You may remember that a few months back I was managing the writing and design of the Business Matters marketing supplement. It’s now set to be published with the September edition. With BlackBerry on board as sponsor, we’re hoping it’s going to make a big impact on the SME community.

It’s mostly aimed at giving concrete advice to SMEs that want to beef up their marketing efforts. We didn’t want it to read like a textbook, so we’ve glammed it thing up with a few business celebs: there are interviews with Ann Summers chief exec Jacqueline Gold, Syed Ahmed of the The Apprentice and a few other big names.

By the way, if you run a small to medium enterprise and you’re not subscribed to BM, it’s probably the best small business magazine on the market. Best of all, it’s free - click on the image or here to go straight to the subs page!

If you take a look at the about me page you’ll see that I’ve changed the photo. The last one made me look like an alien, so I’m quite pleased to see the back of it.

Thanks to Chloe Young for the pic, and thanks also to James Dalton, Kat Cook, Nick Ringrow’s arm, George Twizell’s hair and the right hemisphere of Laura Maddren’s head for their guest appearances.

I spent most of May working on the new version of the Which? website, and it’s now gone live.

In case you’re not a Brit, or in the unlikely event that you are a Brit but you’ve never heard of Which?, it’s a national charity that fights for quality, value, openness and fair dealing from consumer-facing businesses. Having a product awarded Which? Best Buy status is a very big deal indeed for a UK company.

I was mostly working on the campaigns section of the site, helping to rewrite material and advising on tone of voice issues. The aim of the redesign is to broaden the demographic appeal of Which? campaigns beyond their traditional 40/50-something AB 1/2 heartland. In simple terms, the organisation wants to keep the middle-aged, middle class, Guardian-reading demographic that it has had cornered for years, while at the same time appealing to a slightly younger, Mail on Sunday and Daily Mirror-reading demo - the group of people, millions strong, that politicians often define as ‘middle England’, and consider to be the key opinion-forming segment of British society.

Broadening the appeal of the brand without losing the loyalty of the core readership was a tough challenge, and in the main we met it by looking at the clarity and readability of the copy and thinking about ways we could appeal to the new target audience. The whole thing is now much more ‘you’-oriented, and focusses on the needs of busy parents with young or teenaged families.

From a communications point of view it was a great challenge, and I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out. The proof, however, is going to be in reader feedback - watch this space!

My old chum Bruce has recently quit his job as a network manager work as a freelance IT consultant. He’s got loads of experience and will do well.

A few days ago we were discussing his business website (not live yet - I’ll post a link when it is) and he mentioned that he would be including a blog.

This got me thinking about why blogs are becoming so popular on business websites, especially in the freelance and microbusiness sectors. If you read the relevant threads on UKBF you’ll find a number of good reasons put forward for having a blog on your website. It allows you to:

1. Talk about your product and/or service;

2. Issue news, warnings, information updates and product announcements;

3. Prove your expertise by including tutorials and howtos;

4. Offer a simple, easily managed, moderated forum for customer questions and feedback.

For me, there’s a fifth reason, too: a blog humanizes your business.

I recommend my clients have a blog on their sites for the same reason that I recommend that they include photos and bios of their key people. Visitors to a site like to see the people behind the pages - it gives them a sense of what makes the business tick. That, in turn, builds trust. Trust is the route to winning both new customers and repeat business.

That being the case, what subjects should you blog about? The classic advice is to provide useful information that gives targeted readers a direct benefit. That’s an absolutely sound strategy, but don’t forget to include what journalists call the human angle - talk about yourself, the projects you’ve been working on, and what you hope to achieve in future.

Including that human angle helps new visitors warm to you and your business, and makes it harder for them to write you off or criticise aspects of your offering or your site. Some still will, of course, but for most people it’s much easier to be sympathetic to a business once they know a bit about the hopes and aspirations of the human beings behind it.

Do you send out marketing emails? Do you want to increase your open and conversion rates? Here are some tips I sent to a client a couple of weeks back. He’s in the public relations business, so the whole thing has a bit of a PR angle to it. Still, it’s useful advice whatever industry you’re in:

1. A good basic approach is to think like you’re headlining a story or a release - try to summarise the benefit/angle in the subject line.

2. Taking the story idea further, one of the advantages of email is that people at first only see the ‘headline’ (i.e., the subject line). They can’t scan the top of the ’story’ (i.e., the body of the email) to see if it measures up to the expectations the subject line has set up. That means that you can use your reader’s curiosity to your advantage. A good way to do this is to make the subject line a question or a startling fact that readers want to know the answer to/more about.

3. Remember that getting them to open the email isn’t the same as getting them to read it. So the bodycopy really has to deliver on the promise of the headline.

4. Building from that, make your recipients a promise and deliver it. I always think the best email marketing (and this is particularly the case with email newsletter marketing) offers its readers a benefit in and of itself. In other words, the marketing shot takes the form of a newsletter with some interesting or useful information that the readers can benefit from even if they don’t take up the offer. In this scenario you might not make a sale from an individual customer but you have had a chance to build trust for next time.

5. Split test.  Write two or three different subject lines and send emails headed with each one to a small percentage of your list. Study the return rates and choose the one that gets the best response. As well as increasing your response rate, over time this helps you build up a picture of what your audience responds to, giving you useful information for when you’re writing releases/ website copy/ brochures and the rest.

6. Even if you do it very well, your open rate will be small and your response rate smaller. Based on my limited experience, and from what I’ve heard, a 1-10% open rate and a conversion rate that’s about 1-5% of that is about average. If you send out 10,000 emails and get 50 leads, you’re doing very well. So the size of your list is important. Obviously the rates vary by market, offer and quality of the email.

Fuel strikes notwithstanding, I’m off over to Lincolnshire tomorrow to check up on my mum and dad. I’m still available for work, though, so feel free to get in touch if you have any new projects.

I’m now more or less finished with my recent bout of work for Which? - I’m going to blog about it this coming week, as it’s been pretty interesting from a media point of view.

Hope you’ve all had a good weekend.

A big hello to the folks at the National Childminding Association. They recently commissioned me to write a feature for their members’ magazine, Who Minds? The piece is about how to develop a web presence on a budget and is aimed at child self-employed sole traders. It’s in this month’s issue of the mag, and may appear on their website - I’ll post a link as and when.

On the subject of magazines, I’ve got a bunch of features coming up in Business Matters over the next month or so, and my new blog is launching on the BM site soon. Again, I’ll post the link when it’s up and running.

I took this when I was in London last week. It’s a floor tomb from the priory church of St. Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield, just outside the line of the old City walls.

I’ve no idea whether the late Mr. Thornell’s piety and virtues really were ‘worthy of imitation’. What I do know, by golly, is that the decline in the number of British hair merchants since 1757 is greatly to be lamented.

After more than a month of solid work on the latest Which? project, I’m busy getting back to normal. With a bit of luck I’ll be able to show you the fruits of my labours soon (it involved the new version of the W? website, which is still being tweaked before going live.)

In the meantime I’m resuming normal service, so if you have any projects you’d like to discuss, get in touch!

“Johnny Depp T Shirt -As seen on Amy Winehouse in Heat!”

Thank God for accurately-used prepositions.