Business Plus Baby

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]

May 23, 2011May 23, 2011

Save The Children: No Child Born To Die

In January, Save the Children launched its most ambitious campaign to date, No Child Born to Die. Every year 8 million children under five die from illnesses we know how to treat or prevent, such as diarrhoea and pneumonia.

It’s heart-breaking that children are dying because their parents and communities can’t afford the healthcare that we take for granted here in the UK.

Save The Children is focusing on providing vaccinations and healthcare workers. In June there is a meeting in London hosted by David Cameron and attended by other world leaders. Save The Children aims to make as much noise as possible to ensure the funding shortfall for vaccinations (4.7 billion) is met by all the donor countries. You can help with this by signing the Save the Children petition and then passing it onto your friends by May 29th.

This is what you can do:

Sign the Save the Children petition and then pass it onto your friends

and if you are a blogger

Get your child to either draw or craft a self portrait of themselves now or in the future
Write a blog post about it as soon as possible, including info about Save the Children and the petition. We want as many people linked up AND signed up the petition by Sunday 29th May 2011
Tag 8 fellow blogger friends and link back to Maggie from RedTed Art
And don’t forget to follow all the action in Mozambique on Twitter using the hastag #PassItOn.

I was tagged by Becky at Baby Budgeting and I’m tagging these bloggers:

Nicki at Curly and Candid

Sam and Helen at Mums The Blog

Antonia at Family Friendly Working

Catherine at Baby Genie

My children aren’t keen on drawing self-portraits (maybe they’re still a little too young?) But when it comes to creativity, the thing we enjoy doing together the most is baking fairy cakes. Here’s one of the batch we made this morning:

The colour scheme was chosen by my three-year old little girl – can you tell? 🙂

It’s easy to take our fairy cakes for granted when so many mums around the world don’t have a kitchen or the ingredients to make treats like this. What I value the most is that we’re all together as a family.

So easy to forget when you’re dealing with tantrums and toddler-induced chaos, but so true.

Please sign the petition and help keep more families together…Save the Children petition

May 20, 2011May 18, 2011

You CAN be a Nice Girl and Still Earn What You Deserve

Before I get stuck into this article, I just like to remind you that…

You can download my new Earn What You Deserve as a Mumpreneur e-course for the introductory price of £24 if you buy it TODAY.

At midnight tonight, the price goes up to £37.

To give you a flavour if the course, here’s a little taster I’ve taken from it:

You can be a nice girl and still earn what you deserve

Ask a group of women why they are in business and many will tell you it’s because they want to help others.

As women, we’re usually taught to be nice girls, carers and good mothers. It can be a very subtle message and you may not be able to put your finger on where it came from. Or perhaps it wasn’t so subtle and your parents gave you no choice but to be a good girl! Either way, it doesn’t sit well with going out there and putting a price on what you do.

It can be helpful to work out where your need to be a good girl came from. Throughout history it has usually been best for society if women stayed close to home and were the carers. After the Second World War, it became even more important for women to stay out of the workforce because there weren’t enough jobs for the men returning home. Women have always worked, but usually for pocket money to top up the family income rather than as the main earner in the family.

This may seem like ancient history, but beliefs that came from those days are easily passed from parent to child down the generations. If we can identify where our beliefs come from, we can see many aren’t ‘the truth’, they are stories, habits, attitudes that have been passed on from many years. The only reason they are still there is because nobody has questioned them.

The influence these beliefs have on us can be very strong, so it’s tough to get rid of them completely. But you can recognise these thoughts when they arise and make a conscious choice to not be controlled by them.

Can you think of one good reason why you can’t you be a caring person, a good mother and get paid what you are worth? I can’t!

Don’t forget, if you want to grab the e-course at the discount price, you need to get it TODAY.

To find out more, please head over to www.earnwhatyoudeserveasamumpreneur.co.uk

photo credit: Savannah (OpenFocusPhotography)