It’s good to do research, you don’t want to spend time on a project without some investigation but discovering the various ways of earning an income online isn’t going to make you rich – you need to put it into practice.

If you are still searching around for the next Get Rich Quick Scheme then let me draw your attention to a few important factors before you waste any more time and money.

1. Firstly – there are no Get Rich Quick Schemes – it’s a myth that you can sit back and count the pennies whilst doing very little. Building a sustainable online business takes time and dedication. That said, there is scope to earn whilst you sleep further down the line – but it won’t happen over night.
2. Beware of courses or schemes that are there to tempt new online marketers into promises of instant wealth. The only person who will profit from these products are the people who supply them.
3. There are many genuine teachers who are only to willing to help you, but make sure that you check out their reputation before commiting to anything.
4. Don’t jump from one thing to another or you will never be successful. Give each project the time and patience it deserves before moving on to something else.

The quickest way to make money online is to earn while you learn – don’t wait until you have absorbed every ounce of info before you get going. Just do something!

My personal recommendation for anyone new to online marketing is a guy called Chris Farrell, he will walk you step by step through setting up your own website and what products to promote. I’d highly recommend you watch his video for more information – this guy is as genuine as it gets! Now – go make some money!

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There are many ways to reach your audience nowadays, but what makes you think they will want to listen? If you are selling the same products or service as the next guy – why are they going to pick you? We all have the right to speak, but we need to earn the right to be heard.

There are technical aspects that you can implement, link building, keyword research and so on – but once that traffic arrives – what have you got that will make them want to sit up and take notice?

The best way to build a relationship, whereby that customer wants to buy from you and only you – is to build it prior to their arrival on your money site.

In the world of business, it’s not always about undercutting the competition or hiring the best SEO contractors, it’s more about the core of what you and your business stand for. And by this I mean your values, integrity and commitment to the cause.

We all have a fundamental right to speak, sell, do business but that doesn’t mean anyone will want to listen, buy or connect with us. We need to earn that right by the way that we conduct ourselves.

Becoming an Expert in Your Field

if you want your audience to pay attention to you, then you need to become a proven expert in your field and there are many ways that you can do this. If you are a teacher in some shape or form, then you need to get out there and get your voice heard. Create lots of good material and start to build up a reputation as the ‘go-to’ person within your niche. Always give great value and consider the needs of your customer before your own.

This same concept can be used for any business model whether it’s marketing, selling, coaching and so on. You need to give proof that you are the expert before you climb onto the plinth and start preaching.

Here are some ways that you can start to let your expertise shine through;

• Don’t just get a blog – get a blog and add really incredible content. Write for your market and give them a reason to want to read what you have to say
• Start networking within your niche. networking can be a very powerful way to start getting your name recognised within your industry
• Consider talking at a conference or hold a few workshops or demo sessions
• Start creating videos and uploading them to YouTube. Use a video aggregator like Tubemogul to dispense your videos further afield
• Create some tutorials and add them to sites like eHow.com or tutorialized.com – you don’t need to be in the field of training to do this, you could be demonstrating a product
• Write articles about your subject and submit them to the big article marketing directories. There are many to choose from, but start with ezinearticles.com and then find some more that are tailored specifically to your niche – ie. Health – this has lots of article directories aimed specifically at this niche
• Create some screencasts using Powerpoint and upload to places like screencast.com
• Take some of your articles and upload to the pdf sharing site Scribd.com
• Create a weekly podcast and post it to your blog and to iTunes

What you are effectively doing here, is dominating your niche with your expertise. So whatever media your customer prefers, they will always be able to find you, your brillaint products, services, solutions and see the passion and the expertise that you have.

Now that they have found you, don’t disapoint at the last hurdle. Look after them, reinforce the idea that they made the right decision to choose you and always, always be better educated and more informed about your customers needs that the competitor.

Now you can climb onto that plinth and smile down at your audience!

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Whilst all of this can be good in moderation, it’s easy to lose sight of the simple things that made you and your business tick in the first place.

