SME Localventure news - 1st Edition

Legendary Support for small local business and entrepreneurs.

The above sentence is the raison d’etre for Localventure. Everything we do is driven by the desire to support small business in the UK & make your life as small business a little easier. The genesis of the idea for this new weblog came around the time I launched my own small business (www.prestigewhisky.com) in June 2009. The business had been in development for around 12 months at that stage & I rapidly discovered as we moved towards launch that there were a lot of hoops to jump through but that these were minor compared to the challenge of actually attracting & acquiring clients. Fortunately I have a background in sales & marketing with an active interest in the internet and e-commerce. Even so, getting my business to market & making it visible to my chosen client demographic has

been a real, on-going challenge. With that in mind the idea of providing more generic support for other business owners began to grow in my mind towards the end of 2009.

Originally I set up www.localventure.blogspot.com as a kind of experiment. A live forum to enable me to play around with ideas on business support & client acquisition (the member model is driven largely by e-mail shots). However, launching the site on the 19th of January 2010 it quickly became apparent that there was a real need for almost a ‘community’ that understood the mindset of SME’s. So the idea began to develop & we now have building towards 100 members with more joining every week. We have around 700 people visiting the site on a monthly basis & over 300 followers on Twitter - these figures are literally growing daily.

In the future, we plan to retain the care of the LV idea which is free advertising for businesses & of course, articles, comment, guest blogs - really anything that is of

interest to small business owners. However in addition to this we are also hoping to add in a whole tranche of member exclusive offers and discounts for you if you join up (for free). Over time we may add in higher level of membership to the site & charge for this additional service but our commitment is to keep the core service free for our early adopters. This newsletter is planned as a monthly affair so we’ll keep you updated on developments plus watch the blog.

What does the future hold for Localventure ?

We recently began discussions with our web designer (BWeb in Woking -

www.bwebsites.co.uk) and are working on a more professional site that will enable us to feature our advertising members more effectively as well as showcase some of the new services that we plan to offer in coming months. The aim is that your potential customers will find the content you give us more easily and we can increase the range of support and interesting business related services that we offer you as well. So it will be an exciting 2010 moving forward with a new website to come, more members, more information and services for you to choose from.