Anyone can come up with a funny anagram (Adolf Hitler = Hell, do I fart!), but try making it topical. Whenever something big happens in the news or a political party comes up with a new slogan, I like to have a bit of fun trying to turn the relevant words into something that's meaningful, relevant and even revealing. One of my best was the anagram of Osama Bin Laden that i discovered in 2011... "Lob da man in sea" - because that's effectively what the US Troops did with him. I tweeted it at the time, and very soon it was all over the place - even on TV. I should have asked for a credit!

It has been retweeted loads of times. I guess because people can see the irony in it. Here is the government announcing they want to unleash the UK's potential, but as it stands, we're still very much a part of Europe. Nothing has changed, to quote the much maligned Theresa May.

Why not have a go yourself? it's not as easy as it looks. Yes, an anagram server helps start you off, but it won't give you any kind of steer. You have to have an inkling of an idea and try and develop it from there. As an example, there are 104,167 possibilities for the phrase Unleash Britain's Potential, and they only show you the first 500 results, none of which bear any semblance to "Still European Inhabitants". In fact many of the results are just jibberish. Here are the results you get from just typing in "Unleash Britain's potential". They're not much use to anyone!

The way to try and find an anagram that works is to identify one word that you know can be made up out of the letters and then see if you can make something that makes sense from the remaining letters. It can be a laborious process, trust me! But, sometimes, it pays off, not in monetary terms you understand, but from the satisfaction of knowing that you have created a little something that people enjoy reading. 

If you like anagrams and want to see more of mine, here they are. http://www.alasdairmurraycopy.com/anagrams.html 
​The conservative manifesto ones will be rolled out on Twitter soon.

So, series 15 of the BBC’s The Apprentice, the show that spawned among others, the loathsome Katie Hopkins back in 2007, started last night.
 
Time was when, Hopkins aside, I looked forward to the dawn of a new season as, in the early days, it really was all about the candidates and their business know how. Sadly though, certainly in recent years, it feels very much as if the producers have gone the way of so many other reality shows, namely to get together a bunch of strong characters who are not necessarily talented business people, but who, collectively can create a bit of conflict, cock up simple tasks and generally act in such a way as to evoke laughter, shock and disbelief from the viewing public. Indeed, I get the distinct impression that people watch the show, not for any business insight or to marvel at the quality of the contestants, but to look on in disbelief as the participants lurch from one balls up to another.
 
Task one of the new series involved a trip to South Africa, with the two groups, 8 boys and 8 girls, given the challenge of creating a high quality tourist experience – the winner being the team that generated the most profit from ticket and gift shop sales. We were then given our first take away nugget by the voiceover who said something along the lines of “If you can sell something for more than you paid for it, there’s a pretty profit to be made”. Really? Who knew? Stating the bleeding obvious may well be an exciting new feature on the show this year.
 
Onto the teams and some of the personalities. On the boys team, a certain Thomas Skinner stood out. The sight of the charmless cheeky chappy prompted my wife, who is a genuine Cockney, to search online to see which side of the water he’s from. Turned out his manor is Romford. Also turned out that he has previous for handling stolen goods, but that’s another story (that the Google search revealed at the same time as his Apprentice CV). Anyway Tommy boy was full of himself, giving it large about his team were going to win or he’d eat his hat!
 
As for the girls, the streets ahead stand out candidate, but sadly not for any of the right reasons, was Lottie Lion. Only 19, our Lottie kept telling us that she'd worked for ‘the best British wine bar’, which under normal circumstances, given the task the girls opted for, would be a good thing. Not this time though. Oh no!
 
The boys decided to put together a safari trip for 16 people, if they managed to sell all of their tickets. The selling point, before it was rightly knocked on the head by the half of the team that weren’t selling tickets, was the guarantee of seeing the big five animals of Africa – the lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant and Cape buffalo. Obviously such a guarantee can’t be made when the animals are in the wild, but that didn’t stop the sales side of the team flogging a couple of tickets on that basis.
 
