A very warm welcome to all of our new members that have joined - we have had an incredible 6 new members this month alone! In addition to that, November saw our greatest ever visitors to the website.

For the second year running, we set ourselves up in the High St at the Teddington Lights Up event and talked to local people about Teddnet. We were all really buoyed up by the enthusiasm shown to us and the support we seemed to have in Teddington... it may be in part due to the fact that we were giving out free mulled wine.. but in any case it has given us the confidence and energy to develop Teddnet in 2012.

Now that we have so many more members, to make your listing more memorable, we do suggest you include a photo .. all you need to do is email it to info@teddnet.org and we will upload it for you. It need not be of yourself, although in terms of increasing your local visibility that is undoubtedly the best thing to do. Another advantage of having a photo is that you are included in the random member selector on our home page (well worth doing now we're getting so many more hits). Since posting this, Teddnet member Trevor Aston has come forward to say that he will take a profile picture for any members for just £25.. so no excuses! Contact Trevor via his Teddnet profile

We wish all of our members a very happy and restful Christmas and look forward to a prosperous new year.

With very best wishes from
The Teddnet Team

Anyone looking for some office space?

We hope to see lots of you at the Teddington Lights Up event on Thurs 24th Nov.

Excitingly this year we will be having a two-centre evening! We will start off around 4.30pm at our usual place in the High Street outside Curchods serving mulled wine, and then around 6pm we will move to our stall in the Teddington Business Community Indoor Market in the Baptist Church in Church Rd. Please feel free to visit us at either of those (or both!) and if you would like to stand with us and tell people about your business, you are of course very welcome.

Hope you all saw our article in TW11 - lots of locals did, judging by the number of people that have mentioned it, and also by the huge surge in hits to our website in the week after it was published. We hope that this might translate into some extra work for some of our members.

No new members yet this month - we would urge all members to have a think about any independent local workers they highly recommend and encourage them to join up. For many members (particularly trades), it really has turned out to be an effective and incredibly low cost way to increase work enquiries... but for all of us, the more members we have, the more people will use the site and the more we will all increase our local visibility.

Our stall at the Village fair attracted quite a bit of interest and we hope to repeat this at the Radnor Gardens fair on 4th Sept.

In the meantime, we wish all our members a lovely summer and a well-earned break!

We have a table at the Teddington Village Fair in Udney Park Gardens this Sunday. Members of the Teddnet steering group will be there between 1pm and 4pm (weather permitting), so if you're passing, please do come and say hello. We'll be hoping to tempt people over by giving away sweets, and then spreading the word about Teddnet and giving out business cards with the Teddnet website address on.

Teddnet are also sponsoring the Teddington School Sports Awards evening this year (7th July) and we have a half-page advert in the sports year book which is offered to all parents of the school and also circulated to local primary schools. This seemed to us a nice community thing to do and another good advertising opportunity for our members. If members hear of other opportunities, please do tell us - we don't have too much money, and we think carefully about what we support, but are always open to suggestions.

Finally, remember to look out for our full page article in TW11 magazine coming out on 1st July!

Just to let you know that we've taken out an advert for Teddnet for a year on the local website www.our-stuff.org this week. It is a new venture and is going to be used by parents and associates of Teddington School in order to advertise businesses, services and items to buy or sell. Because Teddington School are just about to launch it, its a great time to have an advert, and the site is offering a 20% discount on all adverts placed before 31st May. In addition to the Teddnet advert, individual members might like to take advantage of this great local advertising opportunity too... in fact some already have!

You might be interested to hear that we are getting more visitors than ever before to the Teddnet site .. with 371 unique visitors this month * and an average of 22 hits per day. For those of you with photos on your listing, you are getting on average about 17 views of your photo on the random selector every month .. this is great for your local visibility, particularly for those of you whose photo is of yourself. If anyone would like to add a photo, or change their existing one, please email your photos to info@teddnet.org

* Our final figure for March was 429 .. our highest ever (previous highest was 335!)

Our first steering group meeting of 2011 was held last Thursday. We were joined by Louise Nunn from Mumpreneurs and had a very productive discussion about ways in which the two groups could actively support each other. We will be giving a presentation to her members about Teddnet at her May meeting on Wednesday May 18th and if any Teddnet members would like to come along and join us you will be very welcome (10.30-12 noon at the Teddington Arms, 38 High Street - first Mumpreneurs meeting is free so it won't cost you anything - and by the way, men and non-parents are also welcome!).

Another discussion point was Teddnet logos and promotional materials, including a suggestion from a member that we have Teddnet car stickers which we are now researching and will let you know the outcome. Please remember that you are welcome to promote Teddnet yourself using our logo in your email signatures, on your website, or anywhere you like really! By advertising the Teddnet website, you are advertising for all of us. (You can download the logo following the link on our home page). We will let you know about other Teddnet developments in news items over the next few months.