If you have started an online business, then you may have a variety of reasons for doing so – to support your family, to be your own boss, to have more say over your freedom, to escape the 9-5, to have more quality time with your children or to make your millions. Whatever the reason you had to start your business, it would likely have involved an element of passion.

What did you enjoy about your fledgling business when you started out? Sourcing new products, designing new things, chatting with clients, creating new services, interacting with people or learning new skills?

Passion is something that lies at the core of all successful businesses as the entrepreneurial spirit behind it will inevitably love what he or she does. Losing sight of your original goals and the reasons why you started your biz can have a really negative impact on your long term success, if you are no longer engaging in the tasks that you actually enjoy.

So next time when you are planning your day, with a regime of what you have been advised to do – make sure you take a little time to rediscover the passion you had in the first place. Spending time on this will reap rewards for you and it will suddenly all become easier and more pleasurable again.

Photo credit Lusi

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1. Use Social Media to Make New Contacts

When you add Social Media to your arsenal, you have just as much reach as the big players. In fact, Social Media is allowing the little guy to shine as it’s all about the personal touch.

Using video not only drives laser targeted traffic to your business – it enables your customer to view you, your products or services and creates a bond of trust. Most sales offline are based on trust and recommendation, so video is an excellent tool to use as creating that trust without meeting in person is harder to do.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to directly connect with your niche, but the real power lies within the ability for your audience to share your information around. If you haven’t yet created a Twitter account or set up a Fan Page on Facebook – then I would highly recommend you do so.

Make sure that you post things of use and never blatant sales pitches as this really doesn’t work. Make sure that your profile links on social sites like these point to your blog rather than your money site.

2. Get Yourself a Blog in Addition to Your Money Site

A blog is a really, really good idea because when done correctly, you are giving out great info and creating a customer bond without even trying to sell anything.

Blogs are great tools for delivering info, adding special offers, creating an email list and filtering prospective customers through to your main money site. They are also excellent because you can update them regularly and use keyword rich post titles so that your customers can find you easily online.

I’d highly recommend WordPress.org as the blogging platform of choice as it is so versatile. It can be added to your existing website under a sub-domain of yoursite.com/blog, the flexibility of it will allow you to seamlessly blend it into your main site and the features and benefits of all the plugins you can use to enhance your blog are way too long to list.

Check out my post on content ideas for your blog if you need inspiration.

3. Re-Sell To Your Customers

Oh, I know it sounds simple but you would be surprised at just how many business owners who don’t do this. The simple point is; You are selling an excellent product or service, you have very satisfied customers who are obviously interested in whatever you are selling – so why not sell them something else?

You must have your favourite retailers? The ones that you always end up going back to because they sell what you want and are reliable – you know the kind I mean.

How often does an email from one of these retailers pop into your inbox with some special offer? You may not have intended to purchase that day, but when the 2 for 1 offer lands, you can’t resist clicking through….. and spending money! It doesn’t have to be retail, you can apply this to any business model.

You can do this in a number of ways, all of which I advise you do;

• Set up a newsletter for past and prospective clients.
• Send a follow up after sales message – include a special offer
• Cross sell on your site. If they are buying one product, offer a discounted second product or show a list of related items
• Make sure you keep your email newsletter regular so that your customer is comfortable with receiving them and opening them up
• Use your Social Media sites to stay in touch with customers, so that they can always hear about your latest offerings and spread the word
• Say thank you and treat your customers to exceptional customer service. If you do this, they will come back to you without much nudging! They are your biggest asset – so look after them.

4. Use Customer Testimonials and Reviews

As I mentioned before, selling is all about trust, so what better way to let your new customers know that you can be trusted, than letting them see some comments from previous customers.

Depending on what you are selling, you can use user reviews, which are incredibly powerful. Amazon turned the world of online selling with this exact method. It builds customer trust and loyalty.

Testimonials for a service you have provided also go a long way to building a great relationship with future clients. Don’t be afraid to ask for testimonials for the great service you provide. Most folks will be more than happy to send a few words. If you can get them to add a pic and a link to their business, then it really does solidify the deal!