The girls opted for a luxury wine tasting experience. On paper what’s not to like? Well, for one, the price they initially came up. 2,500 rand, about £130 per person. Initially that didn't include food either. Unsurprisingly, they had very few takers at that price so were left with no option but to flog the majority of the tickets for 600 rand a piece – a discount of over £100.
 
On to the ‘experiences’ themselves. First, the boys. I don’t know if it’s just me, but the sight of a bunch of twenty something blokes on a coach being led by a faux cockney geezer in a sing song in order to build up the morale of the punters on the trip doesn’t scream ‘quality’. But, somehow it seemed to work, judging by the smiling faces and audience participation. Meanwhile, the girls team, having safely transported their customers to the winery, proceeded to run round like headless chickens trying to find one of the main focal points of the place – the wine cellar. Again, maybe it's just me, but you'd think someone would have thought ahead and got a rough idea of the layout of the place in advance, but no.
 
I won’t go into too much detail about the actual tasks as, if you saw the show you’ll know, and if you didn’t, watch it on catch up. Suffice to say there were lots of embarrassing moments and cock ups, none more so than when, during the wine tasting session, the aforementioned Lottie took it upon herself to steal the Sommelier’s thunder by butting in and reminding us  about how she had worked at the best British wine bar and telling the guests what sort of flavours they would get from the wine. If looks could kill, Lottie would surely have saved Lord Sugar the hassle of a boardroom session.
 
The other stand out moment for me was Thomas, Tommy, The Teester, negotiating with the shocked looking lady in the gift shop. Short of getting her in a headlock and screaming “give me the money, slag!” he put sufficient pressure on her to up her commission level for his team from 5% to 22.5%, claiming he’d have got 25 if another team member hadn't spotted her terror and suggested a compromise of 22 and a half.
 
As always, the outcome was far too difficult to call. Either team could have lost. Neither deserved to win. In the end, it was the girls team that was slightly less bad than the boys and, putting aside their bitchiness and loathing for certain members of their team, they embraced in the reception area like they’d just own the women’s world cup. Meanwhile, back in the boardroom, one of the boys became the sacrificial lamb. To be honest, it could have been any or all of them. The main thing I’m looking forward to next week is Thomas eating his hat before we get on with proceedings in Task two. 

​A couple of days after getting back from holiday in Spain in August I started to get a bit of a dry, tickly cough. I thought no more of it and in fact played cricket the following weekend and the weekend after that too. During that time I was aware that the cough was there, but it hadn't really developed into anything worth worrying about so I just put it down as being an annoying summer cough/cold.
 
Little did I know that that particular theory would soon change - quite dramatically!
 
Saturday 27th August was my son’s birthday and I woke up coughing a bit more than I had been previously. Not enough to bother me much during the course of the day, but when I went to sleep that night, the real trouble started. I woke up several times during the night having coughing fits that seemed to be getting worse and worse. The last one in the early hours of Sunday morning was so scary that I said to my wife that we should go to the hospital to get it checked out. So about 8am Sunday morning off we went to the local emergency unit where a doctor diagnosed a chest infection and prescribed antibiotics and steroids.
 
The following morning I got an emergency appointment with my GP and she referred me for a chest x-ray which I had the same day. I was told the results could take up to a week but in fact they were back in the surgery the following morning and revealed I had a partially deflated lung. That was the least of my worries as in the meantime I had experienced more and more coughing fits to the point that I was now scared to go to bed. Really bad episodes of choking and gasping for breath that lasted anywhere between under a minute to more than two. As a result I tried staying up watching TV as long as I could. Being tired seemed a better option than choking to near death.
 
I got through Tuesday night somehow but the coughing continued off and on through Wednesday. Bizarrely I felt absolutely fine when I wasn’t gasping for breath, but when the coughing attacks kicked in I became a bit panicky to say the least as I had no idea what was causing such awful episodes. My wife was also beside herself with worry, fatigue and the fear that I was going to pop off in front of her eyes – that’s how bad some of the attacks were.
 
