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Introducing my new business titles: Running a Successful Business After the Start-up Phase and Your Guide to Starting and Building your Business

Liz with her new books

It’s time to tell the world: I have two new books out, and I’m pleased to share the news with my readers and subscribers.

“Running a Successful Business After the Start-up Phase: Who are you Calling Mature?” is a look at what happens next. Following on from “How I Survived my First Year of Full-Time Self-Employment: Going it Alone at 40“, it shares what I’ve learned about optimising your customer base (including saying no to prospective new business), optimising your income, keeping that vital work-life balance, and blogging and the use of social media to build awareness and grow your business. It’s had some good feedback both personally and on its Amazon review page and I’m really pleased to be able to help people further along their journey through the wonderful world of self-employment and running a small business.

You can buy the print or e-book version from Amazon – you can go straight to Amazon UK, or see the book’s web page for links to the other international Amazons, and buy in different formats including pdf and for Kobo at Smashwords.

I decided to put “Your Guide to Starting and Building your Business” together to offer a low-cost option for people who want to read both books. It’s on e-book only at the moment, and is an omnibus made up for “How I Survived my First Year of Full-Time Self-Employment” and “Running a Successful Business after the Start-up Phase” which takes you right through from how to decide whether to go self-employed, taking the first steps, perhaps while working in a day job, setting up your business, getting your first customers, working out which customers to continue working with, using blogging and social media platforms and getting your life back while running a successful business. I really do write this blog and these books to help people, so I’m really pleased to be able to put this package together at a decent price, and it’s so great when I hear how I have helped people!

You can buy the e-book only omnibus from Amazon UK and other versions of Amazon (see list of links), and for all e-book formats, from Smashwords.

Thank you to everyone who’s supported me in my writing efforts – I’m so glad when I hear how I’ve helped people, and hope that I can continue to do so for many years to come. Watch this space for my new venture – an editors’ version of the two books and a workbook to go with both sets of books, based on the mentoring I’ve been doing with some industry colleagues this year.

If you’re interested in how I got to this point, do pop over to my Adventures in Reading, Writing and Working From Home blog, where I talk more personally about writing the books and choosing (and tweaking) their titles.

And you can find info on all of my books on the Liz Broomfield Books website!

5 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on May 31, 2014 in Business, Ebooks, Uncategorized, Writing

Tags: business, celebration, writing

Developing your Business: Moving Into Office Space – How, When and Why?

28 May

As part of my series on growing your business., we’re taking a look today at the expert’s view on moving into office space. You can read about other people’s personal experience of moving out of the home office here, and today I’m delighted to welcome Sam Barnes from Easy Offices, who is going to run through things to think about when upgrading from your home office from an expert’s perspective.

Many people choose to start their businesses from home. It’s cheap, convenient and comfortable. For some businesses, that’s all that’s required and they never feel the need to break out of the home office. For the majority of businesses though, office space becomes an essential as revenues grow. We’ve helped all manner of businesses find office space, from single person start-ups to massive corporations. However, there’s no doubt that with the advice you’re about to read, the process of selecting and moving into your brand new office, will be made substantially easier.

Why does my business need office space?

Your office space is the centre of your business.

Without offices, you’re running the risk of not being taken seriously by other businesses or consumers. Imagine if the next time you wanted to go the bank you ended up at a home, not an office. Commercial premises are a necessity of business.

The practical side of getting your own office space is extremely important too. You’ll have your own phone systems, postal address and meeting space. All of these things will be vital as you grow your business, providing the infrastructure that will drive you forward.

When should my small business move into offices?

This is a slightly more difficult question to answer. There are lots of reasons that you might need to look into choosing office space:

•   You’re outgrowing your existing office space.
•   You’re taking on more staff.
•   You need a meeting room for clients.
•   There are too many distractions at home.
•   You’re unsatisfied with your current office space.
•   You need better facilities, i.e. better internet, private rooms, reception area etc.

There could be hundreds more reasons on this list, but the vast majority of office moves are instigated by a lack of physical space, specifically when taking on more staff.

If you find yourself thinking, on more than one occasion a day, that a bigger office would make your work more effective or allow your business to grow more easily, then I would say it’s time to take the plunge!

As your revenue grows, you’ll find that justifying the cost of an office becomes easier and easier. Having the cash to be able to fund an office move is an absolute necessity.

How do I go about choosing office space?

There are three main kinds of office space available to small businesses in the current market:

1. Co-Working Office Space

Co-working spaces can be a great fit for some businesses. They’re the cheapest of the three main options available. Essentially you’ll rent a couple of desks in a room or part of a larger office. This gives you the ability to separate your work and home lives while keeping costs low while your businesses is in the early stage of development.

You’ll never know who you might be sharing with and you can make some amazing new businesses contacts while sharing office space. We’ve heard lots of fantastic success stories about relationships formed in shared environments. Equally you’ll want to know before you choose a certain office, what kinds of businesses you’ll be working alongside. If you need a really quiet environment, make sure those around you feel the same.

You’ll also have access to shared mail, printing and catering facilities.

If you’ve only got a couple of staff and you work as one well-oiled machine, a co-working space would be ideal.

2. Serviced Office Space

Serviced office space is more expensive than co-working office space, but not quite as expensive as a full-blown office lease.

It’s the perfect choice for companies with a few staff who need room to grow. You’ll have a dedicated space for your business (no co-working here). You’ll have all the kitchen, printing and mail facilities that I mentioned before, plus some added features. These normally include security, some kind of reception area, cleaning services and usually the ability to rent extra infrastructure such as improved internet connections.

You’ll get to put your own stamp on things too! The simple branding of your office through posters, mugs and pens can turn the feeling in your office from start-up to established business.

A fantastic choice for businesses growing quickly who know they’re going to need space to meet clients and further expand their operations.

3. Office Lease

The only option for larger businesses, an office lease lets you rent an entire office. This is necessary when your business has outgrown your existing solutions or needs to centralise.
As this post relates to small businesses, I won’t go into too much detail here. What I will say is that you’ll need to be making substantial revenues before choosing a fully leased office. The costs involved are substantially higher than serviced or shared offices.

