As the Daily Telegraph reports newly crowned prime minister Gordon Brown has appointed Sir Alan Sugar to the new Business Council for Britain.

Yet another body that will meet and offer advice to the government that the government will simply ignore.

The council is tasked with advising Government the impact its policies have on the UK's competitiveness.

Don't you think that's rather strange when there are organisations that already fulfil that role. 

Hold on let me think, which ones are they...

How about the CBI? They never seem backward at coming forward to make the point that this government has slowly strangled almost every business, school, university and charity with bucket loads of red tape.

Then again what about Business Link, doesn't it feed back what it finds from the people who use it?

Oh, hold on don't we also have the myriad Chambers of Commerce around the country. Aren't they meant to reflect the voice of their members?

What about newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and the rest of the media, including bloggers of course?! Surely they all comment on the impact government has on business too?

And then we have all the civil servants who deal with industry, commerce and anything to do with business. Are they all deaf? Or maybe Gordon Brown doesn't want to listen to civil servants.

Plus, how many business people already bend ministers and the prime ministers ear already? Are they going to be ignored too?

Finally, we're a democracy, so can't her Majesty's opposition provide feedback as to the impact the government has on us all.

Ok, rant over, normal service will now resume...

 CBI fulfils that role already. And in fact and with a slightly broader range of

This is a review of a jolly useful little category on Garry Conn's blog on making money online. It's called Google Adsense Tips and is one of several categories related to making money.

As I read through the postings I noticed that Garry has removed a number of links as part of his overall blog concern about using nofollow for links.

Unfortunately that makes one or two of the postings unusable.

However, the rest of the postings, with their comments, more than make up for it.

Why Google Adsense Doesn't Make Money

Google Adsense is used to display short ads on blogs and web sites.  So much many of us know. Or maybe we don't?

Garry Conn reckons that if you've a blog about making money online - and let's face it almost everyone on the Internet hitting those sites knows lots about Adsense. And you're not going to make massive amounts of money from it.

As Garry also says there are a lot of blogs out there that would benefit from using Adwords that don't.

The real point that Garry makes is that us bloggers aren't going to make each other rich by clicking on Adsense Ads. Because we all know about the ads and pretty much ignore them.

No Adsense Ads - Does It Make Sense?

Garry has removed these ads from this site and uses them on his other blogs to target people who know pretty much nothing about the whys and wherefores of Internet Marketing and will click on the odd Ad and maybe even buy.

In fact to encourage us Garry even shows a couple of days Adsense earnings and each one is more than I've made in 3 months of restarting Google Adsense on my own blog.

Making Money With Google Adsense

The real value to Garry's posts is the sheer volume of interesting comments he gets. And the value increases because Garry discloses a lot of useful information about what he does to make money to cover the mortgage through Adsense.

The free consultancy that Garry gives out is great, on one post's comment ( and I'll let you find it within the Adsense category) he spells out step by step how to make money from a blog about gambling. And I don' think he gambles himself.

In summary a great category for a truly interesting blog. Check it out.

Oh, and before you go click my Google Ads!!

Despair no more!

Garry Conn has redesigned his blog and come up with the natty idea of getting people to "sponsor" one of his categories and then to comment on it. He wins and so does the "sponsor."

Category Sponsorship

This is a great idea for Garry as the number of comments he's generated so far on his category sponsorship post is pretty good.

In fact I've actually spent almost the whole morning reading a number of intriguing posts on his site. Including one about "do follow" and "no follow" links with Andy Beard, amongst others.

And it's a great idea for the rest of us because Garry provides links back to the "category sponsor."

Check out my review of Garry's Google Adsense Tips.

In a strange way this short series with Mary, Queen of Shops doing a nice Gordon Ramsay to fashion boutiques has been fun and contrary to what I expected not always the same.

As I've noted before it seems it's invariably the case that the shop owners start off well then get into a rut and their shops become more charity shops than fashion houses.

Welcome To Fashionable Islington

Divorced couple Ruth and Anthony continue to run their boutique unhappily called "Comfort and Joy." Designer Ruth is producing clothes that compete head-on with major chains and she's trying to compete on price.

Not a good situation to be in.

When Mary suggests changing the name Anthony is not impressed and explains the name is a clever reference to a 70's Sex manual called "The Joy of Sex" by Dr Alex Comfort.

