Don’t forget to enter this month’s Business Mums’ Blog Carnival, hosted by Antonia over at Family Friendly Working.
This is a great chance to get new readers for your blog, plus get a backlink and some comments too. Check out my post ‘Introducing the Business Mums’ Blog Carnival‘ for everything you need to know about how the carnival works.
Please email posts to antonia (at) familyfriendlyworking (dot) co.uk by 19th February and the carnival will be posted on the 25th February.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Each month, a different business mum blogger will be hosting the blog carnival, listing the best business mum blog posts that month. If you're a business mum with a blog, you can submit your own favourite post of that month to the carnival.
Why? Well, it creates traffic, links and comments for your blog as well as sharing expertise around the business mum community. 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.
And if you fancy being a host, please send an email to helen (at) business plus baby (dot) com.
*Update* I'm allocating hosts to months on a first-come-first-served basis so apologies if you've offered to host and I've not got back to you yet.
I'm getting a lot of offers from people who want to host and I don't really want to start allocating hosts beyond the end of 2010 just yet! Feel free to offer to be a host anyway as I'll keep a reserve list if I get more hosts than there are months left in the year.
Email a link to your post to the carnival host for that month – see the list below…
Don't forget to read other people's posts and comments when the carnival is published. The more comments our blogs get, the more popular our blogs look to new readers!
January 2010 – www.businessplusbaby.com
Email posts to helen (at) business plus baby (dot) com by the end of Friday 22nd Jan and the carnival will be posted on Mon 25th Jan
February 2010 – www.familyfriendlyworking.co.uk
Email posts to antonia (at) familyfriendlyworking (dot) co.uk by Monday 19th February and the carnival will be posted on the 25th February.
March 2010 – www.mumstheblog.co.uk
Email posts to info (at) mumstheboss (dot) co.uk by 13th March and the carnival will be posted on the 15th March.
April 2010 – www.selfemployedmum.co.uk
Email posts to contact AT selfemployedmum.co.uk by 15th April and the carnival will be posted on 19th April.
May 2010 – www.theefficiencycoach.co.uk
Email posts to heather AT theefficiencycoach.co.uk by 24th May and the carnival will be posted on 30th May.
June 2010 – www.ivyhouseinteriors.co.uk
Email posts to sarah AT ivyhouseinteriors.co.uk by 18 June and the carnival will be published on 22nd June.
July 2010 – www.mumazing.co.uk
(email and dates to follow)
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.
Back in May I started my blog for three reasons, firstly I wanted to do some online networking and this works best if people can read about you and see a photo. Secondly, I tend to think by writing. I had lots of business ideas – writing and sharing them was a good way for me to work out what was right for me. And thirdly, I’d felt very alone when I realised I couldn’t got back to my full time job, so I wanted to share my experience with other new mums who might be feeling the same.
It took me about an hour to set up my free blog using WordPress.com and it did the job brilliantly. I didn’t know where my blog would lead me so I didn’t want to invest too much time and money in the beginning. So why move to businessplusbaby.com? Well, I started to get really promising feedback on my blog and I felt I could turn it into a little business of its own. My url helenlindop.wordpress.com was fine for a hobby, but it didn’t feel professional enough for a business.
There’s another problem with free blogging sites such as WordPress and Blogger – they can edit, remove and publish your blog content elsewhere. I might be a bit of a control freak, but I want complete control over the content I write, because I might want do something else with it, such as to turn it into a book or a course. Also, if the content doesn’t comply with your host’s terms of service they can remove your content or close down your blog. Now I know you’re not likely to intentionally blog about anything so offensive or illegal that your blog is closed down, but if it happened by mistake (say, your account was hacked into), do you want the hassle of convincing your hosting company of your innocence?
Free blogs are great to get you started, but once you’re thinking about earning money from them or have a fair amount of content, seriously consider getting your own domain name. You can buy web space cheaply and downland WordPress for free from WordPress.org, so it needn’t be expensive. And your content is then yours.
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