Wednesday night I again tried to stay up and watch tv, not just to give my wife some respite but also hopefully to avoid more attacks. Around 4am though I could barely keep my eyes open so decided to try and sleep on the sofa. 20 minutes later I woke up feeling like I was drowning/suffocating and desperately trying to draw breath. Thankfully my wife heard my gasps and wheezes from upstairs and ran down to try and help me. Eventually, I managed to get my breath but was left feeling exhausted. It was then that we decided to call an ambulance as we were getting more and more bewildered by this ‘chest infection’ that was causing such scary and more frequent coughing episodes. Basically, whenever I coughed, my throat shut tight and was very reluctant to open up again. I later learned this is what's called a laryngospasm.
 
The ambulance team ran a few tests – all of which seemed fairly normal i.e. blood pressure, oxygen levels, pulse – before taking me down to the local hospital where I had a blood sample taken and a doctor do various tests again to try and ascertain what was wrong. The upshot was they gave me stronger antibiotics and acknowledged that the results of my blood test revealed that I did indeed have an infection. I was then sent home.
 
I managed to endure Thursday with similar episodes - there seemed no point in going back to hospital again as it appeared there was nothing they could do. After all, other than the irregular cough that had me gasping for breath, all my other signs were good. However, another particularly horrendous episode on the Friday night saw me back in hospital again early Saturday morning. The one consolation being that my belief that Friday nights were really busy one for A&E Units was knocked for six when, at five in the morning, I was the only person in there apart from the bloke on reception. We had a lovely chat when I wasn’t coughing.
 
This time I saw a doctor who, whilst pleasant enough, didn't really know what to do for the best. He could see I was struggling when the cough kicked in but the best he could suggest was that maybe it was GERD related i.e. food reflux. I knew it wasn’t, but he prescribed me some tablets for it anyway (which I still have). He also, at my suggestion (as I had read they can suppress coughs) chucked in some codeine phosphate pills, but being anti-drugs and not wanting to be out of it when trying to cope with future attacks I chose not to take them once I had read about the possible side effects. Again, I was discharged, this time around 6am. My wife said she couldn't believe it when she heard me coming up the garden path coughing at around 6.45am! She was convinced they had to keep me in for observation, so bad was the latest attack.
 
Throughout this time I had been exchanging messages with a GP friend of mine, just letting him know what was going on. After I told him of this latest visit to the hospital, he asked if they had tested me for Pertussis and was amazed when I said they hadn’t. To be fair, I didn't even know what Pertussis was, then, but I do now, only too well! It’s whooping cough, and as soon as I read about the symptoms and timeframes involved I knew straight away that that is what I had. In fact it was glaringly obvious. The dry tickly cough to start, the feeling perfectly fine in between coughing fits, with no other bodily indicators to suggest I was unwell. The dreadful, irregular attacks that had me thinking I was gasping my last breath, the fear of going to bed at night – it all added up. And yet, not once during my trips to hospital or surgery had any doctor even thought to consider or mention that whooping cough was a possibility.
 
Armed with this new information I took it upon myself to go back to the hospital again on the Saturday afternoon and see a doctor to explain that that is what I thought it was and to ask for a per nasal swab test. A very kind, compassionate and thorough doctor listened to my story, which included me having a bit of a coughing fit and breaking down in tears with frustration and fatigue, before contacting the microbiology consultant who explained to her how to do the test. Cue two long wire brush type looking implements being shoved up each nostril and scrubbing the back of my throat – not an experience I recommend – and being sent away for tests. At last I would get to the bottom of this mystery illness and the results would confirm that it was whooping cough all along, wouldn’t they?
 