Some Top Tips for Choosing Office Space

Here are a few questions that you’ll need to ask yourself before making your choice to move offices:

•   Price – Can you afford it?
•   Space – Does the office you’re looking at give you enough room for meeting clients and working as a team?
•   Infrastructure – Do you need a dedicated phone line and Internet? Does the office you’re interested in office this as a service or do you have to organise it yourself?
•   Facilities – Can you and your staff park here if they drive? Are the kitchens clean?

They might sound like simple, fairly obvious questions, but if you fail to take one of these things into account you’ll be paying for it for months to come.

The best advice I can give you when attempting to choose an office space, is do your research.

Start out with a list of criteria that you need from your office. If any one of the office spaces you go to look at doesn’t meet even one of them, keep looking. There’s a space out there for everyone!

Sam Barnes is from Easy Offices.

The company works tirelessly to help businesses of all shapes and sizes find the perfect office space for their needs. He is interested in everything small business related with a particular interest in marketing. He works in the digital marketing sphere.

Outside work, he’s an avid football fan, with Arsenal being his lifelong obsession. He also has a passion for music and film. He’s currently rattling through the IMDB top 100 as a personal challenge.

You can also find Easy Offices on Twitter.

This post is part of my series on growing your business. Read more here and read about my own business journey in my books.

1 Comment

Posted by Liz Dexter on May 28, 2014 in Business, Guest posts, Organisation

Tags: business, co-working, freelancing, guest posts

Am I automatically registered to submit my tax self-assessment online?

14 May

If you’ve registered as self-employed in the last year and a bit, you will have received a letter from HMRC telling you that you need to submit a self-assessment tax form. You can do this on paper by the end of next October, or online by the end of next January.

So it makes sense to do it online, right? YES.

Every year, I meet people who’ve just set up their new business and think that because they’ve registered as self-employed, or because they registered as self-employed online, they are automatically registered to submit their self assessment (tax return) online. They can just wait until the end of January and submit it online then, right?

NO.

If you want to file your taxes / submit your tax return / do your self-assessment online, and this is the first time you’re planning to do it online, you HAVE TO go through a separate registration process.

Don’t just take my word for it: here’s a bit of my latest letter from HMRC telling me I need to submit a tax return for the 2013-2014 tax year:

Got that? You need to go to the HMRC website – WELL BEFORE THE END OF JANUARY and register to submit your tax return online. Once you’ve registered, you will be sent a letter with an activation code. This can take over a week to arrive.

You do not want to leave it to the last minute, or make any assumptions.

If you want to submit your tax return online, you must register to do so as a separate process, and you need to do it in good time in order to get your letter and then activate the account and THEN complete the online tax return (that last bit doesn’t take very long).

If, as a good and normally sensible friend of mine did one year, you leave it until the end of January to even register to submit this information online, you will receive your letter after the end of January, go to fill in your tax return and find yourself confronted with a hefty fine.

The HMRC website with all information on submitting your tax return online, and registering to do so, is here.

If you’re considering setting up a new business or have recently done so, you will find plenty of careers resources on this website (click on that link or surf around the category cloud in the sidebar). Or why not take a look at my books, which have loads of information about starting and maintaining a freelance career.

Other useful posts on this blog:

Setting up as a freelancer 1

10 things you can do before going self-employed

Why I do my tax return in April

Tax payment on account

2 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on May 14, 2014 in Business, Organisation

Tags: business

Using LinkedIn for your business

09 Apr

Using LinkedIn for your business

LinkedIn is seen primarily as a networking tool for the more corporate end of the market. However, you can set up your own business page on LinkedIn now, and there is a lot more interactivity and ‘social’ activity than there used to be – or than you might think.

Setting up a LinkedIn profile

Once on www.linkedin.com you can join up and set up your profile.

It’s a good idea to include as much information as you can on here – and in a professional way. While it’s never a good idea to allow typos and grammatical errors on any professional profile, it’s vitally important here, as people tend to make more of an effort, and so any errors will be very glaring.

There are various sections to fill in on the profile; including past jobs allows your ‘network’ to grow, as LinkedIn, unlike other social media, will not let you even request to connect to just anyone. For example, I’ve added my experience in here:

… and I’ve added information about the books I’ve written in the Publications section:

Find your way around LinkedIn

Your home page will contain a feed a little like your Facebook timeline, with updates from people to whom you’re linked. To find people to link to, you can search in the search box at the top of the screen. Once you’re linked to someone, they will appear in your Connections list, which you can access by clicking the [number] connections icon to the bottom right of your profile picture area.

Your profile also includes a link to People You May Know. This will give you people in networks connected to you by other connections, workplaces or interest groups to whom you might want to link.

Click on People you may know and you’ll be given a list of possible connections (I’ve blanked out names and obscured photographs because this is my own LinkedIn profile):

You can see your invitations and notifications at the top right.

Invitations allow you to see who has invited you to connect and any messages they’ve sent you via LinkedIn:

Notifications show you who has liked your updates or shared your profile:

Linking to people on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is different from other social media networks, in that you have to have a tangible connection to a person in order to ‘Link’ to them. If you find someone you want to link to and press Connect, you’ll be asked how you know that person. If you say that they’re a colleague, or that you’ve done business with them, you’ll be asked which of your jobs they are a colleague from – that’s why it’s important to list all of the companies that you have worked for on your profile. If you say that they’re a friend, you’ll be asked to prove you know them by providing their email address.

You can find people just outside your network by clicking on the People You May Know link. This will give you a list of either friends of friends or people who have said that they work or have worked at the same organisations that you’ve worked at. You can connect to these people in the same way. You can also search for people using the search box at the top of the screen (Note; I asked Janet’s permission to use her profile in these images):

However you access them, click on the person’s name to see their profile and then use the Connect button to ask them to link to you:

It will then ask you how you know that person: when you click on one of the radio buttons, you will be asked for more detail.

Here, I’ve clicked Colleague, so then it will ask me which company that I’ve worked at relates to this:

Setting up a company page

You can set up a company page on LinkedIn for your business – this will give people another way to find you and will provide another link to your website and other social media.

