Just catching up on my RSS blog reader right now, it’s the weekend and I’m almost on top of this workload that seems to have stretched out now for almost 2 months.

A lot of projects and general maintenance required in my own marketing efforts have been put off because that’s what happens when you begin to grow into your success in business, the very methods and detailed maintenance that you’ve built into your marketing apparatus as you developed become very hard to keep up with as your priority becomes delivering those core operations to your customers at a high standard.

It’s been an amazing time for my businesses, I’ve just been flat out, but without having significant time to focus on marketing, it does create some revealing contradictions.

There’s no doubt there’s plenty of headroom for improvement when it comes to my presentation.

And I’ll be the first to admit that my customer service has never been a strong point.

But my businesses are still flying, still growing at a pace I can barely keep up with.

So now is the time to not take anything for granted and to do the necessary maintenance - mainly to avoid negative cues that can build up when you neglect you online presence. Your online presentation may look dated but that’s no reason to give the game away by having blogs that haven’t been updated in months flapping about looking sad.

To have some really topical content related to the Olympics or something else similarly dated on your front page.

1: Update Your Blog

2: Update Your Site

3: Update Your Social Media

Two of my favourite business blogs would have to be:

http://entrepreneurs-journey.com - Aussie Yaro Starak to me is like leveling up from Problogger Darren Rowse. Darren’s great when you’re playing around with developing a blog and how that could become profitable, but Yaro’s more in my headspace, executing blitzkrieg business ideas to generate income. Like Darren, Yaro has a lot of simple, applicable concepts that frame his approach to creating business online.

He does do a lot of offers and kind of “for dedicated bloggers” stuff, but there’s some great general online business concepts in between.

http://ittybiz.com - Far be it from me to deny Naomi from Ittybiz, she’s become successful with a great brand as a straight talking small business blogger who isn’t afraid to tell it like it is - that running a home business is a nightmare, and shit is gonna happen, so get used to it, her audience though is somewhat at a more beginners level so it’s more solid basics in application but nothing too cutting edge in terms of new online strategies.

I’ve also been reading 37signals but again, the consistency of the subject matter veers quite heavily in terms of relevance as they are a software company, but there’s usually a cracker of a post here or there.

They’ve been talking alot about the recession lately - Here’s a point that was made recently about advertising and freemium based models when it comes to a crunch:

“When the people using your product aren’t the ones paying for your product you’re at a strategic disadvantage.”

I think this points to something I’ve really experienced and that’s building up high value propositions and providing high value services/products. You want to be offering something that people are really wanting to pay for.

Anyway. Bit late on this post so . . . bombs away!