As Mary points out it's a book that the tribe the shop should be attracting wouldn't even have heard of.

So which tribe's that then?

Clever Mary Portas has realised that with Ruth designing and making her clothes for the shop the shop could clean-up by selling them to the individualistic woman shopper.

The first thing you notice as you walk in the shop is a central Berlin wall down the middle made up of hanging rails and topped by handbags.

On one side is Anthony's clothes a mish mash of designers sourced from around the globe. and the other contains Ruth's designs - some good, some not so hot.

Down With The Walls!

The first thing Mary suggests is removing the Berlin wall. Anthony is not impressed.

Then Mary suggests taking down the wall that blocks Ruth's design studio from the shop, so Ruth can go out and talk to the customers about the designs or simply say hello from the design table. And of course Anthony wasn't impressed.

In fact Mary got quite frustrated by Anthony's lack of enthusiasm for many of the points that at one moment she looked as if she'd throw in the towel.

Finally she takes Anthony material shopping to Liberty's and there she finds he's an absolute star for choosing exactly the right materials.

She also gives them both the chance to dress a side street shop window at Harvey-Nicks. And they do a good job of it. And of course Anthony is not impressed by what he sees as being "damned with faint praise."

After many moments of Anthony being under-whelmed, under-impressed and reluctant he relents and takes part in changing the shops' name to "Handmade and Found" (originally made and found and subtly improved by Mary by to Handmade and Found), designs and stamps the bags with the new logo and designs the new shop window and incorporates his designer buy-ins with Ruth's garments.

And The Result?

Of course the refit brought Ruth's designer backroom and her credentials out into the shop.

Anthony's materials really added something to Ruth's designs and they both found that they worked well together. The shop also become one unified shop rather than a shop with battle lines drawn between two talented and creative people.

The tribe they brought into to see the garments were very pleased and Ruth (if only she could see her own value) is able to charge more than she has been.

"My son is now an ‘entrepreneur.’ That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job." - Ted Turner.

Do you tell people you're an entrepreneur, or remember this one, intrepreneur?

You can't really call yourself an entrepreneur because it's a label other people attribute to those that have started and run companies. So until other people start calling you an entrepreneur you're simply working in your business, like every other employed person.

I'm not saying entrepreneurs make a success of their businesses. It's just that they (and their families) take what is perceived as, and usually is, a massive risk to go into business for themselves.

So someone who has a job and buys and sells on eBay may become an entrepreneur, but until their whole life is on the line and income from their business feeds the family they're not an entrepreneur.

When Cortez landed in South America and was massively outnumbered some of his men attempted to steal one of his ships to go back to Cuba. To ensure no mutiny could happen again, Cortez scuttled all but a small one of his ships, by claiming they were not seaworthy. That meant he and his men had no choice but to defeat the Aztecs or die trying. History shows who won that one - Cortez!

In the same way an entrepreneur thinks only of the business as he sets it up and gets it going.

So my definition of an entrepreneur is "someone who thinks of an idea for a business and with all the resources at their disposal focuses on making that business move forward, either to success or failure - either one is a learning experience for them."

What do you think?

At last I've done it!

I may be mad but I finally decided to transfer to the new blogger widgetised template.

It meant losing some of the customisation that I'd built up in the previous template. Although to be fair I didn't lose that much.

And I'm gaining...

Labels!

So if you fancy stuff about Tycoon or The Apprentice they'll all be neatly labeled.

Hurrah!

Why did I decide to go for it now?

Because Internet Explorer wasn't rendering my customised template properly (my fault I know) but it was fine in Firefox.

By the way Firefox is now pretty much the only browser I use. I did use IE6 to check whether my blog displayed OK but I'm hoping that'll be less of an issue with this change.

Let me know what you think.

Richard Bandler (co-founder of NLP), Peter Thomson (owner of Achiever's Edge) and me (Power Packed Copywriting and Coaching) all have something in

common.

So what is it I hear you shout!

We're all on this blog in audio form.

Thanks to the existence of amazing technology I've put a BOXFILE in the sidebar of this blog that gives you a number of files that you can download, or just listen to online.

