Category: Blogs and Blogging

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Blogs I like: NikkiPilkington.com and Birds On The Blog

I'm a huge fan of small business blogs, but I guess you knew that already! So here are a couple that I'm just starting to read regularly

NikkiPilkington.com – Internet Marketing

Nikki has been helping businesses connect with their customers using the internet since 1994, so she really does know her stuff. And that's refreshing when it seems like half the people on the internet are claiming to be internet marketing experts. (The other half seem to be social media or SEO experts!)

This blog has helpful (non-technical) advice that you can go out and use straight away – I've already learned about a couple of incredibly useful WordPress plugins plus some great ideas for what to write on my Facebook fan page.

Birds on The Blog – Business women blogging – but not just about business…

One day I was browsing around Nikki's blog when I stumbled across Birds On The Blog. And I'm very glad I did. Birds On The Blog is a written by a group of business women, but only some of the articles are about business. It has a wide range of articles – all useful, engaging or entertaining. I do enjoy a good mummy blog from time to time, but it's great to read articles from women who are blogging on other subjects.

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A blog to watch: LittleMumpreneur

Mum blogs have been around for a few years now, but business mum blogs are still new, exciting and developing fast. My personal favourites being Family Friendly Working, Mum's The Blog and Self Employed Mum.

So I was really pleased to see that Erica, otherwise known as Littlemummy, is branching out into business mum blogging. Littlemummy is one of the best mum blogs in the UK ( in my opinion anyway!) and  Erica sums it up nicely when she says she blogs about 'life, parenting, trying new things'.

In creating new LittleMumpreneur blog, Erica is giving herself more space to talk about blogging, entrepreneurship and eventually subjects like marketing and social media. Erica already has a lot of experience in blogging (I recommend her free course Mum Blogger E- Course), so I'm looking forward to watching LittleMumpreneur grow over the next few months.

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What Makes a Really Good Business Blog Post?

This week I’ve hosted the first Business Mum’s Blog Carnival. It’s been fantastic to make contact with so many enterprising mums and read their blogs. Along the way I’ve been asking myself “What makes a really good business blog post?” so that I can improve my own writing. Here’s what I’ve found:

It’s got to ‘add value’ in some way

It needs to be interesting, useful, funny, express an opinion or whatever. As long as your readers have a reason to come to your blog. It’s got to be for them and not all about you. It might not be possible to do this in every post, but if people have got a reason to go to your blog, you can tell them about your new product once they are there.

A blog that is just a sales pitch might keep the search engines happy with a stream of regular fresh content, but it won’t keep customers on your site or encourage them to come back.

It needs to have an objective

If you’ve got a personal blog, you can write about anything that takes your fancy. It doesn’t matter if your only reader is your mum!

When writing for a business blog, you’re writing with a purpose. Top of the list is to bring visitors to your blog, but what are your other objectives? Do you want to build a relationship with your customers? Demonstrate your expertise? Tell them about new products? Get them to join your mailing list?

It’s got to be easy to read

To quote Matthew Stibbe in ’30 Days To Better Business Writing’  (downloadable from badlanguage.net) “You have no right to your readers’ time. They are already as busy as you are”. Keep it simple, direct and relevant. Avoid grammar, punctuation and spelling errors.

Writing for the web is different from writing for print. People scan rather than read every word, so keep paragraphs and sentences short. Use subheadings and bullet points to break up large chunks of text.

It doesn’t have to be a long post

The post should only be as long as it needs to be to get your points across. We all have short attention spans when reading web pages, clicking off to the next page after just seconds. if you write a long post, what are the chances of readers actually reading right to the bottom anyway?

So there you go – all I need to do now is to follow my own advice! My challenge is keeping my sentences short. (I’ve been trying hard in this post, can you tell?) If you have any more tips, please do drop me a comment.

 

 

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How To Get A Stay-At-Home Job

Many of us start businesses because we can’t find home-based jobs that fit around out families. If this is you, then you’ll want to take a look at hiremyparents.com, which launches this week.

After the launch you’ll have four days to claim your free membership, so keep an eye on hiremyparents.com this week.

If you’ve trained, studied and worked for years to become an expert in your field then why, when kids come along, would you want to sell perfume online; or start cold-calling for an energy supplier. Why can’t you do what you do but from home?

Hiremyparents was created to solve this problem. An association where members can browse for full time, part time, casual, job share, temp/contract, freelance and stay at home jobs, along with home based business and self employment opportunities posted by businesses from around the world.

A job board that gives its members a chance to make money using the skills they attained prior to kids and fulfil the desire to stay at home.

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The magic of Twitter

I’ve been feeling a little uninspired lately and struggling to write posts for this blog. Nothing serious, just a side effect of being at the beck and call of two tiny children and the inevitable sleep deprivation that comes with it.

So when I saw the quote “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still” it struck a chord with me. The quote came from @Homebiz_Mag, otherwise known as Mag Furness and I’d never heard of her until last night. I liked the quote so much that I retweeted it (copied it so that my followers could read it).

It must have struck a chord with @mumstheboss (otherwise known as Sam Pearce and Helen Woodham, who I’ve actually met face-to-face a good few times) because they retweeted the quote too.

Now I know that Sam was suffering from bloggers block yesterday – you guessed it, because she tweeted about it. So this morning  I was delighted to find “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still” had inspired Sam to write this blog post. Brilliant!

Yes, Twitter suffers from a lot of hype and spam, and it’s the best way of wasting time that I know. But what a fantastic way of connecting with people and passing on ideas.

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