To keep my GP in the loop I made an appointment on the following Monday, where I explained what had been going on. I then kept my fingers crossed that the results would be back sooner rather than later. But no! Instead, I got a phone call from a doctor in the emergency unit at the hospital on the Wednesday saying she had had a note from microbiology that stated that the samples I had given were the wrong kind! What? They shoved two brushes up my nose and scrubbed the back of my throat – I remember it well! How could they be the wrong samples? Anyway, that was the situation. As luck would have it though, this latest doctor had herself had whooping cough last year so she was able to empathise with me, but ended by saying that hers lasted exactly 100 days. I was only on about day 30 at this stage, so it wasn’t really what I wanted to hear. Oh well. She suggested I have a Pertussis antibodies blood test, which would definitely reveal whether I had whooping cough or not, so I got back in touch with my GP and asked for them to leave a form out. Then it was back to the hospital yet again for a two-hour wait to have my blood taken – on one of the hottest days of the year - followed by more coughing/choking fits. Here's an example of a MILD attack (warning: it is pretty grim listening). The worst ones went on for around 3-5 times as long, if you can imagine that.

From time to time, with the most recent time being earlier today, I get asked if I have time to write a few blogs for someone else. Well, not just someone else, generally for a business that I have no experience of, and on a topic that I have no interest in. I've even turned down writing a regular blog for a very well-known business entrepreneur. That might sound weird, but it's true. Let me explain why.

When blogs first became a thing, I, like millions of other people around the world, eventually joined the party. But, I made one hard and fast rule for myself - I am only going to write a blog if it is about something I am passionate about (for example, a rant about the quality of online recruitment advertising) or have experience of something that my wittering on about may benefit others who read it (my piece about being made redundant would be another example). That's my rule, in a nutshell. After all, wasn't the 'weblog' originally created to be the online log of the actual author of the piece? When and why did it turn into a piece of material that you commissioned an outsider to churn out on behalf of you or your business just to pad out your website or give the impression that you feverishly write a blog on a regular basis? Where's the authenticity, originality and personality in that?

The answer, to me at least, seems to be that the blog, having started out as an opportunity for the actual author of the piece to put their point of view out there in public for all to see, has now, in many instances, become nothing more than a page about something/anything related to your business to put on your website to try and drive traffic to it. And that's fine if that is your intention, but I will always turn down the opportunity to write such a piece because, as I say, to me, the blog, if it is to remain in existence, is, for me, merely an outlet to express my own point of view on a subject that I care about - hence this hastily typed missive that I hope has made you think. I mean, come on, how many more 'top tips', 'how to' and 'why you' type blogs does the world really need?

In summary, if you feel strongly about a subject; if you have been through something in life that you think might help others or you're simply so fired up and passionate about something relating to your business life then go for it, write a blog, but make it your own words. Don't commission someone else to do it for you just so that the hits on your website get a boost or it helps pad out a neglected section of that site. The online world already has more than enough of those articles floating about.

​Rant over. Comments welcomed.   

I'd finished work for the week early last Friday so decided, as an experiment, to throw an offer out on Twitter - I'd write a free bit of recruitment copy for the first recruiter to get in touch with me and send me an existing job ad or description. I didn't hold my breath, and to be honest, had no one taken me up on my offer I wouldn't have lost any sleep over it. I was just keen to see if the 'power' of social media ran to people in the recruitment world spotting a good, no obligation, nothing to lose opportunity. And, after a few minutes, one of them did!

I was contacted by a fellow Tweeter who just happened to have a live vacancy that he felt might be worth me having a look at. After all, as I'd made clear in my tweets, there really was nothing to lose. If he liked what I wrote, fine, if not, no problem.

Because I was going to be busy at the weekend (I quite often work some of it as part of my flexible working from home set up) I set about writing it straight away and, within just over an hour (my normal turnaround time for such jobs is usually 24 hours due to volume of work) I'd put my spin on the original and given it a slightly less formal tone of voice. It was, after all, for a customer service role, where tone of voice is everything! 

