Posts

Sorry to be negative ....

First thoughts are that the USPs aren't enough to pull in paying customers easily (the paying customers being presumably employers and recruitment consultancies wanting to advertise their jobs - job hunters wouldn't pay).

Employers increasingly use their own sites to advertise vacancies. This approach costs them nowt, is good PR (any company hiring now is obviously doing better than most!) and encourages visitors (who drive up the site rankings and may even become purchasers of company products).

Recruitment consultancies' job boards are self-marketing devices as well as candidate attracting / processing ones.

It seems to me this idea involves lots of work for you and I can't see how you'd get enough paying customers to make it profitable.

Can't help but what an interesting question! Good luck.

... and sometimes lots of pain and no gain, exactly like trying to lose weight.

You'd have to think carefully about which categories of business to target too, James. Some of them have regional or national markets and the locations close to them aren't necessarily their best sources of customers.

In our experience, for example, we get lots of customers from SE England but fewer from Leicestershire.

Would a flat share actually cost her less? You might be horrified to find out what the "going rate" for renting now is. Worth investigating as you're trying to be fair to both parties and you'd like your place back ASAP.

If she really is paying you "over the odds" after the 3 months freebie's been repaid, you could always put a sum aside to give her a lovely "moving in" present when she does move out.

We're on a UK based hosting service and it occasionally goes down, typically not for long (6 - 15 mins).

In your opinion, how often (per month) does a UK based hosting site have to go down to put it in (a) the better than average category; and (b) the worse than average category?

Sad to say, I think the interest in starting a business often comes from those who've lost their jobs (or who've never had the opportunity to get one) and who feel "I've nothing to lose, so I'll give it a go".

I'm particularly anti the government and its agencies selling self-employment as the way out for school leavers unable to get their first jobs. This is the quickest way to ruin and heartache for most (not all) school-leavers.thumbsdown

Or alternatively, we might be at the start of something much more exciting! Us human beings telling governments and economists that austerity programmes don't work and it's up to them to come up with something that does.

They'll have to put their thinking caps on, though. It seems to me nobody really understands what's happening.

When sites with a low PR value (eg 0!) use your articles and text link back, does this still improve your Google page rankings plse?

I've been sending my articles out to ezinearticles and goarticles and they have been picked up - but sadly not so far by high PR sites

A speck of comfort I've got from the Libya "adventure" is that it now seems likely the UK government will have to look harder at the evils it's permitted and colluded with during the "war on terror".

It's good for those in power to remember that the torture victim may be able to hold you to account if he / she gets into power before you die.

I used to feel we had halfway decent governments (OK maybe a bit bumbling and unsuccessful but basically on the right ethical side of the line) and now I don't. I'm horrified that (allegedly in my name - and yours) our "democratic" governments have made us recently international aggressors and co-conspirators in torture, rendition and breaches of international law.

I would love to see Blair, Straw, individuals in MI5 / MI6 et al in the dock for what they've done ... but sadly, I don't think it'll happen.

I know other governments do worse - but that is no comfort to me when I fear my government intends to follow their example.

Rant over ....