Tag: blogging

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Promote Your Blog: Mumpreneur Monday Challenge

I thought it might be fun (and useful!) to post a Monday Challenge for the next couple of weeks.

If you like it I might make it a regular feature – let me know…

So this week your challenge is to…

Take one extra step to promote your business blog.

Drop me a comment and let me know how it goes (plus you’ll get a link to your blog, which is a little bit of promotion in itself!)

Here are some ways you could promote your blog this week:

  • Join a forum

Pick one that is visited by your target audience, make sure it allows you to put your URL in your signature and read the terms and conditions carefully. Then, staying within the Ts&Cs, help people and show them you’re an expert.

Maybe you’ve been a forum member for a while but have been just lurking? This week, become active in that forum instead.

  • Twitter and Facebook

Make sure every blog post is announced on Twitter and your Facebook page. You can do this automatically with NetworkedBlogs or TwitterFeed. Schedule some tweets with a link to your older but most popular blog posts using Hootsuite or Tweetdeck

  • Boost your content

How can you really add value to your readers? What do they want to know? How can you give that to them? Commit to stepping up the quality of your content this week.

  • Blog Carnivals

Enter a blog carnival (hint: Business Mums Blog Carnival!). Do a Google search on ‘blog carival’ and your key words to see if there are any on the same subject as your blog.

If there are no blog carnivals in your field, why not start one?

  • Guest Post

Draw up a list of blogs with a readership similar to your target audience. Check to see if they have a policy on guest blogging and make sure you follow it. If the  policy is OK with this, email the owner if they would like to feature you as a guest blogger. Tell them a little about your blog and give them a list of possible subjects that you could cover. Offer to feature them as a guest blogger in return.

  • Comments

Set yourself a target of (say) 3 comments a day for a week. Comment on blogs with a similar readership to your own but make sure you add something to the conversation, rather than just saying ‘great post!’

  • You Tube

Record a video, upload it to You Tube and embed it in a blog post. It’s not as scary as it sounds – stand a video camera on a pile of books on your desk, speak your blog post into the camera instead of writing it, download onto PC and upload to You Tube. Your first video won’t be perfect (Yes, you’ll cringe when you see yourself in the video!) but you’ll have taken that daunting first step towards video marketing.

  • Be helpful

Help other bloggers promote their blogs and they will return the favour. Retweet them on Twitter, mention them on your Facebook page, ask if they would like to be guest bloggers on your blog.

  • Not got a blog?

This week, have a think about if  now a good time to start one. Blogs can be great for getting fresh content on your website, telling customers about new products and increasing your search engine rankings. But keeping them up to date takes time and commitment, so you need to weigh up if it’s right for you and your business.

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Creative Commons License photo credit: theinfinite

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Women Wednesday – the Final One

Over the last few weeks I’ve been supporting Creation Collaboration’s Women Wednesday Blog Hop. Today is the tenth and final one.

Creation|Collaboration was set up by eight women, all existing friends, who run small businesses from their homes. They started Women Wednesday blog roll to link up with other women in business, spread the word about Creation|Collaboration and basically just have fun visiting interesting blogs!
Join in each week and you could be the following weeks blog feature.
Heres how you can join in with Collaboration Women Wednesday:
  • Link up your blog name and URL to your Women Wednesday blog post using the McKLinky below (you only need to add on one blog to be seen on all of the McKLinky blog roll’s) Please note that it’s for blogs only and not links to your websites or shops.
  • Follow our Creation|Collaboration blog and the hostesses listed in the first 3 slots.
  • Grab our Women Wednesday button and feature it on your blog or Women Wednesday blog post.
  • Follow and comment saying you’re from Women Wednesday on as many blogs as you likes listed in the McKlinky box.
  • Follow back any new followers from Women Wednesday!

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It’s the Business Mums’ Blog Carnival for June!

Would you like more traffic to your blog, plus more links and more comments? How about a chance to network online around the business mum community? It’s free and will take you just a couple of minutes. (The sparkly bikini is optional…)

Then join this month’s Business Mums’ Blog Carnival!