I've reproduced the original and the new version below. Given it was written in roughly an hour, I hope you can see what's possible in terms of turning a piece of copy that 'does the job' into a piece of copy that sells the job a bit better, simply by talking to the reader as an individual in a friendly yet professional manner. 

​Your comments are welcomed of course!

Some of you will be aware that I am not shy of bemoaning the fact that there are so many poor job posts littering the online space. You only have to visit a job board and pick a few ads at random to find cut & pasted job descriptions, phrases like "Our client are looking", hideous examples of awful grammar and a whole load of posts that just have no kind of sell or allure about them at all. And yet....   

I tweeted this earlier today: "Amazes me how some recruiters spend loads on getting a shiny new, all singing website then destroy their street cred with awful job content". It was in light of the fact that I had been looking at a recruiter website that had recently been given a make over and now came with all the bells and whistles and a big sell up front about how wonderful they are. I then went and had a look at their job content and found exactly the same sort of examples that I mentioned above, hence the tweet.

A few minutes later I got a response to my tweet that asked "Do you think job seekers care or just copywriters who get exercised about it?" and it made me wonder - do job seekers REALLY not care about how a job post is displayed? Are they unconcerned about bad spelling? Do bullet pointed lists plucked directly from a job description ring their bell enough to make them want to apply? Because if that's the case, I, and many more people in the recruitment marketing space like me, have been deluding themselves for years that somehow people do actually care about how a job is marketed. I believe they want to feel like they are being spoken to personally when they read a job ad. They want to like the sound of what the company advertising is looking for. They want to be able to see what they are reading as a potentially lucrative career move. They want to be slightly excited at the thought of working with these people they are reading about. Because, if that's not the case, we may as well chuck any old nonsense out there in the future and call it a job post.

But then again, imagine if you will, if the people who advertise cars, holidays, booze, exotic food items, luxury goods etc. had the same attitude. What if Ford just published a picture of a manual of a car with the caption "Buy it" and called it a tv ad? Would that work? Of course not. So what is it that makes recruitment advertising any different? After all, moving jobs is pretty high up on the list of life decisions. You're not buying a can of beans or a bar of chocolate, you're investing in your future. And is that future really worth so little that how an employer presents themselves to you has little or no effect on your decision to apply? Can it really be? 

I welcome your comments.

I've just watched the final of the BBC’s The Apprentice on catch up tv and thought I'd give you my take on proceedings.

Firstly, I have to say as an overall comment on the show, it seems to have lost the mojo it had in earlier seasons. All too often I found myself thinking it was more a case of who was the best of a bad bunch each week, and which team actually deserved to lose less than the other one. I think the fact the eventual winner was on the losing team seven times speaks volumes (though being no statto, I've no idea how past champions have fared losing wise. I would hazard a guess they didn't get beat as many times). Anyway I digress. Onto the final.

I still find it hard to understand why Mark made it all the way. His business plan was more of an "I'm doing this job at the moment. Will you just pay me to do it for you?" type affair. And no one seemed to ever pick him up on his at times brash assertions like the glaring one in the final where he simply said "I know more about online marketing than anyone". Excuse me? Really? The same way you know London very well as you've lived here for two years (one of his earlier equally ridiculous boasts in the week they needed to navigate their way round town to buy various items). At times, the guy comes across as nothing more than a bullshitter and a braggart. Someone who will happily conduct a character assassination on his fellow contestants or slyly manipulate his way into a more favourable role on any given task. So hang on, I should stop there. After all, some might say he has everything it takes to be a success in business. But, if that's the case - at what cost?

Bianca by contrast, was worthy of her place, given that the two front runners for me prior to their firings, Katie and Roisin, were no longer around. However, once she decided that her tights were going to cost what may as well have been a million pounds a pair, it was clear that, despite Mark's business plan being vastly inferior in so far as it's just taking a business model that has been out there for years and convincing Lord Sugar that he was God's gift to online marketing, Bianca was heading for the runners up spot.

