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Professional service firms such as lawyers or accountancy practices often find it challenging to market their services. Some even find it distasteful. This interview with lawyer, Flor McCarty, managing partner of McCarty and Co, looks at some of the marketing strategies employed by their legal firm, which could also be successfully adapted to many other business sectors. Why Is Marketing “Dirty” for the Professions? Before we get to the interview, here is a little background information on…

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Sharon Sheppard runs the virtual office company – OutofhoursAdmin. Besides the business side of things I have often seen Sharon helping people on Twitter and Facebook – including me – with Excel and Word problems. Using Excel a lot myself I thought I knew it well but realised Sharon knows it inside out. So I thought I’d find out a bit more about how her business came about and her expertise in all things Microsoft. And of course I couldn’t let her go without giving us some helpful…

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OceanaBoost was set up by Declan Moore (17), David Ryan (17) and Barry Holland (17). All three of these young entrepreneurs are students of Clonakilty Community College, in Clonakilty, County Cork (Ireland). They set up their company OceanaBoost Drinks in September 2010, with an aim to establish a functional fruit drink with health promoting extracts from seaweed. The 3 entrepreneurs told me about their business, their successes and their plan for the future.   When did it all begin?…

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Reviews are something we used to rely on before we downloaded an App, surely it must be a good indication as to how good an App is! Not necessarily, as we found out once we started developing our own apps and were on the receiving end of reviews. How Many? There are 123 app stores in the world, and each store has its own review site. All reviews are recorded under the individual countries. There are 400,000 apps on the app store that have no reviews, or are not getting downloaded. No Way? The…

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I’ve known Alex Schregardus for three years and have followed the progress of his app, visitorM, with interest.  I’ve been wanting to interview Alex about the progress he went through developing his business, using LEAP and the support from Enterprise Ireland, plus the idea behind the app. Finally I pinned him down to answer my questions. What is your business background and how did you make the decision to become self-employed and an entrepreneur? I’ve been self-employed…

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A password is a common denominator in everything we do online, along with sign-ups and logins. We have become used to signing in or logging on to a site, forum, dashboard, blog, website or hosting control panel. Username, email and password protection is such a familiar space for us now, yet what are we doing with them? There is a lot we can do technically online, what I want to address in this post is simply what we can do for ourselves personally. Let us look at how we can increase our…

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Apple recently started promoting the “iPad in Business” series on its website. The series is essentially a collection of interactive online seminars designed to help brands understand what great value the popular tablet has as a marketing tool. Participants will be able to engage in Q&A sessions with experts from Apple to learn more about how to use the device to accelerate their business growth. This series of seminars looks to be a phenomenal resource for small businesses that are…

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What can Oprah honestly teach us about Productivity Apps for the iPad? Firstly, she endorsed the iPad in her TOP 2010 things to love. The Productivity Apps she loved were the journaling and most importantly writing her column for O Magazine and meeting her deadlines. Now if that’s not the epiphany of productivity, read on for some more favourite iPad Apps to increase your productivity. Oprah – A Pioneer of the iPad Even as Oprah was one of the pioneers to use the iPad in 2010, she of…

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Email Marketing is the process of delivering relevant, engaging and timely marketing messages to a specific list of recipients via email. It is a great way to target specific groups and it’s relatively cheap too. Follow these six simple tips to create and run a successful Email Marketing campaign. # 1. Email sign up Have a sign up form on your website which is short, simple and has a limited number of required fields. First name and email address should suffice. Information required to…

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I’m sure everyone will have heard about the problems with the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Ulster Bank in the past week. I bank with Ulster Bank and I’m told payments made to me last week are unlikely to reach my account until next week – almost 14 days delay. All my direct debits are on hold too and I’m waiting to hear if there are any ramifications to this. According to this news report on the BBC Wednesday (27th) lunchtime they say 99% of accounts are up to date. I’ve just…

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