Smarta went to the 'Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work For' awards last night. And there were some great businesses up there. But you know what? You could have been one of them.

Winning awards is not the sole preserve of multinationals whose logo-printed tentacles reach every last corner shop from Uruguay to Uzbekistan. There are more prizes out there for the UK's small businesses than ever before. And, frankly, if you're not applying for them, you're being lazy.

You don't need to have dozens of staff and a turnover of millions to get noticed. You just need to be acting smartly with what you've got.

The Smarta 100 is an absolute case in point. We set it up to reward companies for achievement, whatever their resource or size. We've got winners who started a business for less than £20, and one-man-bands who've got no intention of serving any more than a handful of customers by themselves. You should be applying for awards like this. It can take less than an hour to put together an application. And for those 60 minutes, if you win, you get tons of free PR, increased brand awareness, boosted credibility with customers and a phenomenal shot of validation and recognition.

There are plenty of ways to win an award that don't require hand-nosed business strategy and super-fast growth. As last night's ceremony proved, you can win a major award just by making sure your staff are happy. There were winners who'd done simple things like give their staff free fruit, put on regular fun nights, set up a scheme where employees who don't know each other take each other out for lunch. These steps cost very little - many were free. But they can get you a prize that's going to be publicised in the biggest Sunday newspaper in the UK.

Look into every award going for your sector and region. You might think your organic egg stall isn't big enough to win a national business award, but it could win a local business prize or a trade magazine award. Go niche.

When you apply, emphasise all the fantastic qualities a small business can offer that give it a competitive edge over larger competitors: brilliant customer service (include testimonials), a close-knit team (ask your staff to provide quotes and mention staff retention figures), an eye on ethics or nicheness of service.

If you don't apply, you'll never know.

(One word of warning - some business awards can charge ludicrous amount to attend the ceremony. It's still worth applying, as even to be shortlisted is an accolade - you can then just not go to the actual ceremony to save costs. But focus your efforts on free or cheap awards. The Smarta 100 is completely free to enter and to attend, and there are others like it out there. Just persevere with finding them.)

What are you waiting for? Read our feature on how to win small business awards for more advice on the application process and for info on where to find awards, then get applying!

Intuit senior marketing manager Melanie Vala attended yesterday's We Mean Business conference, and couldn't resist passing on a few more of their useful tips and tricks for small businesses.

Here are 11 great tips from Deborah Szebeko, founder of thinkpublic, who started her business based on being inspired by wanting to help improve the patient experience in the NHS:

1. Be adaptable: things will change, be open to this and stay flexible
2. Learn the lingo: listen to others and record what they say, use this to develop your language.
3. Develop your story and brand: each opportunity has a story and their story is their brand, embrace this and include it in all your branding, right down to your logo.
4. Build relationships: don't underestimate your clients as your advocates.
5. Give people respect and responsibility: by giving people opportunity they will be empowered to learn and innovate, and this will help the business to be great.
6. Failure can sometimes be a good thing.
7. Create a positive working culture: this draws the best people to work for you and creates an environment where the team members are accountable to each other.
8. Find a great accountant: they will become the backbone of your business, just because there's money in the bank doesn't necessarily mean you're making money. An accountant can advise you on how to grow the business and reinvest.
9. Find a mentor: just having someone to listen and reassure you is invaluable to keeping you on track.
10. Don't forget to have fun: it's not worth doing if you're not having fun.
11. Trust and follow your instincts: disconnecting with your heart will often disconnect you from why you started your business.

And finally, one great antidote Deborah shared was how she and her team have their own 'Come Dine With Me' competition at lunch time - each team creates a lunch and they vote. The challenge being that they only have a microwave at their office! Talk about a way to develop a fun, innovative and passionate work environment.

Blowing your own trumpet is a good thing in business. I don't mean a full-blown daily concerto of 'I'm so unbelievably brilliant'. I mean a quick, chirpy fanfare when you've earned it. You need to celebrate your achievements with the people who love your business. Tell them about your exciting store opening on Twitter, Facebook your latest product, and when you meet someone for the first time, tell them what's going well rather than droning on about your woes.

