PRIME business club

Are you interested in contributing to the PRIME Business Club web site - as a guest blogger? We’re looking for older entrepreneurs to share their experiences of starting and growing a business.

Fill in this brief form if you’d like to be a regular contributor or submit a one-off piece. We’ll get back to you after Easter if you’re selected.

What’s in it for me?
Nothing is guaranteed, but if your blog is good you could get:

1. Customers for your business. Every blog we will put up can have a link to your own web site on the end. If you also want to put up an email address or phone number we’re happy with that too. The web link should also boost your search engine rankings a bit.

2. Media exposure. This web site is often visited by journalists. If you seem to know what you are talking about and have an interesting point they might contact you direct for a quote.

3. Practice - in both talking about your business and writing for the web.

Don’t worry if you have no writing experience. We’ll help you with editing and send you a draft before anything goes up. For example, we’ll remove any defamatory statements so neither of us will get sued!

Why is PRIME doing this?

We know all sorts of great older-owned business are getting started. But they are not properly refelected on this web site. The best people to learn from about pitfalls to avoid and things to try are often those actually doing it. So if you have relevant experiences to share contact us.

The only requirements are that you must be UK-based (although we could be flexible on this) and must be aged over 50 and getting involved with self-employment or starting your own business for the first time.

Could you be a PRIME online mentor?

Have you already experienced the challenge of setting up your own business? Would you be prepared to share your experience as a PRIME mentor?

Mentoring online can be the perfect way to share your hard earned wisdom with those who can benefit from your experience and knowledge, all in a supportive, safe and secure online environment.

PRIME mentors assist people in the early stages of starting a new business. The emphasis is on being a sounding board and talking through and clarifying options rather than giving business advice.

If you would like to find out more about volunteering with the UK’s top mentoring website please get in contact with Harri Harrison, PRIME Mentoring Manager, harri.harrison@ace.org.uk

If you’ve started your own business or have become self-employed after the age of 50, here’s a chance to get some free publicity. We’d like to hear from you. We’re looking for stories to put up on the case-studies section of this web site.

There are two ways of entering. If you use Microsoft Word just download this form (in Word 2003 doc format), fill in some details and email it back to us at primebusinessclub@gmail.com

Or if you prefer you can fill in the form immediately here online. You don’t need to fill in every field in great detail - just enough to give us the gist of what you are doing. We’ll also email you a link so you can return to your online form later and alter or add details should you want to.

You story could inspire others - and also warn them of pitfalls to avoid along the way. And it could also drive traffic to your web site, from both customers and journalists looking for stories. We’ll link to your web site from any case studies we write up.

Ideally your business needs to have got to the stage where it has started trading and have enough customers on board to say something about how things are going. We are interested in businesses up to about two years old - but older is acceptable if you can still remember lessons learned from your the early days of your venture.

We don’t guarantee we’ll put every business submitted up. We’ll contact you to go through your story if it’s suitable. Since we are not sure how many great stories we will receive at the moment we can’t promise to respond to everybody.