To set up a company page, click on Interests at the top, then Companies from the drop-down.

At the top right of the next page you’ll find a link for Add Company.

You will first need to confirm that you’re eligible to create and moderate this page, so there will be an email sent to you to confirm, and you must have a personal LinkedIn account to create a company page.

Fill in all of your company’s details and save – and there you go.

To edit your company information, go and find the company page and click on Edit.

Getting social

This section is about social media – so how do you get social on LinkedIn?

Updates

You can post updates, just like on Facebook – do this from the Home page. Your updates will appear on your connections’ home pages, just as theirs do on yours. You can like and share updates in a very similar way to Facebook.

You can direct most blogging platforms to automatically post links on LinkedIn – all of my WordPress blog posts do this. You can also link your Twitter account to LinkedIn by going to your account settings (click on the small photo in the top right of the screen), clicking on your name and choosing Manage Twitter Accounts.

Click on Add your Twitter account:

If you’re logged in to Twitter you will see this Authorize app message, if you’re not logged in, you will be asked to log in first. And there you go:

Recommendations

If someone has done a good job for you, you can click on Recommend in their profile and type in a recommendation. They will be emailed this and will have the option as to whether to publish it or not (this prevents people posting negative comments without the member knowing).

Groups

There are thousands of interest groups on LinkedIn and these can be a good way to meet new people, spread the word about what you’re doing, and find out what other people are up to.

Access Groups by searching in the top search bar (you can click on the icon to the left of the search area and select only Groups to search) or by clicking on Interests then Groups. Once you’ve joined some Groups, you will find them listed on your Groups page, and then some suggestions underneath.

When you look at the Groups screen, you can see all of the groups you have joined, and you can also create a group if you wish to.

You will also find suggested groups at the bottom of the page:

Groups work very simply – you can post a new message or reply to another one, just like in other social media like Facebook and Google+. You can choose whether you are updated by email for all posts and replies in the group, or whether you want to just access them via the LinkedIn website.

I have found that some groups do become clogged with too many adverts and not enough discussion, but others can be really useful. The usual rules apply about reciprocity and kindness when using LinkedIn for social media communications.

Golden rules for using LinkedIn

Be professional. LinkedIn is known as a professional and careers-orientated site, although there is certainly room for the self-employed. But you do need to be extra professional and not very personal on here.

Reciprocate – if people like and share your updates and group posts, say thank you and like and share theirs.

Similarly, if people recommend you, or if they use the Endorse buttons that appear at the top of the screen when you log in to say that you’re knowledgeable about a certain topic, do try to recommend and endorse them back.

Useful related posts on this blog

Using Twitter for your business

2 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on April 9, 2014 in Business, Social media

Tags: business, social media

Growing your business – moving into premises (case studies)

19 Mar

When you start to grow your business, it can become obvious that you need to move out of the dining room or even home office and into your own premises. I was lucky enough to be able to dedicate a room in our house to Libro, and I work quite happily up here and don’t intend to move out. But if you don’t have space to put aside a dedicated and undisturbed area of your home (or you don’t want to work from home), you are making something that you want to be able to leave out overnight, or you are planning on seeing clients, it can become a matter of necessity.

Here we meet three people who have expanded into their own new premises, and learn how and why they did it, and what happened next …

Jennifer Woracker of Twinkleballs, who makes cake toppers and is one of my Small Business Chat interviewees, has just moved into a workshop in the garden. She and her family recently moved in with her parents in Wales, and her mum helped her to convert the summer house, paying for the initial work, which cost around £1000. Jennifer is now paying her mum back in monthly instalments.

By doing this, Jennifer has none of the disadvantages of paying business rates and rent on a premises, and all of the advantages of having her own studio to work from, which has made the world of difference to both her business and her home life.

Before getting her own space, she had to work from the kitchen in my home, which meant that she couldn’t start work until the family were fed and all the cleaning up done, she could only work at night and had to clear everything away before she could go to bed, “often at 2am!”. She also had to kick out all the pets and make sure the area was spotless before work could commence. What about now?

My purpose-built studio has everything I need to store my tools and materials and I can leave my work out to come back to as and when I want, this means I can pop in and work for an hour or so during the day when the children are other wise occupied. When the children go to bed I escape to my little shed in the garden and get down to doing the work I love, I use a baby monitor so I can be sure the children are safe and sound while I am working. My studio is a lovely fresh, clean and pet free environment that is a pleasure to work in, it has a sink with a water heater, a huge work top and loads of cupboards. I also have a kettle for the all important tea brakes and my laptop with Spotify playing my favourite tunes. It is great to have a place of my own to explore and develop my creativity!

John Ellery of Ellery Consulting, a firm that specialises in grant making and fundraising, has taken one private and one government-initiated path to having premises. Why did he take this route? After trying for a short period to work from home, with a young family and many distractions, he realised that working from home wasn’t ideal for him. As he was a relatively new business with the associated cash-flow concerns, he wasn’t keen on paying out an expense for an office initially.

His initial solution was signing up for a Regus Goldcard, which he did in his second month of operation. This allowed him use of Regus Business Lounges across the country (he picked up a free Goldcard with his membership of the Federation of Small Businesses. It looks like you get a different level of free membership these days: do check before joining either service). His assessment of these spaces:

Whilst these do not provide private space they offer a professional environment, a place to go to work to – separating work and home environments – and free tea and coffee. The Business Lounges were still a fairly informal work environment, with sometimes Lounges being very busy and noisy and the annoyance of having to pack and unpack everything if you wanted to nip out to get lunch.

Looking for something more private as he grew the business, John then found the government ‘Spaces for Growth’ scheme, offering free space for start-ups, SMEs and social enterprises through the use of empty government buildings. This gave him a permanent space of his own, an offer of additional desks as the business grew and a formal office to invite contacts and partners to. In his words, “This gave the business a great saving as we attempted to grow”.

John says of his adventures in low-cost premises:

I have used both of these schemes in order to provide myself with a work space, a place away from home that I can go to do a day’s work, with this separating the work and home environments. Through these two approaches I have managed to do this at a minimum costs allowing me to focus use of business funds on growth opportunities.