In the UK, we're very prone to downplaying our achievements, to shuffling about awkwardly when someone gives us praise, to being overly modest. We murmur and shake our heads and pooh-pooh claims to greatness. This doesn't do anyone any good. It makes you look unconfident and shy and makes your business sound unappealing.

Who's going to partner with a start-up that can only say: "Yeh, it's going okay, I suppose. Could be better, could be worse - you know how it is." Rubbish! Instead, shout about the fact you've just signed a brilliant deal with a major player in your industry, that you've just taken on a new member of staff, that things are really looking quite bright for the future. Blog it, tweet it, tell people the good stuff when they ask how you are and how business is going.

Enthusiasm is infectious and engaging. If you're obviously excited about your business, other people will be too. Contacts will want to hop on the happy bandwagon and help you out with anything they can. New customers will turn to you rather than your sour-faced competitors. Suppliers will warm to you, and smilingly give you that 5% free you ask for. When you believe in what you're doing and aren't afraid to show it, other people will believe in it too.

The Smarta 100 are a case in point. We've been working hard here to pull the list of the UK's smartest businesses together, to build a microsite to showcase our wonderful winners, and to publicise them through our personal and @smartaHQ Twitter accounts, offline media, network of contacts and on Smarta. Result? "Smarta 100" is now trending on Twitter UK. We are pleased as punch. And, of course, we've tweeted about it.

And our winners are busy tweeting about being in the Smarta 100 too, and calling up their local papers to get some coverage out of it, and putting it on their websites. They're going to get plenty of PR out of this, and their customers will see that they're one of the smartest businesses in the UK. That means more brand loyalty and, sooner or later, more sales. You don't get that without putting yourself out there and proudly sharing your achievements with the world.

From sole traders and partnerships to thriving small businesses, making sure you are always in touch with your clients and business associates is essential for you and your team.

From arranging a work meeting or finally tying up that all important business deal, with almost half of all calls in the UK being made from a mobile phone it's vital we can rely on our mobile signal.

To help you ensure your signal is flawless, Vodafone is offering one lucky reader one of its Sure Signal packages, giving you great 3G signal in your home or office, along with a pair of Nokia 2730 pay-as-you-go phones topped up with £10 worth of credit - so there really will be no reason for not being connected.

To enter, just email competitions@smarta.com with your name and contact details and 'Vodafone Sure Signal' in the subject line.

Or follow @smartaHQ on Twitter and post the message 'I just entered the competition to win a Vodafone Sure Signal package. To enter, follow @smartaHQ & RT http://bit.ly/bVJhix'.

For competition terms and conditions, see Smarta's terms and conditions page. Winners will be announced on March 18 - so get your entry in now!

Social media is all well and good for business, but unless it translates into actual, tangible contacts you can leverage when you need to, it's just meaningless chatter - which, let's face it, we get plenty of at the pub on a Friday night.

Which is why we're very impressed with social media conference Like Minds in Exeter, which is working closely with the local council to ensure the conference makes as big an impact as possible on local businesses - which, naturally, means lots of local contacts.

The conference takes place in Exeter on January 26, and its 'exquisite' (their word, not ours) line-up of speakers includes 140 Characters Conference organiser Daren Forsyth, Telegraph.co.uk communities editor Kate Day, and Reputation Online editor Vikki Chowney. They'll be looking at issues such as the change in business towards greater levels of personalisation for customers and the role social media plays in enterprises and charities.

While most of the main conference takes place in the Exeter Conference Centre, there will be lunctime talks in restaurants and cafés, giving you plenty of opportunity to explore the city.

Most of the tickets have sold out, but there are still a few left and at just £25, we suggest you snap one up, pronto.

If you want to grow a really smart, successful business, you've got to learn to kill all negativity: other people's and your own.

