As Hogtown Consulting is a new business I have been concentrating heavily on business development. Yesterday I attended a seminar put on by the NewPath Network here in Toronto. The presentation was by Martin Obern on the subject ‘What’s in it for me’, that is why should a potential client care about what you’re trying to sell them.
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One common reason for businesses to blog is to build authority in their market. In a sense this authority building excercise is like giving away free trials to potential customers, by writing often and well about topics relevant to your market you hope to gain attention and eventually customers.
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Today I attended the Enterprise Toronto Small Business Forum at the Toronto Convention Centre. The event was of mixed interest and quality, these things always are I guess. But it was definitely worthwhile attending, particularly for the opportunities to chat to people in the same new business startup boat.

I appreciated a theme of doing business ethically that cropped up in several presentations during the day. I have lots to write on this subject, in fact I’m thinking of adding something along the lines of ‘make honesty central’ into the Hogtown Consulting mission.
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Just a quick pointer to an article on creating good email I found interesting. A lot of the recommendations seem like common sense, as the best often do, but it’s probably worth a quick review if you use email at all regularly. I know there were some guidelines on that list I could keep more closely in mind, ‘Brevity is the soul of…getting a response’ for example read more…

Just a quick note to say that I have launched the Hogtown Consulting mark 2 website today. I wasn’t happy with some of the visuals of the original site, but had been too busy to fix them. I have now managed to spend a little time on it, and I think the new design meets my criteria of being modern and clean.

The content is the same, although I am working on some new stuff, specifically an about page to tell you more about the who and the why of Hogtown Consulting.

Feel free to leave your comments and thoughts on the new design, there are some tweaks to come I’m sure but it will be here for a while I hope.

It’s just what it says on the box, a blogging conference that takes place in Vancouver. The 2006 event has just been announced, with some luck I’ll be able to make it to this one.
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This is slightly off-topic, but I find it interesting and can probably work out a tenuous link to on-topic.

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian born author, blogger (at boingboing, which is in the major leagues of the blog world) and advocate.
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One important aspect of web marketing is an understanding of web stats, what they are and how to interpret them.
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