Small businesses with an online presence are set to reap the greatest rewards from Gordon Brown’s £250m bailout plan and stand a much better chance of securing bank funding according to business social network Ecademy.
With the rise in popularity of business networking sites such as Ecademy, LinkedIn and Xing, small businesses and start ups can now actively promote their businesses and gain new customers, simply by creating an online presence. By utilising the tools provided by these networks, small businesses can quickly create valuable contacts, place adverts and generate leads, all for as little as £10 per month.
“Small businesses who register with business social networks can actively begin building their business, generate revenue and gain the tangible results needed to really impress the banks, without having to worry about accounting for often high operational cost such as offices, travel expenses and additional staff”, explains Penny Power, who founded Ecademy in 1998 from home whilst raising her three small children.
Jenna Gould started her PR business Media Jems on popular business social networking site Ecademy after going on maternity leave and believes that her use of the networking site to build her brand and customer base was an hugely influential factor in securing small business funding from Lloyds TSB earlier this year.
“By establishing my brand through an online network, I was able to immediately test my proposition with real customers and adapt my offering to meet the needs of the market with relatively little outlay. As a direct result doing business through Ecademy, I was able to approach the bank with a clear business model that I could prove was working and it certainly influenced their decision to provide me with the funding I needed to expand”, explains Gould.
“The marketplace and blog pages of Ecademy are particularly effective as they are highly indexed on all the major search engines, meaning that businesses can get their message out to their audience immediately and start generating leads”, adds Power.
Basic membership to Ecademy is free, with PowerNetworker membership costing just £10 per month + VAT. For more information visit http://www.ecademy.com
ENDS
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