And if they are kind enough to agree to a video testimonial – then all the better. Imagine you have a gardening business that you are promoting online, once you have completed your job – you can take a little Flip Camera (I use one of these) with you to the customer and ask if they’d mind giving you a little video testimonial. If they’re not camera shy and they are delighted with the work you have done, then they’ll happily agree. If not, you can still take some footage of the work you have completed and add a written testimonial from them. There are numerous business models that this works incredibly well for.

5. Drive More Traffic

It goes without saying that the more targeted customers you get to your site, the more sales you will ultimately enjoy. Using the ways we have discussed above, especially Social Media, will certainly afford you plenty more traffic. But don’t forget about the search engines. If someone searches for something you sell on Google – you want to be appearing at the top of that search, or at the very least within the top five sites.

The easiest way to get more traffic is to do some keyword research, find out the terms people are using to find your site or sites like it and make sure you optimise your site correctly.

You can read more about how to do this on previous posts I have written;

Ranking in Google

Do You Really Want to Rank for That?

Constructing Great Keyword Rich Titles

There’s plenty more in the archives, so have a dig about! If you found this post helpful – perhaps you could give it a tweet or hit the ‘like’ button below and share it on Facebook.

And of course, if you have any comments or thoughts or your own tips you’d like to share, then please do leave them below,

Nikki

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If you don’t yet have a blog, you should really think about setting one up. There is a famous saying ‘The eyes are the windows to the soul’ and I like to think of a blog in this way. It’s the eyes to the soul of your business – it’s the welcome mat, the comfy waiting area where people wander about reading the notice board before they decide if they want to enter your ‘office’.

If your blog is your ‘office’ then – happy days!

But again, I can’t stress enough the importance of doing this right.

If you are a business and you are on Twitter, then you really should be directing folks to your blog rather than you place of business. You’ve got to build the relationship first.

There is another excellent saying that is so true of human nature;

“People like to buy stuff but they don’t like to be sold at”

“Think of Twitter in Terms of a Party”

Whereby you have been graciously invited. If your opening line on introductions is ‘This is my company, buy my stuff’ how successful do you think you are going to be?

Answer: Not very!

You will have links to your main money site from your blog, but rather than send someone directly to a sales page, it’s far better to take a softer approach and work on building a good customer/client relationship.

The thing is – even if they don’t buy today, they will remember you for the great information that you provide via your blog, which means they will also be happy to recommend you to others too.

By creating great information on your blog, you will get a natural flow of traffic from people on Twitter who’d like to check out your latest post. They will click through again and again and start to build a relationship. Give them a link to a sales page and they’ll click once and unlikely buy.

Pop an opt-in box on your blog so that people can sign up to your news letter; make sure you give away something of value in return in addition to the newsletter. This could be a report, a discount voucher or something else tailored to your particular niche.

You’ll start to build up a nice list of potential and current customers that will always want to open your emails because they know that you give value first – and of course, your products or service will be excellent too!

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I have created a free PDF for you to download and keep. It shows you how to set up your Twitter account easily in a step by step format.

I’ve also used plenty of screenshots for you, so that you can easily see which stage you are at.

Although it might not be rocket science, there are right and wrong ways to do this and within this PDF I also give you some top tips on how to create a great profile and what links you should be including.

If you already have a Twitter a/c – you may still find the information helpful and you may also know someone who may benefit from the information included.

Just right click on the link below and save a copy to your computer, or go directly to the link to have a look and then save your copy from there.

Best Wishes

Nikki

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Thought I’d share this fantastic video with you – as not only is the information excellent, the video is incredibly powerful. Social media and multi-media are becoming the favourite way to get content ‘out there’ and this kind of video is a truly great way to get your message to as many people as you can.

You can use video for anything, it’s not limited to event promotion. If you sell a service then video testimonials can be incredibly powerful for your potential customers, if you sell products then video demonstrations will substantially increase your sales. Maybe you have a training site, screen capture training tutorials can be invaluable to your students or do you coach? Why not record a few ‘life lessons’ so that your audience can see how great you are and want to sign up with you.

The beauty of online video is that it can go viral and it is easily shared. The information is more powerful than the written word in many cases and the search engines LOVE IT! If you use something like Tubemogul to distribute your videos, you will reach a huge audience. Don’t think for a minute that you can only upload them to your website.