In no particular order they're 

• Richard Bandler - talking about NLP and other good stuff
• Steve McDermott - very funny presenter and won European speaker of the year award a few years ago
• Peter Thomson - an example introduction from his Achiever's Edge monthly CD programme
• Me - an introduction to me and this blog (hear what I sound like, am I sincere - you decide!)

So have a listen and feel free to leave a comment, which was the best audio, who was the best speaker, what nugget did you personally discover? 

How often have you heard that every business needs to be
different and unique to its competitors? In other words it has to have a USP.

You've probably heard of the marketing term USP. Unique selling proposition or
unique selling point.

Has the concept got a little pedestrian!?

Everyone claims to have one. Unfortunately the USP is often stated as  the company offers quality, speed or dependability. Features you'd want any company to provide as standard.

Having a USP is a good thing, if you get it right...

After all the attitude of trying to differentiate yourself from your
competition is a useful one for your prospects. It gives them something
they can latch onto to explain to themselves why they're buying
you.

The only problem with a USP is it's completely internally
focused. We're telling the customer how we're different.

We're saying we're special because we're the lowest priced, or we
offer a 20 year guarantee or we offer the largest range of colours
and so on.

Introducing the UCP

In addition to understanding why you're different you need to
create your own Unique Customer Position or UCP.

Your UCP is oriented towards your customers. So for example.
Let's say your USP is currently "we service more cars than any
other garage in the community."

That has no customer orientation to it, does it?

The UCP could be "we help customers to keep their cars in top
mechanical shape for longer."

That UCP addresses the customer concern that they want their cars
to be at their peak of performance for as long as possible before
needing another service.

That's a lot more interesting for a customer compared to the USP
of "we service more cars than any other garage in the community."

This idea of a Unique Customer Position is applicable to any
business and any industry,

The other point about having a unique customer position is that
you can easily use it during a sales call as the customer
immediately understands what you're talking about and the benefit
to them.

I don't think anyone else has ever used the term Unique Customer
Position in this context so you're heard it here first.

As I warned in a previous post about Tycoon there are some interesting businesses being worked on over, possibly, the next 10 weeks.

The show is very Apprentice like: pictures of smart suited men in Bentley's, images of London and quick cutting between sweating "apprentice entrepreneurs" maybe we should call them "appreneurs"?

The appreneurs seemed to have thought they'd already won the competition by getting into the final 10 companies. Certainly that was the initial smug expression the competitors wore when they started the program. By the end of the first 2 weeks they looked distinctly more frazzled as Peter Jones looked worriedly at them and asked slightly searching questions in a Dragon's Den like meeting at the end of two weeks so he could decide which companies to invest a further £20,000 in.

So far it's a bit like The Apprentice and a bit like Dragon's Den...

So here's my twopence:

Tom Thurlow

Tom Thurlow seems to have taken a leaf from Richard Branson's book by starting a student's newspaper. Tom's vision was that the newspaper would be free to the customer and paid for by adverts. He managed to impress initially by calling the newspaper "Snap."

What he knew but didn't tell Peter Jones were:

• Piers Morgan, probably the most famous news editor known, was starting a paid for newspaper for kids
• Tom's printer wasn't getting a newspaper mock-up to show when he'd expected

Also the newspaper turned out to be a folded A3 flimsy piece of paper which looked to be uninteresting. And yet Tom claimed to be proud of it.

My Advice: Don't invest any more money in Tom and sack him because he obviously doesn't understand business yet.

Elizabeth Hackford

Elizabeth Hackford decided to go down the Innocent fruit drinks route but with a dash of Vodka in hers. So isn't that an alcopop?

Peter Jones wielded a bottle of drink that was exactly like hers. She claimed hers wasn't from concentrate, the one Peter had said "not from concentrate." So nil points for market research.

Peter advised her to come up with a great name to get attention for the drink - rather like "Death" as a name for cigarettes. So she came up with some really pedestrian names and after talking further with Peter decided on something that wouldn't sound too good in a bar, you know, "could I have a Fruka please?"

I noticed that she's got an equally insane name now on her web site: VTox. If you're an extreme sports junkie (like Elizabeth) and you know mountaineering terminology you could translate VTOX when ordering a drink as "can I have a Very TOXic drink?"

There's nothing wrong with a me-too product but there has to be something interesting about it - as Peter says - a good name.

All in all I was under impressed with Elizabeth "make it happen" Hackford. Particularly when she tearfully exclaimed that she would move mountains for Peter.