Instead, encourage positive thoughts, positive viewpoints, explore positive outcomes. We're satisfied that in education and sport, positivity breeds confidence and confidence is almost always attributed to an upturn in performance.

Yet we wrap so many business processes in negativity. While business owners and entrepreneurs are often viewed as inspirational, ideas people, they're bombarded by internal and external negativity from the minute they utter the very notion of going into business.

The whole start-up process is steeped in negativity. Almost all business advice comes in the form of caution and we seem to focus as much on dissuading people than encouraging them, let alone assisting them.

If your business idea itself isn't questioned, its business model almost certainly will, and then there's the economy and lack of bank lending. Compound this on a personal level with the fear and risk of jacking in a regular income and supporting any dependents and it's a wonder anyone ever takes the plunge.

I'm not naively dismissing the value of cautious business planning, but negativity can be a serious creativity killer you should resist yielding to. Don't talk yourself or be talked out of by anyone else, all your great ideas before you've given them a chance.

Why is it our first instinct to dissect every reason why an idea won't work instead of exhausting why and how it could? The answer is actually quite simple: it's harder and scarier to be positive.

It's easy to be negative. Pointing out the dangers and pitfalls, considering all the downsides, thinking how to minimise risks and considering resource/time implications makes us feel grown-up, sensible, and, dare I say it, business-like.

Persevering with positivity is hard. Much tougher. Going out on a limb, challenging convention and disapproving voices is uncomfortable and often unnerving. It's the rough ride.

It's also how all progress, creativity and innovation are born too, though. We should be braver and banish negativity more often to let positivity and creativity flourish.

Every brilliant business idea in history has been opposed by someone (sometimes everyone) and many only survived thanks to the unwavering belief and positivity of their creators. But how many were lost?

Surround yourself with positive people and dismiss negativity.

I need to make something absolutely clear: I believe effective use of social media will benefit any business. No exceptions. None whatsoever. I don't believe you can show me one business that can't benefit from it. Not one. If you disagree, well sorry, either prove it or admit you're wrong.

I've believed this for some time, but let others' reservations and the fear of being labelled a crazed social media sycophant render me less vocal than I should have been.

I listened to the 'expert' with the marketing diploma who told me 'social media is great for some businesses, but not all'; I listened to the small businesses - my readers - who time and time again told me they weren't interested in or didn't get Twitter; I listened to colleagues who cautioned its more for media or tech types and not our core audience; and I paid too much heed to the stats that showed the vast majority of successful small businesses don't use any social media and weren't searching for it in particularly large numbers.

I didn't actually agree with any of this, don't get me wrong. My conviction never weakened. I just respected people's opinions and, besides, you're supposed to listen to your customers, right? Wrong.

Well wrong in this instance, because they're wrong. All their businesses could benefit from smart use of social media, they just can't see it yet. But they will.

I do realise how arrogant this sounds, but I just no longer believe there's a single valid argument to be made that social media doesn't work for businesses.

How can you not want to benefit from Twitter when it gives you free access to what 78 million people think? That's free access to what your existing and potential customers want, don't want and think about your business, your competitors, your sector. How does it not make total 100% sense to interact, communicate and get to know your customers?

If 350 million people on Facebook share 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts) each week and 80 million Facebook users are engaging with external sites via Facebook Connect - why are you ignoring it?

How is it not smart to put your business in the places where your customers spend their work and leisure time and expect to find you? How can you still avoid video when YouTube is the world's second biggest search engine?

Why aren't you uploading images of your products to Flickr if millions of people search its library of 4 billion images every day? How does it not make sense to have your personal details and the details of your key management and sales staff on LinkedIn as 50 million other people do? If a client expects to find you this way and can't, what does it say about you and your business?

How does it not enhance your business to use all these social media sites and more, heck maybe just even a blog, to show you and your employees are knowledgeable and passionate about your subject and to prove other people think that too?

If you're telling me any of the above doesn't make sense, then seriously, you shouldn't be in business.