Here’s how it works. Each month, a different business mum blogger hosts the blog carnival, listing the best  posts that month. If you’re a mumpreneur with a blog, you can submit your own favourite post of that month to the carnival.

We’re looking for posts that add value in some way, so maybe they inspire, inform or make us smile. It’s OK to talk a little about what you do (we’re all in business after all) but a post that’s just a sales pitch isn’t going to be much of a read.

UPDATE: The June carnival is now live at the Ivy House Interiors blog

The hosts for the rest of 2010 are:

July 2010 – www.mumazing.co.uk

Email posts to samthewlis (at) hotmail.com by the end of Friday 16th July and the carnival will be posted on Monday 19th July.

August 2010 – littlesheep-learning.blogspot.com

(email and dates to follow)

September2010 – www.littlestuff.co.uk/blog

(email and dates to follow)

October 2010 – www.sizzlingscience.co.uk

Email posts to info (at) sizzlingscience (dot) co.uk by end of Monday 11th October and the carnival will be posted on Monday 18th October

November 2010 – www.andreadaly.com

(email and dates to follow)

December 2010 – www.redtedart.com

Email posts to maggy (At) familywoodley (dot) com by the end of Friday 24th Dec and Carnival will be posted by Friday 31st Dec.

Photo credit: m8nd1

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Seven Things You Didn’t Know About Me

I‘ve been tagged by Antonia of Family Friendly Working and Sam of Keep Calm Eat Cake (and Mum’s The Boss), so I thought I should get around to doing a post on seven things you didn’t know about me. Sam also sent me the Kreative Blogger award, so I’m quite tickled by that. Thanks Sam!

1. I was a clumsy child. I’d broken both my legs by the time I was three. I was quite proud of this when I was a child, but now I’ve got a daughter who is almost two I’m horrified at the thought of it! I’ve always been a bit clumsy and uncoordinated but this improved when I…

2. …Spent seven years learning tai chi. Then I moved to Bedford three years ago and gave it up. Well, not exactly gave it up. More like never got around to continuing it. It’s a real shame because I must have forgotten most of it by now.

3. When I was 35 I found out I was Irish. Kind of. My maiden name was McClagish and my Grandad was born in Glasgow, so we’d always assumed we had Scottish roots. Then I checked the censuses for my Scottish ancestors and found every one of them had parents or grandparents who were born in Ireland. I don’t think my Dad believes me.

4. My little brother used to go out with Sam Pearce’s (of Mums the Boss fame’s) little sister. But Sam and I didn’t meet until fifteeen years later at the first Mum’s The Boss meeting. Sam worked out who I was when she read my Facebook wall a couple of weeks later and saw my brother had written ‘My big sis stinks’ on it (he was 33 at the time!).

5. I’m a rubbish snowboarder. It’s probably something to do with point number 1. I’ve spent five days learning in France, another five in Bulgaria and I’ve slid on my bottom down the Tamworth Snowdome on many happy occasions but I’m still awful. I tried Cairngorm too, but it was hardest of all there because of the horizontal snow causing a white-out  (I certainly didn’t feel any affinity with Scotland that day).

6. Come to think of it, I don’t have much luck with outdoorsy stuff. When I went white water rafting the raft capsized (it was in Nottingham in November). I perforated an eardrum during my first outdoor scuba dive. I went zorbing and had a panic attack. These days I just stay in and watch Cbeebies instead.

7. I lived in Cardiff for three years, but it was a long time before Torchwood and Gavin and Stacey made it cool. Back in those days, Captain Jack’s office would have been under the Severn Estuary. I don’t think Barry Island has changed much though.

I now have to pass this award on to seven other bloggers. If they want, they can also take up the challenge, which is:

1.Copy the award to your blog
2.Insert a link to the person who nominated me
3.Tell you seven things about myself that I haven’t told you before
4.Nominate seven other bloggers for the award
5.Link to their blogs
6.Tell the nominees about their award

So here are my seven nominees (I hope you’ve not been tagged already!):

Becky at Baby Budgeting

Maggy at The Good Life

Sam at Mumazing

Mummy’s Little Monkey

Andrea Daly, the Accidental Business Mum

Susie at Wise Genius

Toniann at Knot Just Jigs

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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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