting events in the world and I'm not going to miss it for anything. Especially as it's going through the wonderful Dales countryside. These are my roads where I go cycling. I head out to one of my favourite spots, the wild moors of Buttertubs Pass and take a few photographs

Does your website tell people what you do? It should do, and probably does. But does it tell people who you are? Maybe you have an About Us page with a few paragraphs about when the company was formed, and maybe even a few photographs of staff. But is that it? As the saying goes: "People buy from people who they know like and trust" How much of your personality is in your website? Is it just a dry, sterile document? Let people know who you are.

You probably have a plan for your business, and how it will progress, but inevitably you will have made assumptions. Is there any way you can test those assumptions? Ask people, maybe put a questionaire on your website and email it out to some of your customers?

It may be the first time that you have had a website or run a business. You will make mistakes and wrong choices, but don't despair remember every artist was once an amature. And every master has a disaster! At Onsitenow we use a really flexible content management system called MODX to build our websites. That means that we can add and remove features with relative ease, so if you make a wrong choice about a feature it's not going to be such a disaster after all. It can usually be changed and updated with ease. Your website can learn with you as your business progresses.

As I said a couple of days ago, just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean you should too. Just because everyone else has really annoying moving slideshows on their websites front page doesn't mean you should. Be different. Think of your customer, what would be useful and interesting to them? Don't believe the anecdotes until you have some firm data. Onsitenow can design and build a website that can cater for your clients, and we can collect the data on their actions, then you really can see what works and what doesn't.

Having your own website gives you the opportunity to measure your customer's activities. What pages are they most interested in? How often do they come to your site? What stage do they get to in your sales process? You can measure all these activities and with the reults you can improve how your site works. Because, as the heading says, you can't improve what you don't measure. With a bespoke site from Onsitenow we can measure the most important metrics for you business.

Things will go wrong. That's gauranteed. So don't get all het up about it, deal with it. What lessons can you learn? How can you improve the situation given those lessons?

There's a saying: "keep moving you can't steer a parked car" So true, you need to build up a bit of momentum to move forward. If your website isn't being updated, how's it going to have any effect on your business? As pointed out yesterday Onsitenow use MODX to create our client's websites. MODX gives you creative freedom to change the design around, and re-develop the functionality of your site. So don't just let your website stagnate, keep adding, keep innovating. Steer your business.