They both have the additional and unexpected benefit of mixing with other people and businesses in a similar situations, with this network found to be vital as he faced the challenges of being a new business owner. The biggest issue was the lack of meeting or private space in these environments, “However, this is easily overcome through meeting partners in their offices or going out for a coffee!”

Would John recommend these two schemes? “Definitely. The Spaces for Growth is an especially strong and under-used scheme which will be of great benefit to help the business grow”.

Karin Blak of Interrelate has taken a slightly more conventional approach to business premises. She’s a psychosexual and relationship therapist in private practice but also runs a training business providing courses in emotional first aid, listening skills for teachers, emergency workers, etc.

Karin founded Interelate in 2005 but only offered the training on an ad hoc basis, so premises were not a priority. However, when she started to run this side of the business seriously, she realised that something would have to give:

At the moment, any work relating to Interelate is done at the dining room table at home, which now is no longer appropriate. Having to clear all my work into piles on the floor every evening when the family sits down for dinner is not good and does not encourage my family to realise that this is a business not just something Mum does to keep her occupied. For me, it will instill a working day rather than working from the moment I wake until going to bed at night. I so look forward to regaining my home and having to get out of the door to go to work.

She does already have a practice room in town for her private practice, but there is not enough space there for her desk, books, papers and stuff that is needed to run a training business. So she began to look at other businesses and how they were going about expanding or moving. Having noticed that some were getting some good deals on rent or getting landlords to include additional services, “I realised that I needed to be cheeky, so when I went looking at premises I began to bargain with landlords and managed to get a really good deal without too much haggling”.

The upshot of this haggling is that Karin is currently moving into a lovely room in the centre of town with enough space for both therapy and training, and paying less than she did for just her therapy room. Although she had the experience of running the therapy room before, it’s clear that looking at others’ experiences was really helpful for her [as I hope this series of expert opinions and case studies is for you!]. She has some useful things to say about the financial side of things:

The cost side has become more important than before because of launching Interelate and having to invest in business development services, updating the website, telephone answering services, equipment and so on before I have earned any serious income.

Karin admits that she didn’t do as much budgeting as she now thinks she should have done, and suspects, “I could probably have got more out of my little pot of money if I had”. She did go to her bank, but, while they were willing to help, could only contribute half of what she was asking, mainly because the business wasn’t creating an income yet.

Would Karin do it again? It’s early days and, as she says, it was a leap of faith but in going about the process of research and evaluation, she has already made some valuable connections who are going to be helping her by selling and even buying her training courses. Like John, she’s found a side benefit to getting out of the home office and into the wider world in terms of networking and connections. Her final comment:

My message is that I would always take that leap of faith again because a. I am enjoying all so much b. I am meeting some fantastic people c. I will never be able to say that I didn’t try hard to make it work.

So, we have three ways here in which you can expand your business by expanding into premises. You can build a garden office/workshop, invest in various schemes that give you more or less temporary space, or take the leap of faith and trust that your business will make enough in its new home to pay those rental and service fees. All of them take planning, and you must continually check that you’re getting value for money.

Thank you to Jennifer, John and Karin for their input into this article. I’m hoping to find an estate agent to contribute an expert post on this topic – if you are one or you know one, please do get in touch with me!

Jennifer Woracker Twinkleballs – Facebook – Twitter

John Ellery Ellery Consulting – Twitter – Facebook

Karin Blak Interelate

———-

This post is part of my series on growing your business. Read more here and read about my own business journey in my books.

3 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on March 19, 2014 in Business, Guest posts, Organisation

Tags: business, guest posts

What to do when you encounter plagiarism: business content

12 Mar

This post is for editors who suspect that they might have encountered some deliberate or accidental plagiarism when dealing with content for their business clients, particularly in regard to websites and blog content. By sharing my tips and practices, I hope that I can gather a resource of best practices for other editors / proofreaders.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the act of passing someone else’s work off as your own. In the business world, this usually involves copying someone else’s content, word for word, without linking back to the original work or acknowledging that it has come from elsewhere.

I’ve noticed that I and colleagues are fairly often confronted with content to edit that has been pulled wholesale from another (often rival) website, used word for word without attribution. That would be stolen. It’s found most often, in my experience, in business marketing content such as websites and blogs. Note that I have written about plagiarism in student work in another article.

Plagiarism in the business world

Why is plagiarism bad? Two reasons:

If you steal someone else’s content, you are liable to be found out, either by a prospective client who is looking at several different websites in one business area, or by the originator of the content, who may be alerted by a search service such as Google Alerts or plagiarism-detecting software such as Copyscape (thanks Arlene Prunkel for the heads-up; she has blogged about her own experiences using this software).
Using the exact same wording in two places alerts the search engines that something is amiss. It’s never clear exactly how the algorithms work, but you run the risk of your content not being indexed and found anyway.

Why is not flagging plagiarism bad for the editor?

OK, we haven’t signed a Hippocratic Oath of Editing or anything, but it’s the job of a principled and decent editor not to allow plagiarism to happen – surely?
Someone finds out that a site you’ve edited has plagiarised their content. You let it pass unmentioned. The plagiariser says, “Oh, my editor didn’t flag it up”, and the finger starts to point at you.

What form does business web content plagiarism take?

As with student plagiarism, business plagiarism can be deliberate or accidental – or a mixture of the two.

Deliberate plagiarism

I’ve edited web text where the style and content varies so much that it’s clear that it’s come from different sources. Sometimes the client is clear about this, “Oh, I picked it up from various places, it doesn’t matter, does it?” Yes, it does.

On other occasions, I’ve been given a link to a single blog post or article, or perhaps a web page, usually by necessity published by the client’s rival, and been asked to “rewrite this so it doesn’t look like we’ve used their words”. Not ethical.

Deliberate or accidental plagiarism

Sometimes it’s not clear whether a client realises that you’re not supposed to lift text wholesale from another place. So it’s important not to pour scorn or invoke human rights and laws, but to quietly educate.

