From day one I decided to set up www.ksbkids.com, I have spent many hours working on my own in my little office.   Recluse would most likely be an increasing appropriate description.

How did it happen that someone fairly outgoing as me ended up as a recluse…………

Well, my determination to succeed has made me focus on the task in hand 110%. But also when I first started out, I again and again was a little disillusioned with the help and support available. So I assigned myself to the fact that reading books and articles would be the only way to find the solutions to the problems I was facing.

From the moment I decided to enter into the children’s clothes market by selling Scandinavian children’s clothes online, it has very much been a case of buying a few books and just getting on with it. Well, perhaps not a few books……….many in fact. I have books about programming, blogging, SEO and you name it. I alone have seen Amazon through the recession! I read these books, while “watching” my girls at their swimming lessons, while cooking dinner, on planes and you will even find a few in the car just in case the traffic light is really slow.  However, one of the problems with working on your own (apart from going slowly insane, yes I do find myself having long conversations with the checkout girls at Sainsbury) is the lack of input and feeding ideas of another person…………if I am really truthful I have missed that.

Not long ago I came across the national B2B centre at Warwick, – how I wish I had come across these guys much earlier……….. Last week I spent a couple of hours with Mark Bonnett and Gareth Edwards discussing www.ksbkids.com and the tools available to increase my natural rankings in the search engines. We among other things discussed my blog and potential content for posts. I saw that Gareth very kindly in his blog wrote “Much easier with Malene than other clients since she cottoned on very quickly to what we were trying to do.”  Well, not sure I was that quick but it was inspiring to discuss ideas with two other people and for a lack of a better expression it was the kick up the butt I needed.   Within half an hour we had written up many ideas for my posts, facebook entries and Tweets.  We discussed how I sell many black/white stripy tops for French days at primary schools and how many of our plain tops are used for nativity plays!

It was inspiring spending time at the B2B centre.  In my experience working on your own is not always ideal; some times creativity flourish best when working as a team.