My Advice: Rename the drink, something like "Mule Kick." Also give her some more rope to hang herself with next week.

Iain Morgan

Iain Morgan actually seemed reasonably clear as to what he was doing: importing and selling radio-controlled toy helicopters.

Other than a few brief glances that's all we say of Iain until presentation time to bid for money from Peter to go forward.

So he produced a presentation that showed exactly why he needed every last penny of the £20,000 Peter Jones had to invest this week.

And of course he got it, because without further investment to import the helicopters he'd have nothing to sell!

My Advice: Seems to know what he's doing from the ordering point of view. My only thought is the quality of the helicopter.

Lauren Pope

Lauren Pope was producing "thicker, longer" hair extensions. To me they looked like nicely packaged hair extensions. I don't claim to be an expert in the product though. Peter thought that they would go well in Top Shop. Great...

Lauren wanted to go to China (I think) to investigate sources of hair for the extensions. She was disappointed when Iain won all Peter's investment money.

Again Lauren didn't really feature too much in this episode.

My Advice: Use the phone and ask for samples from a select few suppliers!

Justin Chieffo

Justin Chieffo is producing an environmentally friendly carrier bag dispenser. My wife immediately said, "that would be really useful." My thought was - isn't it just a carrier bag stuffed with more carrier bags?

Still it's certainly an interesting idea. It should mesh well with "bags for life".

That said I noticed that local Sainsbury's had a day when you could take as many "bags for life" as you liked. All the bags went and Sainsbury's didn't need anymore old throw-away bags? Well certainly all the "bags for life" went but I've not actually seen anyone using one. Even I have two in my car and haven't actually remembered to take them out to re-use.

So an interesting concept and one that all us environmentally concerned people are interested in...but we don't often do as we say do we?

That said whenever Justin is talked at by Peter Jones he gets very tense, anxious and looked incredibly worried. Rather like a tailor who's made the Emperor's new clothes and doesn't want to get found out.

He also tried to go for £15,000 investment for no other reason than to get rid of Ian. What a stupid thing to do when you consider the winner gets the profits of everyone else! So he's trying to cut his profits by getting rid of one company!

My Advice: Really hit all the supermarkets with the concept. But first actually target a few stores and ask if you can try it out there. Then present the results to the supermarkets. If the idea is going to work the supermarkets have the biggest vested interest (reduced costs) in getting it going. Then if the supermarkets show no interest bin the idea.

Helen James and Cathy Caudwell-Todd

Helen James and Cathy Caudwell-Todd had come up with a fun name for a range of gardening garments aimed at women. A good idea but one that was only hitting part of a big market. So Peter Jones suggested that they rename their range so they could take in men and kids gardening garments. The pair were most put out but on mature reflection realised Peter had a point and renamed the clothes SOD for men and SOD for women. They also paid a fair bit for some well produced polo shirts that looked fairly classy.

In fact they then went on to sell over a £1,000 worth of clothes from their web site in the week. The winner so far!

Peter had a lot of praise for them, particularly as they'd taken onboard what he'd said and made money too.

My Advice: These two are ones to keep. They're doing well we just need to see that they can capitalise on their early lead without having to pay for advertising and I can think of lots of different ways you could get PR for fashionable gardening clothes.

Is It Worth Watching?

I found the opening episode interesting.

My main concern is that Peter Jones is not great as a "balls of steel" entrepreneur's presenter. Maybe he'll grow on me but at the moment I believe he should have sacked Tom and didn't and going on what Elizabeth thought was OK with a name given her more of a hard time.

The other concern I have is that you didn't see any interaction with the businesses customers or suppliers.

Still it is week one, so like Tom and Elizabeth I'll see what happens next week.

This is a test post to allow me to find out how Google is indexing my site.

I wrote an article called "Do Your Adverts Sell?" in early September 2006 about the importance of direct advertising compared to branding advertising and how Cannes Lions are what Ad agencies chase rather than sales!

This year the Cannes Lion Award are 17th to 23rd June, so if you're not there now I suspect you already know you're not an award winner!

Suzanne Vranica, writing in the Wall Street Journal notes that Yahoo and Google are going to Cannes with hundreds of staff to pitch digital media as the medium to go for to the big, and not so big, Ad agencies.