Accidental plagiarism

Very often, a client or indeed other blogger won’t realise that reposting the whole of an article or web page, with a reference or link at the bottom, will prejudice the search engines against them and lead to their content not being indexed. Here, it’s useful to drop them a line to suggest that they only post a few lines of the original with a link to where it can be found in full. Link-backs all round and happily shared content!

What to do when you encounter plagiarism in business texts

I have a sliding scale of activities depending on the level of plagiarism and overtness about the plagiarism:

Here’s what I do to avoid my clients plagiarising on their websites and blogs:

If I find lots of reposted blog content which is referenced, I will have a quiet word about posting teasers and links instead.
If I suspect content has been lifted from elsewhere, I’ll pop a few sentences into Google and see if I can find the source. Then I’ll raise the issue with the client by marking the sections or just emailing them to ask if they had permission to quote the source. I’ll then suggest that they rewrite it (or have it rewritten) using a variety of sources.
If a client has quoted an industry leader or other person but not referenced where they got those quotes, and it’s clearly not from a direct conversation, I will advise them that they should quote their sources in a source list or footnote or link.
If I am asked to rewrite one blog post or web page to make it suitable for the client, I will go back to them and either offer to research the topic myself or ask for a list of suitable resources from which to research it (which can then be referenced in the text)

I will always explain why plagiarising is a bad idea and the effects it can have on their business, reputation and search engine results. Most clients understand the issues once they’re explained: any that ask me to continue helping them to plagiarise whatever will become ex-clients. I can’t risk being associated with this kind of activity, and I don’t wish to be implicated in any scandals, plus it’s against my ethics to promote or encourage plagiarism.

I’ve talked here about strategies for dealing with plagiarism in business texts. If you have any other practices you’d like to share, please do submit a comment below!

Related posts on this blog:

What to do when you encounter plagiarism: student work

Top 10 blogging sins

My terms and conditions

11 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on March 12, 2014 in Business, Copyediting, Errors, Ethics, proofreading, Word, Writing

Tags: business, Copyediting, errors, plagiarism, proofreading, refusing

What to do when you encounter plagiarism: student work

05 Mar

This post is for editors who suspect that they might have come across deliberate or accidental plagiarism, or are concerned that they are doing “too much” and thus causing their client to unwittingly engage in plagiarism. By sharing how I approach this, and asking for comments, I hope I can gather together a resource of best practices for other editors / proofreaders.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is, at its most basic, the act of passing someone else’s work off as your own. It usually involves copying someone else’s work, text, content, however you want to describe it, without pointing out that you’ve copied it or referencing it back to the original work.

In my work, plagiarism is found most often in student work and business marketing content such as websites and blogs. This post is about student work, and I discuss business content in another post.

Plagiarism in academic work

Plagiarism is, unfortunately, rife in academic work. You can kind of understand it: students are under a lot of pressure, and overseas students in particular can have a lot of financial pressure from their funders to return home with a good degree and pick up a high-level job. With courses over-subscribed and A-levels often not preparing students for the rigours of academic work, the student may not understand that they are not supposed to use other people’s work unattributed, although universities do provide them with reams of paper and things to sign which are intended to explain and prevent plagiarism.

I tend to find two kinds of plagiarism, deliberate and accidental:

Deliberate plagiarism

I’ve come across some pretty shocking examples of deliberate plagiarism in my work. This includes sections marked in a different colour, with a note in the covering email: “Can you please rewrite the sections I’ve highlighted”. More heartrending are the examples where the author says to me, “My English is not good enough to rewrite the parts from other authors, please help me to rewrite them”. But I can’t.

Deliberate or accidental plagiarism

I often come across direct quotations used as if they are the author’s own words. Unfortunately, to the experienced editor, it becomes all-too-clear when a direct quotation is being used without being referenced. Here are some markers of the unattributed block of text that I’ve found:

The language changes subtly: more multi-syllable words, different kinds of linking words used
The standard of the English becomes markedly higher, with no corrections needed to be made (even if you miss these as you go along, the island of white in a sea of coloured corrections and highlights stands out as you look at the page)
The language changes from American to British English or vice versa (many students are inconsistent in their spellings, but a block of the opposite type of English is a real giveaway)
The font, size or colour of the text, or the indentation, line spacing or justification changes – a classic case of copy and paste

Sometimes you can give the student the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe they meant to rewrite and reference and forgot. Maybe they didn’t realise that they couldn’t use blocks of text like this. But it doesn’t mean that it can go unmarked.

Accidental plagiarism

I would count accidental plagiarism as a case where a student who has clearly rewritten ideas taken from other texts and referenced direct quotations and such ideas misses off a reference after a piece of text that is clearly from someone else. Of course, the cases above may be accidental, too, but they do still need to be addressed, as does the odd missed reference.

Plagiarism by the editor

There’s another form of plagiarism which the editor must resist themselves: rewriting so much of the text that it’s the editor who has in effect written the text, and not the student. I talk about how I avoid that below.

What to do when you encounter plagiarism in student work

It’s our duty as decent and principled editors to flag up plagiarism when we find it and help our student customers to realise how they should be referencing and when they’ve made a mistake. It is not our job to rewrite text or make so many corrections and suggestions that we have in effect written the essay ourselves. There are plenty of dodgy proofreading companies out there that will do that (and essay writing companies that will sell students ready-written essays), but as a decent editor, you should not be involved in those sorts of practices.

If you don’t flag up these problems, it is likely that the essay will be run through the university’s plagiarism software and that will flag them up to serious effect (many students know this, and that’s why they might ask us to rewrite sections for them). If you’re concerned about returning work to a student with plagiarism noted and discussed, remember that you’re saving them from possible penalties or even expulsion from their course if they continue to plagiarise and attempt to pass others’ work off as their own, even if you’re not concerned about helping people to obtain qualifications fraudulently.

