Featured – Page 37 – Business Plus Baby

June 3, 2011June 10, 2011

Taking care of your money and leaky buckets

Over the last few weeks I’ve been busy launching my new e-course, Earn What You Deserve as a Mumpreneur. (Maybe you’ve noticed? :))

Earn What You Deserve as a Mumpreneur is all about making more money without having to work any harder. Often, a few changes to the way you think or do business is all it takes to put more money in your wallet.

Then it occurred to me that money is a bit like water in a bucket. There’s no point in pouring in more water if it’s pouring out of a hole at the bottom. So to be more financially secure, you need to not only earn more (well, for most of us!) but you need to manage the money you’ve got. Continue reading “Taking care of your money and leaky buckets”

June 1, 2011

Build a Little Biz: Happy Birthday!

Way back last summer I was reading a thread on the Launch Coach‘s blog when I stumbled across a comment by Karen Gunton. Karen was working on her blog Build a Little Biz, which has pretty much the same aims as Business Plus Baby, except she’s in Adelaide, Australia and I’m in England.

We exchanged emails, then guest posts and then we became unofficial blogging buddies, supporting each other and bouncing ideas around between us. Since them Build a Little Biz has just got better and better. Karen has got a deep understanding of what it takes to grow and market a mumpreneur business and she’s built a team of experts who help her out on specialist subjects. She’s also developed a valuable knowledge of branding, then poured it into her workbook, Build a Brand.

Today is Build a Little Biz’s first birthday and it’s hard to believe it’s just one year since Karen started her blog. That’s because it feels I’ve known Karen a lot longer and because she’s built such a brilliant resource for mums in business in such a short time. So Happy Birthday Karen and Build a Little Biz! I’m looking forward to seeing what the future brings!

To celebrate Build a Little Biz’s birthday, you can get 30%* off the Build a Brand workbook if you buy it before the end of Sunday 5th June (enter the code happybirthday at the checkout to get your discount).

Karen tells me that she’ll be taking Build a Brand off the shelves soon after, so don’t miss this chance to give your brand a boost.

You can read my review of Build a Brand in my article How to brand your mumpreneur business.

*Full price is $67 (Australian dollars) which is about £44, so with a 30% discount the Build a Brand workbook will be about £30.

May 30, 2011June 6, 2011

I started a business with a baby: Claire Rocuzzi of Better Birthing

Tell us a little about your business

Better Birthing offers a wide range of antenatal and postnatal services, from antenatal classes to doula support both postnatal and in labour and breastfeeding advice too. It is important to me that all women receive information that they need, when they need it.

My dream would be to ultimately see the whole “process” of birthing become natural and led by the instincts that we are given rather than how we are told to do it. All in all, the whole childbearing process is a wondrous celebration of all that is woman. My calling is to add to this experience, making it a memorable one by providing emotional support and knowledge to the mother-to-be and partner. Who knows, maybe one day my dream will come true? Part of my dream is to treat each mother as the unique woman that she is, and to walk with her, besides her, on this wonderful journey that she is on.

What was your job before starting your business? Continue reading “I started a business with a baby: Claire Rocuzzi of Better Birthing”

May 26, 2011June 13, 2011

Becoming a writer (and earning money as one)

Many work at home mums would love to earn a living as a freelance writer. But if you think the best way to earn an income as a writer is to spend nine-to-five writing novels, think again…. 🙂

With the book publishing industry going through massive changes due to electronic books, the Kindle, IPads and blogging, it’s much harder to get a book deal than it was just a few years ago. Even if you do, as the author you’ll be expected to do virtually all of your book’s promotion yourself. You’ll only get to keep around 8% of the book’s cover price, so unless you’re JK Rowling and can sell books by the truck-load, that’s a lot of work for not very much money.

True, there’s more to life than money. But if you’re determined to use your writing as a way of keeping a roof over your family’s head, you’ll need a better strategy than getting a novel published.

Now isn’t an easy time to break in to journalism, either. Digital publishing has taken its toll on newspapers and magazines too, meaning that any budding journalist will be competing for work with trained journalists with years of experience. Plus tight deadlines mean that journalism often isn’t flexible enough for mums with young children.

But don’t despair, there’s one place that always needs fresh writing – the internet.

Here are some of the ways you can earn an income writing for the web: Continue reading “Becoming a writer (and earning money as one)”

May 25, 2011July 10, 2011

Don’t Waste Your Money On A Professional Link Building Service

If you own a website, chances are that at some point or another you will be approached by a professional link building service company about their services and while the offer might sound tempting at first, please don’t get too excited about it.I have looked at quite a few of their offers both for my own sites and for those of my clients and I have seen some of the link building work they do. It mostly consists of creating fake profiles for various forums and other interactive sites. And while the forum profiles of active members do gain quite a bit of “link juice” and strength, a simple profile with one or no post on the forum, is often not even indexed by the search engines, making it completely useless.What should you do then, if you obviously need links to get quality traffic and to start ranking for your keywords in the search engines? The good news is that SEO and link building isn’t nearly as complicated as some will have you believe and can easily be done in-house. If you are a solo entrepreneur just starting out, I recommend you do most of it yourself. Once your budget allows, outsource some of the parts and pieces. You can then simply create a overall link building strategy and hand your employees or virtual assistants a list of tasks to complete that will send your site traffic and build quality links.

Part One – The Strategy

Find a keyword you want to rank for and make sure you are using it in the title and once or twice throughout the content of the page on your own site. Pick a homepage or category page as well and have the keyword you want to rank for handy.

Step Two – The Links

Now that you have your two keywords, it’s time to start building links. Use the keywords as the anchor text in those links and whenever you can build a link first to the content page, and then to the category or home page. If you can include only one link, go with the content one.

How do you build those links? Here are a few suggestions:

Social Bookmarking Sites
Blog Commenting and Forum Participation
Yahoo Answers
Writing and Submitting Articles to Various Article Directories
Guest Blogging on related blogs

Rotate through these activities and build as many links as it takes to rank for the keyword of your choice. Since it can take a little while for links to get picked up, I recommend you do 4 or 5 of the activities (mixing and matching as needed) and then wait a few days to see how the links affect ranking. While you are waiting, those quality links will start to bring some traffic to your site directly and will continue to do so day in and day out. Doesn’t that sound simple? Yet it is so effective and you truly don’t need a professional link building service.

Looking for a link building program?

Go get information at http://www.EasyLinkLove.com

This is a guest post by Susanne Myers of www.easylinklove.com and contains affiliate links

photo credit: [nohide]alexbrn[/nohide]