If you're still labouring the same old tired excuses - 'I don't have the time'; 'my customers don't want it'; 'I'm worried it could damage my brand'; 'it's hard to measure'; 'what's the ROI?' - you're either not listening, you're wrong or you're soon not going to be in business. Probably all three. There are no excuses, let alone reasons.

So what made me get a grip and stop pandering to the doubters? I listened to Smarta founder Shaa Wasmund (she is the boss, after all) and downloaded the audiobook of Gary Vaynerchuk's (@garyvee) Crush It!  Why now is the time to cash in on your passion.

I'm not going to go into detail about why this is about the best book you can buy to understand how social media works and why it's going to drive everything going forward - I'm just going to tell you to buy it.

One thing, calling it a book 'about social media' is actually a disservice - it's a book about business. About entrepreneurial insight, customer service, product, killer marketing strategy, sales.

If you care about your business, buy it. Seriously, do it.

Because the sceptic in me lives on, I'm sure many of you won't though. Indeed, some of you will simply dismiss this blog post as another load of jumped-up, social media bravado ignoring the 'real needs' of small businesses.

So here's a quick experiment: Name me one type of business that wouldn't benefit from social media or shouldn't use it and I'll give you a reason why they would and should.

If I can't or three people reply disagreeing with me, I'll donate £10 to charity. If it's your business and you try what I suggest then realise I'm right, you donate £100 to charity (that's a pittance to the savings and sales potential I'll have opened your mind to). Deal?

There's no point forking out hundreds on a website or teaching yourself how to knock one up on the cheap if no one can find it. Most people will be looking for a business like yours through Google. It's the most popular website in the world. You need to know how to get your website listed on Google - and as near the front page of results as possible. This is what search engine optimisation (SEO) is - ensuring that search engines like Google find your website and put it near the top of search results.

1.    Research your keywords

First, you need to decide what your keywords are. Keywords are the words people will type into Google to find your site. A lot of these will be common sense. You can then check which ones you expect to work using Google's Keywords tool, which will also suggest other similar phrases and show you which phrases are the most popular.

You want phrases that are highly searched for, but have low competition. This will probably mean choosing ones that are not the most highly searched for but still get a fair amount of traffic. Choose about 10 for each page of your website if each page is selling or advertising different products. If you only offer one service, just focus on the same 10 throughout the website.

2.    Fill in your meta data

Meta data is words describing a web page that aren't visible when you're looking at the site but either Google or people searching on Google can see. It helps Google understand what your website is about. You can access it from your website's CMS or wherever you edit your content from. Ask your hosting company if you're unsure.

Your 'page title' and 'page description' are the bits that appear as results on Google. Make sure your title makes sense and has at least one keyword in it, and your company name. Don't go over 66 characters or it won't disply in full. So if you're a garden tools retailer, for example, try something like: 'Buy garden tools and cheap garden forks: Green Gardens' for your page title. The keywords are in bold. Then in the description underneath list even more keywords. Don't go over 159 characters. You also need to fill in meta tags - just put in five to 10 of your keywords.

3.    Make sure your meta data matches your content

Right, that's the complicated bit over. Now you just need to make sure the text on each page matches up with your keywords and meta data. Make sure any headings have keywords in and aim (very roughly!) for a density of about 2% keywords in text on the page. Make sure everything is in normal sentences, too - Google likes this. An extension of this is aiming to make sure you repeat the title of a page in the main text. So if your heading says 'Buy garden tools for less than £20', make sure you have a paragraph somewhere saying, 'We want to make gardening fun and easy, so here you can buy garden tools for less than £20'.

4.     Make sure your homepage is updated regularly

Google likes knowing that you're putting lots of new information up regularly, so either update offers on your homepage or start a blog that shows new titles on your homepage to keep things fresh.