Here’s what I do to avoid helping the student to commit plagiarism by passing off my own words as their own:

I always work with Track Changes turned on and instruct the student to check each change and accept or reject it themselves. Yes, I know they can press “Accept all changes”, but I send them instructions on how to work with Track Changes that don’t include this option.
I will delete, add and rearrange only if either the words are all correct but the order is incorrect, or the order is correct but the tenses are incorrect. You soon get a feel for the light touch needed to bring writing up to a clear output without rewriting.
If a sentence is obviously wrong in terms of content, I will insert a comment and advise the student to check the correctness of the content.
If a sentence is so garbled as to not make sense, I will insert a comment and ask the student to rewrite it.
If a sentence could mean one of two things, I will insert a comment to suggest the two opposite meanings and ask which they mean.
I am clear in my terms and conditions on this website and in my initial text to the student that this is how I operate.
When dealing with a bibliography, I will make small amendments to isolated errors in punctuation or order, usually up to about 10% of entries. If more than 10% of entries are not formatted according to the rules the student has sent me, or are completely chaotic, I stop editing the bibliography and insert a comment to remind the student that the bibliography is supposed to demonstrate their skill and knowledge, so they must work on it themselves.

Here’s what I do to stop the student plagiarising:

If I find the odd missed reference for a direct quotation, I will highlight the offending quotation and insert a comment reading “Reference required”.
If I find the odd obvious copy and paste which has not been referenced, I will highlight the offending sentences and insert a comment reading “Reference required”.
If I find an isolated substantial section which has clearly or even possibly been lifted from another source, I usually copy a few sentences and pop it in a Google search to see whether I can find the original. Then I will highlight the section and insert a comment along the lines of “This appears to come from another source without being referenced. Mark as a direct quotation and reference, or rewrite in your own words and reference”.
If I find several substantial sections like the above, I will stop editing and write to the student advising that much of the text has been lifted from other sources without being referenced, this is plagiarism and they need to address the issues.
If I find anything more than the odd missed reference to a direct quotation, I will mention the referencing issue in my covering email when returning the work, to ensure that the student is reminded to reference all direct and indirect quotations (thanks to Liam for his comment below reminding me that I do this).

What if the student says it’s OK to rewrite their work?

Sometimes when I return work to a student advising that it’s risking plagiarism to have me continue working on their text (usually because of the level of changes I’m having to make to the text rather than lifting work from other writers), they will come back to me to say that their supervisor / tutor says that it’s OK to do this amount of rewriting.

If they do this, I request that their tutor writes to me telling me it is OK to engage in this level of correction. I require this letter to be on headed paper, signed by the supervisor and scanned in and emailed to me. This hasn’t happened very often; when it has, I have contacted the supervisor to check, and continued with the work. I have saved the scanned letter alongside my copy of the student’s work in case of any comeback.

This article has outlined what I do when I encounter plagiarism in student work. I have resources on this website about plagiarism (listed below) which I am happy for you to reference if you need to (but not copy!). If you have other ways of overcoming this issue, please do submit a comment!

10 things that you can do to prepare for self-employment

26 Feb

I’ve been going through these points with a few friends recently, and it struck me that it would be useful to write them down.

Here’s the situation: you know you’re going to be going self-employed / become a freelancer, but that time hasn’t come yet for whatever reason. Maybe you’re working out your notice, maybe you’re waiting to hear when you’re going to be made redundant, maybe you’re in negotiations, maybe you’re moving to a new city and will be setting up there.

Whatever the precise situation, you have some time now to prepare for the future. Use it wisely and you can hit the ground running (sorry for the cliché) and be in the best possible position to start picking up work and collecting clients.

1. Do any local courses and register as self-employed

Whatever country you’re in, you should be able to look into going self-employed, make sure you have all the paperwork and details you need, perhaps take a course (in the UK, the HMRC courses are now run online) and even register as self-employed (you need to do this within x time of your first income from self-employment, so why not sort it out now?). ALso remember that if you want to submit your tax return online, there’s a separate process to do that and you need to do it as early as you can (more info here).

2. Get business cards

These don’t need to be complicated. They can just include your name, email address and phone number and maybe a website url (see Point 3). Get them from a relatively inexpensive site like VistaPrint (I get mine done there, you can tweak them to not include the VistaPrint logo and get relatively good quality).

In time, you can get fancy cards with logos. You don’t want to be in the situation where you attend training on setting up your business, meet a potential contact and don’t have a card, or be passing out your wife’s card with your name scribbled on the back. Be ready to meet opportunities.

3. Set up a website

Get the basics up now so you have somewhere to point people. It doesn’t have to be fancy: just one page with your contact details, an idea of what you do and a photo will do for now. You can expand on it later on. This is also a place where you can collect testimonials and start building your reputation.

If you use a platform such as WordPress, you can buy your domain name from them, so you don’t have “WordPress” in the URL. But I don’t think that matters as much as it used to, so if you’re not sure that you’re going to be self-employed long term, by all means just register the liz.wordpress.com type URL.

If you haven’t thought up your business name and haven’t got time to sort out a URL and any hosting issues, there’s no harm in writing up the text for your first pages so you have it to hand when you’re ready to set up the website.

Do not, at this stage, get tempted into paying thousands of pounds for an all-singing, all-dancing website. You don’t that at this stage, and you will end up radically changing your website in the first year of trading anyway. Save up for that until you know exactly what you want. This point is about web presence and having somewhere to point to right now.

4. Start reading up and doing research

I recommend reading a couple of small business books and also picking out some blogs to follow. Choose a couple in your line of business and a couple of general business blogs. You might even start interacting on the comments and asking advice, even making some small business friends.

5. Work out some basic terms and conditions

This is the one that most small business people find trips them up in the first years of trading. Certainly, my terms and conditions have been forged through mistakes, panics and worries. I really wish that I’d had statements on what I will and won’t cover in terms of subjects, specific information for students, information on how I invoice and when I expect payment, etc., set out somewhere. I meet many people who learned this the hard way.

To get these together, it’s worth looking at other people’s in your industry, or turning to services like those of the Federation of Small Businesses, who offer members template customer agreements and terms & conditions.

6. Get your finances in order

The two basic points here are:

a. Make sure that you have a separate bank account to run your business through. This can be an untouched current account, again, you don’t have to have a fancy and expensive business account to start off with, but make sure you can keep the business separate from your personal money. Your accountant will thank you for this, and it will make it easier come tax assessment time, too.

b. Make sure that you have some living money for those early days. Tighten your belt now, if you can, and put aside as much money as you can. The general recommendation is three to six months’ worth of basic living money (rent/mortgage and bills) put aside to see you through. By going part-time, I got myself a year (of very basic living) ahead of myself. It just gives you that breathing space.

