1. Content: What are you going to write about? It’s always prudent to give advice or showcase your expertise – this is valuable – whereas a thinly veiled selling approach is just annoying.

2. Tone of voice: It’s good to get some consistency but sometimes you need to use content from a variety of sources. We say, pool the content and filter through one person so the tone is consistent. For a blog, keep it light, short and informal too.

3. Consider your headline: Some say this is more important than the blog itself because it really helps you get found on Google searches. We say it’s best to follow up a great headline with great content too. How disappointing to find a new company (yours) through an interesting blog heading, only to find the content weak or dull.

4. Recycle & repurpose: Once your blog is written, promote it via links on your social media platforms. You can also take parts of it, if appropriate, to use as standalone comments on social media. You can also turn lengthy articles into several blog posts. Once you have blog content, think hard about how far you can recycle it without being repetitive.

5. Be regular: Give yourself a realistic target for the number of blogs you can write each month. Our advice is to create a working group of people who can write one per month for the administrator to use. That way, the blogging burden doesn’t become too onerous and the content stays fresh.

“If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again…when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.” — Christopher Alexander

According to Gretchen Rubin’s latest best-seller – “Better than Before” – creating habits is a really good thing. By putting a habit in place, you are removing the need to make a decision. By automating actions, you are freeing up time and energy that can be better used elsewhere. I guess this is what business systems are all about.

We like habits so we’ve built in plenty of automation into docSAFE. For example, you can send documents to clients for signing and it’ll generate reports to tell you what’s been signed and what’s outstanding. By getting into the habit of getting online signatures, you’re taking away the decision of when, where and how to get together with your client. You’ve saved yourself the decision making process and the time it takes to organise and get the meeting completed – all for the sake of automating a repetitive action.

Of course you should meet with your clients but for the bigger things, not just a signature.

Talk to us about how we can automate parts of your office systems (that shouldn’t require thought) so you can get on more efficiently (with the activities that do).

Down-ranking a website that doesn’t perform on a mobile device is absolutely the best move Google has made in a very long time.

Google is working towards making the world a mobile-friendly place. That includes redirecting users away from sites that don’t perform, videos that don’t play, pages that throw up error messages or repeatedly take you to the default mobile home page and not the page you requested.

Finding yourself on a page designed for a monitor when you have a smartphone size area to navigate it is completely hopeless. It’s like crossing the Atlantic in a matchbox.

Google is on our side for this one – getting the internet user-friendly one website at a time.

If you need converting, give us a call and we’ll get you back in Google’s good books.

Most of us don’t have hours a day to invest in social media but here’s how to make a good start:

1 Make sure your social media pages all look consistent, professional and have strong branding (use the same header images, bold colours, large logo or company name)

2 Make sure all your set up fields are completed so your profiles are as complete as possible (don’t miss the new ‘call to action’ button that appears on your company’s Facebook page for example)

3 Get everyone in the team on board. Ask your staff for one contribution per week. Get an administrator to chase them up, store them, organise them and have them ready for use.

4 Use Tweetdeck or another scheduling tool – load up your Tweets for the month and then just add new ones as they occur. It takes the pressure off but means you have a good foundation of communications.

5 Re-purpose every piece of content. A full website article can be re-written into a friendly blog. You can make several Facebook and Linked In posts from it. You can also précis it right down to a Tweet that links back to the complete article.

There’s much, much more to say about this but make a start, give it a go but don’t be a slave to it!

We work in a bubble most of the time, only coming up for air when times are slightly quieter. During those times it’s easy to enjoy the peace but why not use your less frantic times to assess how you work and see if it could be more efficient?

I offer a service where I come in and have a chat about how things are done in your organisation. It’s often useful to talk to a few members of staff too – to find out what slows them down or is a real chore. Then I can work out if there are better systems, easier and more profitable ways to achieve more.

Our clients often comment on how docSAFE changed things for them – automatic backups, providing clients with secure access to their own files (saves on copying and faxing), online signatures and automatic follow ups and prompts. But that’s just part of the picture. We can automate lots of things, schedule all your social media, in short, do a number of things that will help your company work flow.

Looking at things dispassionately, challenging the ‘because that’s how it has always been done’ culture and examining the role of people in your firm is always best left to someone outside the business.

Improving things when it’s quiet will pay dividends when you’re busy again – and that’s when you’ll notice the real difference.