I’ll be digging into video a lot deeper over the coming weeks. We’ll have a look at the simple equipment you can use and how easy it is to get that video recorded and up online – stay tuned!

And if you haven’t yet ordered your tickets for the Brighton Business Mums Conference, then grab them whilst there are still some left. I am one of the speakers in the afternoon and I will be speaking about Social Media – so if you’d like to come and hear that and other great speakers like Annabel Karmel, Antonia Chitty & Mel Macgee – hop over to the site and order yours today!

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Seriously? Are you going to be defeated that easily?

You know, it’s better to see that there is competition in your chosen niche than find your way to the top of a market that isn’t in demand. If there are plenty of other companies vying for the top spot, luring customers in various ways and making a pretty penny into the deal – then this is a ripe market that you can exploit quite easily.

We’ve spoken about SEO Basics before and Why You Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization – so I won’t go over old ground too much, but unless your market is saturated and your competition is in the league of Amazon or Apple (even then you can squeeze in for some juicy, low-hanging fruit) you really have nothing to worry about.

The simple strategy for beating your competition lies within their webpages – they are giving you all the information that you need – you just need to go and have a look.

Simply studying what they have done and doing it better yourself will ensure that your business will rise to the top. Google doesn’t care who is running the site – whoever comes out top in their search, is the one who is best matched for their customers search query.

So, it’s back to basics – see what keywords they are targeting, make sure that you are optimised for them too, make full use of your title tags, meta description, page content and anchor text. These simple things combined with GREAT content will be enough for you to win any battle. Remember that most of your competition is there by fluke – they have optimised unwittingly and have no idea about search optimisation. So you already have the advantage.

Of course, if you’re scared of hard work then forget it, because an ongoing campaign to create great content that is well optimised is a huge time consumer – but if ever you have any niggles or doubts, just look out of your window one morning and watch as Karen dashes out the door with an armful of kids before heading to the office to have ‘the man’ barking orders at her all day….. still seem like too much effort now?

Photo Credit Alessandro Paiver

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Let’s cut through the noise and fluff and look at exactly what you should be doing without spending hours chained to your computer;

STEP 1

I’m sure you have heard of Facebook – more likely you are using it already, but do you have a fan page set up for your business?

A fan page allows you to deliver news, offers and interaction with your potential customers, without any hard sell. There is no limit to the amount of ‘fans’ that can sign up to your page (unlike the facebook groups) and you can keep this separate from your main Facebook account if you so wish. This means that you can send a silly message to your friends wall, without worrying about any of your business contacts seeing it or wondering what you’d poured over your cornflakes that morning.

There are also many additional apps that you can add to your fan page to make it really stand out. Check out Gary Vaynerchuks facebook fanpage for some inspiration. You’ll notice that you land on the ‘Who is Gary’ tab and it looks like a mini site in itself. This is done with the use of an app called Static FBML. Once you have installed this app, make sure you add it as a tab and then you will have a blank page to include your own html code (you might need someone to do this for you if you have no experience with writing code).

If hiring some help is out of the question there are still plenty of apps that you can use to make your Fan Page remain interesting, from Twitter updates to RSS feeds, there are plenty of ways to keep your readers engaged. Check out the apps directory for a full list of what is on offer. And don’t forget to add your Fan Page widget to your blog and website (see mine on the right).

STEP 2

Twitter is the next essential tool to add into your arsenal and contrary to popular belief, the whole world is not on Twitter (yet) which is why it’s important to integrate your Tweets within your Facebook fan page using one of the apps available.

It’s vital to start using Twitter because it allows you to react to both positive and negative feedback quickly and efficiently. It also allows you to make contact with a wide variety of folks in the Twittersphere they may become friends, customers or even joint venture partners.

It’s the perfect place to receive and give advice but above all it allows you to interact with people and show that there is a real person lurking behind the company’s corporate image.

Always use Twitter as a platform to give great value and never a sales pitch. Buy my stuff never goes down well with folks on Twitter so use it to build relationships and with that comes trust which is a platform for long-term business success.