7. Set some targets

While you’re working out what your basic living expenses are for Point 6, it’s worth setting some targets for your monthly earnings. Make them cumulative, so that if you have a bad month, you can still see that you’re doing OK. For example, if you want to earn £24,000 per year after tax, you’re going to need to earn at least £32,000 before tax. That’s £2,666 a month. If you earn £4,000 in January but only £1,350 in February, it’s useful to know that you’ve made just over £2,666 a month on average.

I like to set three targets a year: one to cover basic living expenses, one comfortable one and one to aim for, as this gives you room to expand faster but not on just impossible target.

8. Get to grips with social media

You’re going to end up using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as a business person, you can’t help it. So get to grips with them now before you’re faced with a Twitterstorm after an unconsidered Tweet!

9. Get testimonials

While you still have access to colleagues and even perhaps clients who might be able to give you a testimonial, ask them for it. If you have a LinkedIn account set up, you can use that to request references. If you’re doing bits of the same work you’ll be freelancing in for free, ask for testimonials.

Always ask if you can use the testimonial on your website, and check if it’s OK to put the person’s name and company next to the testimonial (the more traceable the reference, the more powerful it is).

This way, you’ll start off with some visible backup and proof that you are who you say you are. Going into a different industry than the one you’re employed in? Keep it general – everyone likes a cheerful, reliable hard worker, don’t they!

10. Speak it out loud!

Tell people what you’re doing. Not a million people, not everyone all at once, and of course there may be situations at work where you can’t talk about it. I know how powerful it was when I started saying “I’m going to go full time with my business by this time next year”, and I’m sure that it helped me to do that.

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Thank you for reading my top 10 tips for preparing for self-employment. Have you got any more? Do you madly agree or wildly disagree with any of them? Do post a comment and if you’ve found this interesting, please do use the share buttons to share this on whatever social media channel you fancy – it all helps to help people!

3 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on February 26, 2014 in Business, Organisation, Social media

Tags: business, freelancing, skills

Setting up a WordPress blog 4 – Adding slideshows and galleries to blog posts and pages

19 Feb

In this series, we’ve already learned how to set up a WordPress blog, and how to add pages to make it into a WordPress website. Last time, we talked about adding images to your blog posts and pages. This time we’re learning how to create galleries and slideshows and add your image to your user profile in WordPress.

Why would I want to add a gallery or slideshow to my blog post or page?

If you have a lot of images to accompany a blog post or web page, perhaps of artworks or craft items that you have created, and especially if you don’t have much text to accompany those images, so it’s going to be hard to format them on the page, consider adding a gallery (a grid of images) or a slideshow (one image shown at a time, with navigation buttons for the user).

Adding images to a WordPress blog post

When you’re in the blog editor, you can use the Add Media button, with your cursor is in the position where you want your image to appear, to select and add the images of your choice.

You can download multiple images at a time, and they will then appear on your Insert Media page. Viewing your Insert Media page, if you’ve already downloaded images and want to use or re-use them, these will appear in your Media Library tab.

How do I insert multiple images into a blog post or web page?

If you want to insert multiple images, the most simple way would be to tick all of the images that you want to use (see screenshot above) and press Insert into post. However, this will typically give you a jumble of images that looks really messy:

Here’s how to do it properly and neatly.

How do I add a gallery of thumbnail images to a blog post or web page?

In the Insert Media page, click on Create Gallery in the left-hand menu bar:

Select the images that you want to add to your gallery by clicking in the box at the top right of each image until it shows a tick, and click on Create New Gallery at the bottom of the screen:

This will take you to the Edit Gallery screen. Here you can select how many columns your pictures display in and what format – here “Thumbnail Grid”, and then click to Insert Gallery:

This will bring you back to your Edit post (or page) screen. The gallery doesn’t display in the edit screen, as it will pull the pictures from your gallery when the post is live. Click on View Post (or Page) to check how it’s looking …

When you View post, you can see the grid of images. In this case, because I’ve used screen shots as the images and they’re not all the same size and shape, the grid is a bit odd, but you can see the idea. It’s all much neater, which is the main thing:

How do I add a slideshow to a WordPress blog post or page?

if you want a slideshow rather than a gallery, back in the Edit Gallery screen, click on the dropdown arrow by Type to view the different options. Choose the bottom one, Slideshow:

When you’ve inserted your gallery and chosen View Post, you can see a single image at a time, with navigation buttons for forward, back and pause visible when the mouse hovers over the screen: a slideshow:

Today we have found out how to add multiple pictures to your blog post or web page using a gallery or slideshow.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this article and have found it useful. If so, please take a moment to share and comment – it helps to make other people aware of the help that they can find here. For more posts on blogging, social media, WordPress, Word, business and more, please have a look at the Resource Guide, or explore the categories to your right.

Related posts on this blog

How to set up a WordPress blog

How to add pages to make your WordPress blog into a website

How to add images to your WordPress blog posts and pages

Linking your blog to your social media

WordPress 6 – sharing buttons

WordPress 7 – adding an avatar picture

8 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on February 19, 2014 in Blogging, Business, WordPress, Writing

Tags: blogs, business, Wordpress, writing

Setting up a WordPress blog 3 – Adding images to blog posts and pages

06 Feb

In this series, we’ve already learned how to set up a WordPress blog, and how to add pages to make it into a WordPress website. Today, we’re going to learn how to add pictures to blog posts and pages and how to edit images in WordPress. And here’s how to create galleries and slideshows and add your image to your user profile in WordPress.

Note: March 2014 – I have updated this post to take into account the new way to edit images that has just been implemented in WordPress.

How do I add an image to a WordPress blog post?

When you’re in the blog editor, you will find a button marked Add Media to the left. Making sure that your cursor is in the position where you want your image to appear, click on Add Media:

This will take you to an Insert Media page, and if you’ve already downloaded any images and want to re-use them, they will appear in your Media Library tab. But for now, we want the Upload Files tab. Hit the Select Files button:

Select Files takes you into the File Explorer section of your computer. Here you can navigate around your folders and pick the photo that you want to insert into your post.