At the same time the article notes there are executives going to recruit stars at Cannes to beef up their digital offerings.

Cannes Lions are probably the advertising equivalent of the Oscars. And like the Oscars generally they don't reflect how well an advert sells the product but how arty, or how much "impact" or how well designed an ad is.

Hopefully with the digital media's intense interest in analysis the Lions will begin to reflect the important ratio of (cost of Ad Campaign/Total Value of Sales-(Cost of Sales).

So good luck to Yahoo, Google and all the others sending out the digital advertising message and good luck to those agencies looking to recruit the young digital lions to their zoo.

Right Kristina you've done The Apprentice how about persuading Sir Richard Branson to put on another series of  "The Rebel Billionaire" which you could go into and win!

But seriously, I'd be surprised if Richard Branson wasn't deciding whether to offer her a job. After all it's rare that you get to see a potential employee put through their paces so you can evaluate them at your leisure. And one that almost everyone had tipped to win.

Plus, and I'm sure this will appeal to him as the ultimate PR animal, if he asks Kristina to come and see him for a chat that's news!

And as for Katie Hopkins...

Hopefully she's stopped talking about herself as a pantomime villain now and recognised that she's shot herself in the foot with the way she's behaved.  Sir Alan reckoned she was unemployable. I don't actually think that's the case. It depends on how she sorts herself out.

In Katie's case I'd say she's given the word articulate a bad name because she can talk smoothly about all manner of things - some of which she seems to think up and react to on the spur of the moment, rather like Simon Ambrose!

Anyway The Apprentice is pretty much over. I'll keep a weather eye on Simon and Tre (a good double act name), Kristina and possibly Katie and let you know anything I find that seems interesting.

After 12 weeks Sir Alan finally made up his mind.

Rather than polishing a tried and true older apprentice he went for the one who claimed he would be malleable because he was "not fully formed."

So Simon Ambrose becomes the third apprentice and Kristina Grimes grits her teeth, gets her hair done and smiles during the "You've Been Hired" programme.

Interestingly Katie Hopkins was in the audience at "You've Been Hired"  and Sir Alan suggested that she hadn't needed to resort to the tactics she did. If she'd wanted to get the job with Sir Alan I'd agree.

Anyway, the point is that Simon who has not demonstrated very much ability at anything except break dancing and, according to Tre, having a photographic memory gets the job.

Well done Sir Alan for popping Simon's belief that he's a good leader - no, I think not. Maybe in time, we'll see.

In the meantime I've got 38 weeks until the next Apprentice. So I'm looking forward to Tycoon on ITV with Peter Jones starting on the 19th June.

Last Thursday I was so excited because just as I left for a networking meeting I noticed that my blog had attracted 998 hits. I knew with the USA just waking up I'd get a few more so after my previous record of over 600 earlier I'd now hit another milestone - 1,000 hits in a day!

When I woke up the next morning I checked the traffic stats and found that I'd actually had 1,670 hits. A new record for the blog.

So a big thanks to everyone reading this blog. I used to think that simply writing because I like writing was its own reward but I've discovered it is truly fab to get such a great amount of traffic.

In fact I was quite disappointed on Monday to "only" get 691 hits, just kidding!

And I'm really looking forward to The Apprentice finale, which as I explained previously is entertainment and not to be confused with real business.

Yesterday I was talking with my brother Roddy about The Apprentice and he said that he "hated it with a passion." He believes it just doesn't reflect business.

As I said to him and others who commented in a similar vein, "it's entertainment, it's not business it's show business."

What I would also say is that Sir Alan makes it clear that "it's the job interview from hell." That's all it is, so it's rather like candidates going to an employer and taking tests to see whether they'll fit with the business.

So anyone who goes on this TV interview is effectively being interviewed by Sir Alan and a rather large number of other companies around the UK.

If you're good or even reasonable you become famous and as I said after the last series people like to work with famous people. It makes life slightly more interesting doesn't it?

Why else do you think Michelle Dewberry and The Badger were able to set up management consultancies and get work so easily? Why do you think Jo Cameron, the one we all thought was as mad as a box of frogs, could start up a HR consultancy and on and on...

 So if you'd like to open your horizons The Apprentice is the programme to go for. Apply now and let me know if you get accepted. I'll be rooting for you next year!