Creatively Belle

This Special Edition newsletter article is about Customer Service. Customer service can make or break a business, especially a small business. Good customer service is key to bringing back customers and making them repeat customers – the type of customer that lets you build a strong and healthy business. Poor customer service can mean your […]

This month’s article is inspired by the Better Business workshop I did a couple weekend’s ago. The program is about developing and mentoring businesses – generally established – so they can get past any stumbling blocks and move on to the next stage. The course has three parts – a one day workshop, a one-on-one […]

The impressive, talented and inspiring internet marketing entrepreneur Corey Rudl passed away 2nd June 2005 in a car accident in California. At only 34 years Corey had already achieved business success that comes with vision and tenacity and it is difficult to comprehend how such vitality could be gone. His business, the Internet Marketing Centre, […]

This month’s article is inspired by conversations I’ve been having with other small business owners about marketing vs advertising. So what is the difference between marketing and advertising? In our talks advertising is paid for space in publications etc while marketing is more about public relations and is free space in publications. Paid for advertising […]

This month’s article is inspired by questions I’ve been asked directly about setting up a website for a new small business. So where do you start, what do you need and what does it cost? Where do you start? Figure out what you want the site to achieve – what does it need to do? […]

An easy to use website site is great fun to explore and are often the most successful online businesses. Usability is about how easy or difficult a website is to use. Generally an easy to use website: * downloads info and images quickly and easily * groups info logically * tells the visitor where they […]

Marketing tools are essential for promoting your business and for any small business they need not only to communicate your message effectively but to be cost effective too. An easy way to keep costs down is to make your marketing tools yourself. Brochures can be easily made using Microsoft Publisher with their perforated templates. All […]

There seems to be two camps of people when it comes to websites – those who are using them and building their skills with them and those who are spooked by them – or rather the technology – and are missing out on the business opportunities websites can provide. I want to take away some […]

Tenacity is one of my favourite words. When I was a contract IT technical writer my clients would describe me as tenacious. This was because I understood that I was about 56th on the priority list of my sources of technical information for the documents I was contracted to write. So I just stuck at […]

This month’s article is simply about lessons learnt about having your C:drive wiped out by a nasty virus. I thought I was being rather smart about protecting the contents of my computer. I have two drives – C: drive for applications and a physically separate drive – D: drive – for my data (documents, images, […]