Yes, she did try to do a u-turn by suggesting that maybe they could be flogged at £6 a pair rather than the ridiculous £35 she first came up with, but by then it was too late. Mark, who, to be fair, can sell (but was told off for lying about his prowess in online advertising earlier in the process), had done enough to win the prize. That said, one can't help thinking again at how lame the show has become. In the past we've had inventors and people with start up ideas that were genuinely original. What have we got now? Someone who has simply taken the business he is in at the moment and asked Lord Sugar to invest because, wait for it, he has a unique selling point. That's right folks - he's going to make it a personalised service! Who knew that such a thing existed? (Er, pretty much everyone who works in the service industry and is any good at what they do, that's who).

The hairdresser who allegedly pledged to spend £3,000 a month on Mark's service (that's an awful lot of haircuts before you make a profit) just to get onto page one of the Google research results would surely want more than the once a month visit that Mark was pledging to put into his SLA or whatever he's going to call it. Why, for three grand a month I’d want to see you at least every ten days, probably more until I realised you're actually not offering anything that isn't already out there - and probably charging me a lot more for the privilege (I know businesses that spend c. £400-500 a month for a similar service).

All in all, I deleted the show from catch up feeling pretty underwhelmed. I was genuinely happy for Tom the Inventor when he won. He was a bit quirky, a bit different, yet fought his corner because he was able to bring something new and innovative to the table. Dr. Leah Totton, the Irish cosmetic skincare queen, also had a bit about her in terms of business prowess. She felt credible, likeable and knowledgeable without ever coming out with crass statements like "I know more about cosmetic surgery and skincare than anyone else in the universe ever" - something that, had Mark been in that business, he’d possibly have rolled out week after week in between times of belittling and denigrating his fellow contestants. Still it's over now, and, not only does Mark have a £250,000 investment to look forward to, it would seem judging by Ricky Martin and Dr Leah's cameos on the after show that free orange spray tans and Botox treatments are up for grabs too, if he fancies them. Seriously what have they done to themselves? Leah's forehead was as stiff as a board and they both looked like extras from a Tango ad.

Apprentice, you need to find your way back to the heady heights of earlier years or quietly fade into the 'where are they now' distance, a bit like I predict Mark will within a year of being with Sugar. He talks a good game, but he's in a game that already has plenty of established players and won’t find that your average hairdresser or builder really has three grand a month to throw his way in return for once a month tea and biscuits. Maybe Nick Hewer has seen the light and bailed out at the right time. As a viewer, I'm seriously considering doing similar next season, although if one thing remains about the show it's the fact that the more and more inept the contestants become each year, the harder it becomes not to just switch on to see who is making a total arse of themselves on any given week.

My latest blog is totally out of keeping with anything I have written about before. And there's good reason.

Two years ago, out of the blue, I was diagnosed as having Diabetes Type 2. Whilst not anywhere near as serious as Type 1, it was, nevertheless, a bit of a shock. But then I had got used to shock during my life. The death of my father when I was 13. My brother dying within 11 weeks of being diagnosed with cancer. And, when I was 21, being diagnosed with Hepatitis B. Then, and maybe still, the third most deadly disease in the world.  

That came out of the blue too. No one knew how I got it. The doctor asked me “Are you a drug abuser? Do you inject?” No. “Are you gay?” Again, the answer was a resounding 'no'. Apparently, those are the two most likely causes of Hep B, but at the time they simply seemed outrageous assumptions to me. So, in the end, the doctor suggested that, in the absence of any other obvious reason, that maybe I had possibly contracted the disease by eating some infected food. Either way, I had Hepatitis B and it knocked me for six for nearly a year. But, at the same time, it also gave me a certain willpower; a determination; a discipline. You see, I was told that if I didn’t give up drinking alcohol and change my diet substantially, there was a fair chance that I’d die.