5.     Get other sites to link to you

The more other websites link to yours, the more Google trusts you, so the higher it will rank you in search results. Ask any relevant websites to link to yours (you'll be surprised at how obliging they are!). The bigger and more-used the website is, the more Google is impressed. So go for quality links, not just quantity. You can track how many sites are linking to you on Alexa.com. Set targets to improve this figure month by month.

Find out more from our advice on SEO.

Given that I'm supposed to be writing a book, I've watched far too much football today. But perhaps it was meant to be, because Sky's two live Premiership matches proved a valuable business lesson. (Honest boss.)

Without wanting to be a football bore, Birmingham's 2-1 victory over neighbours Wolves and Chelsea's 2-0 defeat of London rivals Arsenal came courtesy of winning braces from two of the game's true proven goalscorers, Kevin Phillips and Didier Drogba respectively.

In both games, the losing sides were far from inferior in every respect but the crucial one of putting the ball in the back of the net. They were equal in the battle, in containing possession and created chances - but for all their hard work there was no end product, no goals. And as pundits like to remind us, goals win games.

While goals win games, goalscorers get goals. Kevin Phillips and Didier Drogba are proven goalscorers. Phillips has 221 league goals in 416 starts, Drogba 123 in 227. They have track records for doing what matters most: hitting the target.

In contrast, Wolves' top striker on the pitch has hit 68 goals in his career to date at a far worse ratio, while Arsenal's, with just 28, was a midfielder. In Arsenal's case especially, there was no shortage of talent or skill on display today and, as always from a side so pleasing on the eye, bags of potential. Potential is just that though and it can flatter to deceive.

A couple of thoughts: how many proven goalscorers has your business got? Have you got people with a track record for hitting goals time and time again? Or are you working with people who make the right noises, show potential even, but ultimately don't deliver?

To complete the analogy, it's probably worth acknowledging that natural goalscorers are hard to find and command the highest fees and wages.

Now you'd like to think a top end sales person would cost you slightly less than the £24million Chelsea paid for Didier Drogba, but you should expect to pay top whack for quality individuals - but that's because they're worth it.

Twitter, twitter twitter. It's all Smarta ever hears these days - whatever happened to Facebook? It may not be blogged about as often as it was, but it's still way above Twitter in the popularity stakes - and it's still a useful marketing tool. Here are our top five ways to attract more fans:

1. Spruce up your page
   It may only be February, but the time is ripe for a spring clean - so get your marigolds on. First, make sure you are making the most out of the 'reviews' tab - where customers can give feedback and testimonials on your product or service. If it isn't being used, get rid of it: avoid having any dead space on your fan page. And it may sound obvious, but ensure you have a nice image as your avatar - pixelated or squashed images do not go down with potential fans.

2. Give people a reason to 'fan' you
   This could be competitions, special deals for Facebook fans or even special events for your fans. Whatever it is, it needs to be a real incentive - not just the odd update.

3. Go viral
   Look at some of the examples of popular Facebook fan pages, and seek to emulate them: Pringles (2,876,663 fans), for instance, created a set of low-budget, silly videos and distributed them via its Facebook page. The videos, pitched perfectly at Pringles' young, web-savvy customer base, went viral instantly. If you don't think you have the resources to create a set of viral videos, make like Starbucks (5,675,187 fans) and ensure you share new, useful content on a regular basis. This doesn't have to necessarily link back to your website - Starbucks shares interesting articles and blogs from other sites every couple of days. Just make sure you're adding value.

4. Get snapping
   Photographs are an easy way to engage your customers: post pictures of new products and encourage fans to give feedback in the comment section underneath. By just clicking the 'like' button, your fans will feel they're engaging with the brand. Photos of events are also a great way to get your fan page buzzing: tag people you know and encourage your fans to tag others. Send out invitations to anyone who isn't already a fan.

5. Use the Fan Box
   The Facebook Fan Box is a widget which allows users to become a fan without leaving the site they're on. It's based on a piece of code you paste into your blog, other social networks or your website. You can even paste it into banner ads - so if you're willing to pay, you could be attracting traffic to your fan page from other sites in no time.