Having accepted to do some SEO work for Stone City Films to promote their new film Unconditional i decided we should watch the trailer this morning, after all we like to know exactly what we are helping with. Imagine my suprise when i realised it's a film i'm actually in! (albeit for a second apparently, so im told).

I did a friend a favour at the start of last year and became an extra for an afternoon in a scene in Newcastle west end bar. A few days later i bumped into a film editor friend who told me he was editing it and let me watch the rough edit, the name of the film wasn't finalised at the time so this is a real turn up!

Anyway it's a great film all shot in Newcastle and the North East staring Christian Cooke, check the unconditional trailer out on the official unconditional movie website, theres also an unconditional movie review here.

It's obvious that with all these 'coincidi' that I'm destined to be a famous millionaire actor one day, people will look back and scour this film for my entrance onto the silver screen. Probably. I haven't much time like, I'm 42 in 3 hours and can't act.

This week we sent live our first holiday cottage website for Lemmington Estates. The site at www.lemmingtoncottages.com has been designed and developed with an upmarket feel to reflect the outstanding qualities of 'Keepers Cottage', a five star gold awarded self catering cottage situated in Northumberland near Alnwick.

It's a beautiful and clean site showing stunning images of the cottage interior on the home page and features an integrated booking system, video, image gallery and animated javascript navigation.

As well as designing specifically for high conversion the site is built to be heading for first page of the search 'Luxury Holiday Cottage Northumberland' with extensive SEO work including the base domain being www.luxuryholidaycottagenorthumberland.co.uk plus a rank boosting package of one way inbound links to help it along.
 

" We had our first sale yesterday at 6pm, not a bad start 2 days after live. Was our real first real visitor, good conversion ratio.
My wife spoke to her today and she said it was the best site she'd seen. Well done & thanks."
Jabin Cousins, Lemmington Estates.

A couple walk into a custom car garage and ask "How much for a car?"

The garage owner tells them he can build custom cars ranging from "£X" to "£X sky is the limit." and asks them how much are they looking to spend.

The couple reply "Ha, we're not telling you that, you'll just take all our money! We would like you to tell us how much a car that you think is suitable for us will cost."

The owner now would either tell the couple to go away and stop being silly or he could go away and try and deduce one thing; how rich are they?

Because the owner want's to sell them the most he can, and he can choose from a mulitude of engines, furnishings, custom parts, unlimited amounts of custom designing time etc., he has no choice but to try and guess their budget.

If he gives them the ultimate custom car price, lets say 500K, he runs the risk of "thats too expensive, goodbye". If he comes in at the lower end of 75K then the couple may walk away because they worry the work may be shoddy.

So the owner tries to appease the couple by giving them a midway price of 200K for a great custom car he thinks they might like and possibly afford deduced by their accents, attitude, clothes and current car.

The couple take his estimate and weight it up next to some others they asked the same question to.

They now feel they are in a possition to eliminate from the several guesses at how rich they are, which custom car will be the best and best value for money.

Because money was from the start THE deciding factor for them, they have no choice but to choose the lowest quote (135K), which was given to them by a custom car garage that produces much lower quality cars than the rest.

The couple feel they have done all they can to stop themselves from being ripped off by 'unscrupulous' car vendors that may have taken all their money and given them a less valuable car for it, had they disclosed the figure. The couple get their customised car, it's ok, a mediocre motor, maybe better than some, it gets them from A to B but not talked about.

In another real world ALTERNATIVE cenario, the couple go to the same first garage where they like the look of the custom cars produced in the past and tell the owner the maximum amount money they have to spend. The garage owner want's to give them the best car ever for that amount and looks into what he can do for that money, the best engine for it, the best fittings and alround customisations. He gets back to them and explains what he will do with their money and how much value they will be getting. They like what they hear, he builds the custom car and soon the couple are the talk of the town, driving a real head turner.

Hello. Welcome to our custom web garage... Can we help you?

I'm far from being any kind of social media mogul (yet, more hours in the day please?) but the power of linkedin has certainly become more apparent to me over the last 2 years. Learning how to use it properly is the first step so i thought i'd post this infographic by MindFlash.com called LinkedIn Bootcamp: Basic Training For The Personal Marketer. It gives a breakdown of the basics for creating an effective LinkedIn profile and account. If you're new to LinkedIn (or have been there a while and not quite clicked on) read the following carefully. For more information visit MindFlash.

Geoff came to see us yesterday, sound and inspiring advice from a cracking bloke.