We are excited to announce 2 new improvements to our site that you will most likely be using on a regular basis.

Relevant featured businesses are now promoted on all pages

Well, most pages! Now while you are reading content on a particular topic, relevant businesses that have chosen to take up the Savvy Business Plan will now be introduced to you. For example lets look at this Article by Richard Carter, who is our top Savvy this week on our Savvy Business Show, talking about LinkedIn changes you need to exploit.

The topic is online marketing, and therefore our relevant featured businesses have popped up on the right hand side.

You can follow these companies and keep up to date with all their announcements.

I encourage you to have a look at these featured business pages, which are all.....

You may have noticed that our navigation bar has changed. We are now listing businesses as part of our new Savvy Business Directory.

There is now an option to list your business through our new business directory! 

Why list in our business directory?

It's always a good idea to be where you customers are searching, and the SavvySME business directory is one of those places. This is especially important if you are a B2B business. Our business profiles are integrated with our new search bar, that helps anyone looking for business services or suppliers to find everything they are looking for, from articles, Q&A to businesses that can help them.

Plus it's free, so there is no reason why you shouldn't list your business.

What are.....

One of the things successful people do, is not brag about what they have achieved, but find subtle ways to demonstrate that they are not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

We appreciate that every piece of content you create on the site, takes up your valuable time and effort, so we wanted to create a feature that really helps you maximise your piece of content, and makes this incredibly easy to do.

Auto sharing is one of the most convenient ways to reach out to your networks quickly every time you create content. Bloggers have been taking advantage of this for years. Each time they publish a new blog post, they have set it up to go out on their twitter, Facebook pages and social networks automatically so their piece of content can be enjoyed by as many people as possible.

Some bloggers have spent hours setting it up or paid.....

We have made fixes to some system bugs which will require users to clear their browser cache before they submit questions, comments, answers and articles. Otherwise the submission may appears to be hanging. 

For Chrome users, go to Tools -> "Clear Browsing Data" option and select "Empty the Cache" and click on "Clear browsing data" button.

For Safari users, go to Preferences and go to the Privacy tab and click "Remove All Website Data..."

For Internet Explorer users, go to Tools -> Internet Options. In the General tab, Click on the "Delete..." button in the Browsing History section. Select Preserve Favourites website data, Temporary Internet files and click the Delete button.

We've now made it easier for you to grow your network and introduce your contacts to SavvySME by allowing you to invite multiple people in one go. We have also included that ability for you to customise your message in your invitation so you can tell them in your own words why they should join you on SavvySME.

The best thing about this invite function is that we've tried as much as possible to show business owners, first on your list by looking at their role and title. That way you don't need to search through your contact lists for all the business owners you know.

You can start growing your network in 3 easy steps.

What are the benefits of inviting my contacts?

Inviting people you know onto the network will not only make visiting SavvySME more fun, it can also help you achieve Top.....

We successfully completed system maintenance today at approximately 13:30 - a little behind schedule. Thanks for your patience while we performed these updates. We're continuously working to improve the features we have, as well as add features that are useful and meaningful to you.

You should now find the site is a little faster, and feel a bit 'smoother' to use. We are still in beta, so there might yet be the occasional hiccup; it's important that we get any issues identified, so please let us know if there's something on our site that isn't working the way it should.

As always, enjoy the community - we're all here for each other!

We are please to announce that we have a new way of finding things, thanks to the feedback we received from our question: How can we improve SavvySME?

What we have just implemented is a sub navigation bar that are put into our major categories on the site. This means you can browse content under your favourite topics. 

If you hover over the sub categories you can also see that you can drill down into sub-topics.

As the SavvySME™ community expands, we are outgrowing our current hosting system. In order to be better prepared for the future growth - and to allow us to add some really cool new features - we are moving our system to a new server. This will be happening this Friday, 1st of March, starting at 9:00AM.

We expect the server to be available again within 3 hours, so you'll be able to get back to your favourite new small business community in the afternoon!

Thanks for your patience as we take these steps to improve your experience on SavvySME™.

Great news my Savvies (thanks to Steve Osborne for starting this awesome nickname for us) ! You can now login with your LinkedIn, Facebook or twitter accounts. 

So bye bye username and passwords and hello to easy access. This is thanks to our hard working programming team: Micha, Paul and Ananda.

Why should I use social sign in?

Using your social accounts not only means you have a one click login and not have to remember your password anymore - it also allows you to easily invite your friends to join SavvySME without having to remember their emails. 

The great thing about having more people on your network is like going to a cafe or a bar where you're a regular. It's great to see people you know and encourage each other through the growth.....

Conclusion of the January blog challenge

I've gotten some great feedback about our blog challenge. It moved people outside of their comfort zones and even thought some people did not join us on SavvySME, they took the challenge on their own blog and grew as a result which I'm so glad to hear! For those that participated in January I have put up the top 10 bloggers on SavvySME in January. Also I've shared what I've learnt during this challenge through this blog post. 

Beginning of a new one

If there is one fact about me, it is that I love to psychoanalyse things. I guess I should have become a psychiatrist but spending 10 years studying medicine and then specialising was really not what I was willing to do after being an accountant for 4 years. 

The other day I noticed something interesting. When I logged into SavvySME, my first instinct was to either read an article or to find a question to answer. But every time I had.....

Many people have grown from our January blog challenge including myself. Whether you chose to take part on SavvySME or privately on your own website, I hope this has benefitted you :) We've has some great responses from the challenge!

Lets take the time to recognise the top 6 bloggers that have contribute their thoughts and learnings onto our site:

1. David Soloman Business Planning Strategist at Quiddity

Read his articles 

2. Peter Montgomery Founder and Host at the Peter Montgomery Show

Read his articles 

3. David Price Director at Price Advertising

Read his articles 

4. Ben Thompson CEO at Employment.....

So one night I had a brain wave, one of those ones you get when you are just sitting around with a nagging feel in your head. The problem was, how can we encourage people to share their thoughts and experiences through our internal blogging/article creation platform? I've been encouraging small business owners to start their own blogs from my social media consulting days and I have listed some of the concerns that I hear:

"What if it' people don't find it useful?" 

"What if no one wants to read it?" 

"What if I waste a lot of time writing it and no one reads it?"

"What if I can't keep it up" 

"What if I don't write well?"

"I don't know how to use XYZ"

Being a passionate blogger myself, these things never occurred to me as I naively try and get people to start pouring their heart out online. And come to think of it, I get met with the exact same and if not very similar worries when.....