Bought to you by MBN – A television news bulletin has led to link-up between a Midland Internet service company and UK Trade and Investment, the government department that helps British companies trade overseas.
Worcester-based Names.co.uk employee Kelly Salter saw UKTI West Midlands Regional Director Paul Noon being interviewed on BBC TV news.
‘‘He was talking about how businesses needed to double their exports by 2020 for the economy to grow,’’ explains Kelly, an expert on website domain names. ‘‘He told how UKTI helped businesses. I didn’t think our customers knew UKTI was there to support them so I wanted to tap into the UKTI resource, get their message out there.’’
Through its partnership with UKTI the popular free online training sessions on the Names.co.uk website will be extended in 2014.
‘‘In the new year we are kicking off a new series of webinars in conjunction with UKTI, designed to tease our customers into the idea of export and to start opening their minds to the idea that their online business has the potential to export and to grow,’’ Kelly explains.
The webinars are hosted by company specialists and industry experts like Claire Jarrett. They last between 30 minutes and 45 minutes and take place at lunchtimes or in the evenings.
‘‘It’s the only time that small businesses can take out of their day to learn something to help them get further,’’ Kelly says. ‘‘Hundreds of people view the webinars and we get lots of questions afterwards which the team work hard to make sure we answer. If we don’t inspire this generation of small businesses it’s going to be tough.
‘‘We have engaged experts such as Claire Jarrett to work with us to deliver education and support to small businesses. Claire is a leading Internet marketing expert and one of the top ranked Google Ad Words trainers worldwide. Most small businesses wouldn’t normally be able to get access to such a valuable training resource and the great thing is we provide it for free.’’
Forthcoming webinars include ‘How To Use Google Ad Words To Generate Red Hot Web Leads’ on December 5, ‘Introduction to Ecommerce’ on December 10 and ‘How to Sell on Facebook in under 60 Minutes’ on December 16.
For more information and to register to take part see www.facebook.com/namesco.
Names.co.uk, formerly known as Namesco, is now part of the Italian Internet company Dada and has almost 100 employees at its Worcester base.
Another partnership it has forged is with Worcester College of Technology.
‘‘We’ve helped them with their coursework materials, areas such as graphic design and mobile app developments, and we’ve revamped their classroom and workshop facilities with some cool kit,’’ says Kelly. ‘‘A lot of our staff have gone in to meet the students and we’ve taken on an intern from the college in our dedicated server team. At the end of the month we’re taking students and their teacher to our data centre in Reading. This is the industry they want to work in so we’ll help them understand what they’re studying and see stuff in real life.’’
The company is a domain and web placement business.
‘‘The majority of our customers are micro and small businesses,’’ Kelly explains. ‘’We tend to be one of the first people they come to before they even set up their company. They’ll buy a website name, they’ll probably buy one of the do it yourself website packages which are a lot simpler to use than they were before. The customers design and build the website themselves but we don’t see our part in their journey as stopping there. Yes, we provide the tools they need to get online but it’s important to us that the businesses know how to use them, not just technically but all the tricks of the trade – how to use them so their businesses are more successful.’’
She adds that the next challenge is the imminent arrival of a number of new domain name extensions.
‘‘At the moment web addresses end in ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’. The Internet is on the cusp of launching almost 1,000 new domain name extensions so you’ll have ones ending in ‘.clothing’, ‘.London’ and ‘.shop’. It’s a lot coming at once. For our customers it’s about making sure we give them the information when it’s relevant and it’s accurate and we don’t confuse them. That’s our biggest challenge.’’
But there will be advantages to the new extensions, Kelly says.
‘‘It’s hard to get a cool website name because they’re all taken so this will open up the possibilities to get a really short memorable website name.’’