With that information firmly ingrained upon my mind, I promptly gave up alcohol and set about having a balanced, but rather limited, diet. I was washed out for a few months. Not bed ridden, but hardly energetic enough to get out of my pit every morning. There were endless blood tests too, but it was all in the name of beating the illness, so that didn’t both me. I wanted that day to come when I got the all clear, which I did, finally, after what seemed an eternity, but was in fact roughly a year later.

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about this latest bombshell, Diabetes.

As soon as I was diagnosed I started to examine my lifestyle. My overall diet wasn’t bad, mainly because my wife is a stickler when it comes to nutrition. But, I realised that, working from home, the temptation to sometimes snack on stuff like biscuits and boiled sweets, was always there, and I had succumbed.  Indeed, I had developed quite a taste for Fox’s Dark Liquorice & Aniseed sweets, maybe getting through a bag of them over the course of a few days whilst I worked. As a result, my blood sugar level had risen to around 7.5. Not desperately high, but 6 and below is normal, so there was a problem. Also, my total cholesterol level was on the wrong side of good and my blood pressure was a bit high. In short, I was diabetic and technically in more danger of all kinds of stuff like heart attacks, strokes etc. than the average person.

Straight away, the doctor wrote out prescriptions for drugs to control both the diabetes and the blood pressure. But, I never cashed them in. You see I’m a great believer in only taking drugs when it is absolutely essential.  I didn’t want to go down the path of becoming dependant on pills just to get me through each day. Instead, what I did was to get strict with myself.  I stopped snacking on sweet stuff.  In fact, I cut sugar completely out of my diet. Well, almost completely. The odd biscuit or piece of chocolate here and there was OK, but they became the exception rather than the rule.

I carried on with this regime for two years. Then, yesterday, I went for a diabetic check up. And, guess what? I've lost 10 pounds in weight. My blood sugar is now down to 6.5. My total cholesterol level is at the normal level of 4.9 and my blood pressure is way down from what it was, coming in at a very average rate for my age, rather than the high enough for concern level it was at before. And all because I made some simple every day changes to my life.

So what’s the moral of the story? Simply this. Do not accept your fate. If someone tells you there’s something wrong with you, don’t go into denial or just take the prescription drugs. First, try and assess the situation and see if there’s not something you can do yourself that might improve the situation. It may not be possible to rely on self-help. But then again, there are instances where it may be.  I can’t tell you how happy I am that I have managed to combat this latest burden that life has thrown at me. Almost as happy as when I beat one of the most deadly illnesses in the world all those years ago. It took sacrifices, but they weren’t really sacrifices, they were merely sensible precautions to hopefully ensure a healthier future.

More and more these days I find myself thinking that those with a vested interest that push SEO as being the be all and end all and a 'must have' seem to conveniently ignore the fact that rather than putting all their eggs in one basket and relying on search engine results ranking them at the top of their particular pile, many businesses employ other means of driving traffic to their website. And, even if through some kind of technical jiggery pokery a business DOES end up ranked number one, there is still no guarantee that a) they are the best people for whatever task the reader has in mind or product they need or b) that the website the reader lands on is going to tell a story that's going to convince them that this company is indeed the proverbial 'dogs swingers' in its field.

Much better, I believe, to have an advertising, marketing and PR programme in place whereby a business is getting it’s name out there, not just online through various social channels, but by traditional means too like press, billboards, radio, mailers etc., and backing this up by taking the time to invest in quality content on their site that sells whatever their proposition is. Human beings are led by their emotions. Technology may lead them to the water, but it won’t convince them to drink. Or in other words, SEO, to me, isn’t the be all and end all - quality content and persuasive and alluring messages are. However people arrive at your website (and, again, by online search is just one of many means) they need to be first and foremost wooed by the words they see. What’s more, if the content is written well, those words won’t just automatically include many of the key phrases that SEO folk bang on about, they will also flow nicely and entice, which, at the end of the day, is what ultimately will attract people to your business proposition, product or job.