OK, so I missed a day. Barely a week into my blog test and I skipped a day. But it was for a very good reason, I spent yesterday morning working out my VAT return. Consequently for the remainder of the day I played catch-up. I’m sure I’m not the first small business owner to experience this phenomenon, where back room processes disrupt actual fee earning work. I expect Digby Jones would have some interesting thoughts on this.

So what did I learn from this?

Firstly, that filling in your VAT return takes careful attention to detail, but actually isn’t that taxing (sorry). More interestingly, that changing your VAT payment scheme can significantly aid your cash flow. I changed yesterday from the normal accounting to the cash accounting scheme. This basically means my return needed to include output tax on invoices that have already been paid. On the normal accounting scheme you are required to include output tax for invoices submitted, even those unpaid. If that makes sense you should see a clear benefit for your cash flow.

But, those nice people at the HMRC have a range of other options that could help us small business owners. I’m not an expert here so you should consult the HMRC or your accountant. However I read about the flat rate scheme that seemed pretty good for small companies, particularly for reducing your time overhead calculating your return.

News from Ad:tech London, advertising is heading online. No surprise there, clearly companies of all sizes have been heading to the internet to advetise, just look at the rise in Payperclick advertising. Well, our friends at Google think there is still more to come. The speakers from Google University believe that the internet accounts for 21% of media consumption in the UK, but currently only 6.4% of advertising spend. With figures like that, it’s hard to argue with them. Of course Google may be a little biased here, they do after all have something to gain from increasing online ad spend.

I am quickly beginning to realise that to blog well requires an awful lot of reading. That seems to be a strange thing to say considering blogging is all about writing, but for those of us that want to use blogging as a business tool, this is key to driving traffic to your blog.

The way it works is you comment on other peoples blog posts on your own blog. But to generate a conversation with that blogger, you need to link to his/her site to generate discussions and web links which should drive traffic back to your site. The more blogs you comment on and post links to, the more likely it is that they will link back to you and drive traffic to your blog. As you can imagine, the more people linking to your site, the more readers you will get, and hopefully participants. Of course links to your blog will also give you huge “Google Juice”.

This seems to be the engine behind building rapid blog popularity. Well, lets see how it goes. To be honest, I’ve been struggling with all the terminology and need to get to grips with tags, trackbacks, RSS feeds and more. There is a whole lot of jargon on the blogosphere!!

So you can see, if you want traffic, you need to write. But importantly you need to read other peoples blogs, comment on them and develop ongoing blog conversations.

it seems one of the best ways to start driving people to your blog is to join Technorati’s directory. So here goes.