Keep Up Media After university I moved to Manchester, a place that still holds a place in my heart. I was working for a company that I really liked and lived in a REALLY cool part of town, the Northern Quarter. Around here were independent businesses, the majority of which were well known beyond their size because they were unique in their own right. Record shops, vintage clothing, small brewery pubs and other quirky places filled the streets here. What I particularly liked here though were the small businesses online. This is the first time I ever considered making a living from trading online, and there were many people I met here who are very successful at doing it. I was lucky enough to meet a guy called James Martin who runs Sick Chirpse. It's a website dedicated to, well kinda strange stories but he's done very well at capturing and retaining his audience and I see his online following multiplying at huge amounts every time I see the site. He contacted me after I put an ad on gumtree advertising myself as a 'successful entrepreneur looking for a technical wizz for the next big venture'. We met up and several pints later came up with a name, Keep Up Media. Within 5 days we had a website, business cards and each had the title Company Director after we registered the business as a company. The best thing about it was that neither of us really knew what we were doing, me certainly less so than James as I had no experience here. I took a weeks holiday off work and we worked on content, our strategy and I began to visit businesses armed with a stack of my first ever business cards. I felt damn good! Sadly our big ideas never really materialised and I closed the company and the site a couple of years back. We had a few customers who took up our social media package - we set up their various accounts;Twitter, Facebook, etc. and designed their strategies online. The best thing about it all was that I personally learnt a lot. We somehow made money on it, but the lessons were more important. We both got a bit overexcited (I wanted to quit my job straight away), we didn't really test the idea out and I in particular was trying to operate in something I knew nothing about. Fair play to James, I'm delighted to see Sick Chirpse doing so well and recommend anyone follows the gang there, the site always cracks me up. Today, I'm at least armed with a couple of years of good sales experience, combined with a far greater understanding of business and online business - I have no excuse now, I just need to get going