Welcome to another new member this week:
Trudi Harrison - Cakes by Trudi

And finally, we have been asked to pass on this invitation to you from the Teddington Business Community. Open forum meeting 30th March

Members, members everywhere ... we are absolutely delighted that another seven members have joined since the last news item! Two have been confirmed and we're awaiting their payments, but the following five are already listed:

Lucy Payne - Artist, Painter
Dennis Welch - Teddington Property Services
Michelle Muldoon - ChiRunning instructor
David Nash - The BeechGrove Press
Lynn Binstock - Flute teacher

A very warm welcome to all of you.

The Teddnet steering group will be meeting again on Thursday March 10th, so if you have any burning issues or suggestions that you would like us to discuss, please email them to info@teddnet.org

And finally .. a small plea from the team .. when you get your annual renewal notice, please please please pay straight away if you can as it greatly increases our workload to have to send out repeated reminders ... and detracts from the more important work of developing Teddnet.

We've had a flurry of new members since our stand at the Christmas lights - a very warm welcome to Elizabeth Lewis (Ocius Human Resources Ltd ), Glenn Hall (Inpigmento), Jimmy Wright (Jimmy Wright Painting and Decorating), Mini Giraudeau (Rubilocke jewellery) and Sarah Sinclair (Tasty Morsels Teddington). Please have a look at their listings and see if you might need their services... and do remember that if you know anyone else you can recommend, encourage them to add their details. The more the merrier!

You may or may not have heard about the local business survey that Richmond Council are currently undertaking. This is your chance to give them your views about local business in this area - the deadline to complete it is 28th Feb and you can find the survey here:
https://forms.richmond.gov.uk/AF3/an/default.aspx/RenderForm/?F.Name=gSu1Z2LTzsv

This is a completely true story from one of our Teddnet members.

She got a call from her mobile phone provider this week.. one of these "courtesy calls" in which they review your contract and see if there is anything else they can sell you. They asked if she wanted extra handsets, but as she only works with one other partner, she explained it wasn't appropriate. "But I see you're in Teddnet", said the caller.....

Well, I don't know why or what he did to find that out, and I wouldn't say we're anywhere near the leagues of the likes of Facebook, or even Mumsnet .. but it seems that Teddnet now officially exists ..we have arrived! Lets look on this as a big positive .. the more people hear about us, the better.

I forgot to ask her what she answered .. let's hope she didn't burst the bubble!

A very happy new year to all of our members!

2010 ended on a really positive note for Teddnet with our succcess at the Christmas lights. Our aim for 2011 will be to grow significantly .. as we are sure that the more members we have, the more people will find who they are looking for, and the more they will be likely to use the site again. You get the picture...

If every member were to try and recommend just 2 people throughout the whole of this year, then by this time next year we would have over 200 members. We know there are a lot of freelancers and independents in Teddington who "keep meaning to join"... let's try and persuade them to take the 2 minutes it takes to sign up.

Finally, you may or may not have noticed, but we are now a regular listing in the local community magaizine TW11 under the web resources section.

As always, any questions, feel free to email the Teddnet team at info@teddnet.org

We are feeling really pleased with the positive feedback we've been getting from both Teddnet members and members of the local community. We have had a big increase in hits since the Teddington Lights Up event, and enquiries as to how people can join us. Our unique visitors a month averaged 130 per month earlier this year, and in November reached 335! Using some slightly questionable analysis of the statistics available, we estimate that around 40 completely new visitors looked at the site as a direct result of the lights up event.

But .. we've noticed something quite surprising.....

Out of all the current Teddnet members, a staggering 85% of us were recommended onto Teddnet by members of the original steering group. In fact, only 8 people have been recommended by members outside the steering group. Our original intention was that we would have a network spiralling outward, but we don't think we have conveyed this message strongly enough to the members and perhaps you don't realise you are allowed to recommend people yourself?

There are obvious benefits to all of us in having more members.. not least of which are more money to spend on advertising and technical developments. So, please can all members try and persuade people they feel should be on it to come along and join. Of course, this isn't a catch-all directory of every Tom, Dick and Harry you can find .. we are very keen to maintain our ethos of a personally recommended group of trusted locals, so please be careful that you really do recommend someone before inviting them to join.

Any questions, as always, send them to info@teddnet.org

28th Oct
2010

Look out for
our advert in
the November
issue of TW11 Magazine

Watch out for the 3rd edition of TW11, Teddington's new (and free) community magazine, as it pops through your door this weekend because we have taken out a 1/4 page advert for Teddnet.

We hope that this will encourage people to use the site and also more people to see the benefits of being listed with us. We know that many members have now had extra work as a result of being on Teddnet and for £10 a year, this is a simple and very low cost way of increasing local visibility. The more members we get, as long as we remain true to our ethos of personal recommendations, the more successful Teddnet will be.

And please keep watching this news page for details about the Christmas lights later this month...

Teddnet has now been going for over a year and a half and we have built up a strong network of locally recommended workers. Many people have told us that they have benefitted from being listed on the site or using the site and we wanted to share with you some of the comments we've had.

If you would like to send in your own testimonial about Teddnet, we would be delighted to publish it .. just send an email to info@teddnet.org with your comments, your first name, and whether you are a member or a local resident.

In the meantime, you can read the comments now on our new testimonials page