NOTE: You might think that you can just right-click and copy an image from the internet or your Facebook timeline, etc., then paste it into your blog. This might work temporarily, but, from experience, these images tend to be unstable and disappear. If you want to use an image from the Internet or elsewhere, save it into your own folders first and then insert it using this method.

Navigate to your chosen picture and double-click on it or single click and press the Open button at the bottom of the screen:

Your picture will be pulled across into your Media Library tab in WordPress.

Note: if you select more than one picture, they will all move into the Media Library, which makes them easy to select. In the next step, only keep the picture you want right then ticked, and untick the others, otherwise they’ll all merrily pile in to your blog in one place.

Making sure that the photo you want to use is ticked, choose the Attachment Details on the right-hand side. This specifies the caption, size and positioning of the image …

Let’s look at that in more detail. You can place a caption on the picture if you want one to appear in your blog post – I don’t often bother, but it can be useful. It’s important to include Alt text, as this is what anyone using an audio describer will hear if they’re unable to see the image. It’s basically good accessibility practice. Link to allows you to link just to a larger version of the image, or you can choose URL to link to an external web page. Alignment can be Left or Right (text flows around these to the other side of the image, if there’s room) or Center (like this blog post). Size is up to you: note, you can make an image smaller but not bigger once you’ve inserted it.

Once you’ve chosen your picture and your settings and alignment, etc., hit the Insert into post button to place the image in your blog post.

And here it is, in my blog post, medium-sized and left-aligned (so you can see that the text I’ve typed appears to the right of the picture and will flow around it. The top of the picture starts where my cursor was, at the beginning of that first line of type. If I chose Right alignment, it would be the other way around; if Center, the text would be underneath.

How do I edit an image in my blog post? (including WordPress’s new image editing process)

Note: this section has been changed to reflect the changes implemented by WordPress in March 2014.

Once you’ve placed your image and written your post, you might want to edit the image. Left-click on your image using your mouse, and two icons will appear – edit and delete. Click on the right-hand, red, delete icon and your picture will disappear (no warning). Click on the left-hand icon that looks like a pen, and you will be able to edit your image.

On clicking the edit icon, you will be taken to an editing screen. This looks a bit different to the old editing screen, and it appears that you can’t do everything that you used to be able to do. But you can! With the help of my old friend Clare Lauwerys at The IT Fairy, I’ve been able to work out what to do and share it with you.

The basic editing screen now allows you to change the Caption text, Alt text, alignment, link and basic size. What about scaling it up and down and adding or changing description text? Don’t fear: it’s all still there.

To add or edit the description text, you need to click on Replace image. Yes, I know that doesn’t exactly make sense, but it’s what you have to do …

Once you’ve hit Replace image you’ll be back in the screen you use to add an image and give it its attributes in the first place:

You can see that the image you’re currently working on has remained ticked in the Add image screen, and you are able to add or amend your description text here (that’s important for your SEO, and I’m going to have Clare guesting on here soon to tell you all about that). When you’ve done that, hit the Replace button and your new image information and old image will be safely in your blog post.

To change the size of the image, stay within the blog post edit screen, click on the image once and then use the standard image changing frame to pull your image out or in with the mouse and cursor to make it larger or smaller:

If you want to edit the picture to flip, rotate or crop it, click on the edit button and once you reach the Image Edit screen, click on Edit Image:

Once you’ve clicked on Edit Image, you can access the ability to flip, rotate and crop your image:

… remembering to press Save when you’ve finished.

Note: you can no longer choose the size of the border around your images. The standard border that you get is an aspect of the theme you choose for your blog. You do get a border of sorts if you add a caption to the image.

How do I preview what my images look like in my blog post?

Click the View Post button to view your post as if it was live on your blog. This can save you from a nasty surprise, as the Edit Post screen does not display exactly as your blog post will in real life (of course, this will display differently on different screens, especially on mobiles and tablets, but this gives you a better idea than just looking at the Edit Post screen).

I’ve added another picture, with Right-alignment, and I want to see how the text flows around them.

And there we go. It looks different from the editor, but I’m happy with the result.

How do I add images to a web page on WordPress?

Fortunately, adding images to web pages works in exactly the same way as it does for adding images to blog posts. So just look for the same buttons and icons, but note that you start off from New Page or Edit Page, not New Post or Edit Post.

You’ve learned how to add pictures to WordPress blog posts and pages, and how to edit those images once you’ve got them into your post/page.

If you’ve found this useful, please add a comment below, and please share this post using the sharing buttons below. Thank you!

Related posts on this blog

WordPress 1 – the basics – joining and setting up a blog

WordPress 2 – adding pages to create a website

WordPress 4 – adding slideshows and galleries of images

WordPress 5 – linking your blog to your social media

WordPress 6 – sharing buttons

WordPress 7 – adding an avatar picture

14 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on February 6, 2014 in Blogging, Business, WordPress, Writing

Tags: blogs, business, Wordpress, writing

Tag Archives: business

Why does my business need office space?

When should my small business move into offices?

How do I go about choosing office space?

Some Top Tips for Choosing Office Space

NO.

Using LinkedIn for your business

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism in the business world

What form does business web content plagiarism take?

Deliberate plagiarism

Deliberate or accidental plagiarism

Accidental plagiarism

What to do when you encounter plagiarism in business texts

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism in academic work

Deliberate plagiarism

Deliberate or accidental plagiarism

Accidental plagiarism

Plagiarism by the editor

What to do when you encounter plagiarism in student work

What if the student says it’s OK to rewrite their work?

Why would I want to add a gallery or slideshow to my blog post or page?

Adding images to a WordPress blog post

How do I insert multiple images into a blog post or web page?

How do I add a gallery of thumbnail images to a blog post or web page?

How do I add a slideshow to a WordPress blog post or page?

How do I add an image to a WordPress blog post?

How do I edit an image in my blog post? (including WordPress’s new image editing process)

How do I preview what my images look like in my blog post?

How do I add images to a web page on WordPress?

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