Make it easy for people to follow you on Twitter by adding a ‘Follow me’ button on your website and blog. You can have a more interactive widget on your blog (see right) if you prefer.

Are we friends on Twitter yet?

STEP 3

Writing a blog is essential for any business nowadays. Done correctly it not only serves to bring extra traffic to your site, it enables customers to check out the face behind the name prior to making any sort of commitment.

My personal recommendation for a blog platform is WordPress as it is so incredibly versatile. You can add various plugins to integrate your other social media sites (you can see both my Twitter and Facebook widgets on the right of my blog) and this makes it easier for your audience to stay in touch via their preferred method of Social Media.

You need to add content regularly to stay ahead in the search engines and to keep your readers interested. If you are stuck for ideas on what to blog about, check out my post on Ideas for Small Business Blogs.

It’s essential to write regular posts but these don’t have to be mammoth – a short, useful and interesting post for your niche is often far more attention grabbing than a rambling essay. And don’t forget the power of video, a short little video post can take a few minutes to create but can easily be shared with many readers.

STEP 4

LinkedIn is a great place to have a presence when you have an online business. I would consider LinkedIn to be more ‘Professional Networking’ as it is a means to attract potential employees or be hired yourself.

In addition to the fantastic opportunities available regarding jobs, it also allows you to find potential JV partners within its vast network.

As LinkedIn is an authority site, anyone that Googles your company is likely to stumble across your LinkedIn profile. so again, it’s important that you keep the information current and professional.

There is also an ability to get recommended/receive testimonials on LinkedIn which is a great way to let your potential customers/clients/employees/employers know that you are a reliable, trustworthy and recommended source.

Make use of the various apps available on LinkedIn, you can import your blog and Tweets, add Slideshows and much more. Start your own group and join some of the established ones.

It’s a really good resource for businesses, so make the most of it.

STEP 5

Forums can be a really great place to interact with your audience, meet new business contacts and build your online presence. The danger comes when you join too many and you spend too much time spreading yourself thin between a large volume of them.

The best way to use a forum is to join a few, test the water with a few helpful posts and then just follow your gut feeling. Stick with the ones that you feel will be beneficial to you long-term and aim to post within them regularly.

The point of forums is a little like Twitter but without the restriction of 140 characters. It’s about helping people find answers to problems that you can solve. Giving someone a solution and making their life a little easier is a powerful way to build relationships, so give forums a go but don’t get too wrapped up in the amount of time spent there.

Make sure that you choose a forum that allows you to have a signature because you can direct people towards your blog within it. If you have been helpful/friendly then people are curious to know more so they will click on your signature to find out a little bit more – not because you asked them to but because they chose to!

A good place to find forums suitable for your niche is Big Boards which is a directory of forums. It also allows you to see how active the forums are as joining a dead forum is a waste of your time.

IN CONCLUSION

Social Media is here to stay. It takes the control from large corporations and gives it back to the consumer. It forces out the cowboys and allows the businesses with integrity to shine. It allows a more level playing field because small businesses now have the opportunity to compete with large ones as the consumer can base their decisions on their Social Experience with you.

To get the most from Social Media, you don’t need to be online 24/7 – choose a handful of sites (pref the ones I have mentioned above) and stick to them. You will be amazed at the results you get when you start to implement these simple practices and it needn’t be draining on your time.

• 3-4 Blog Posts each week – 1-2 hrs MAX
• 5-10 Tweets each day – 20 mins
• Integrate your tweets into both your Facebook Fan Page and your LinkedIn a/c
• Integrate your blog into Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Utilize the signature within your forum profiles to guide people towards your blog/site.
• Visit 3-4 forums and quickly scan for posts you can help with, spend no more than 1hr doing this.

So in total, your Social Media campaign can tally up to roughly 3.5hrs each week MAXIMUM, and when compared to the results, is a small amount of time for a long-lasting and valuable return.

What do you think about social media? Is it worth your time?

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YouTube allows you to have your own channel, something I highly recommend that you do. Once you have secured your brand name ie. YouTube.com/yourcompanyname you can then tinker with the colour scheme to match your business – but that’s not where the real power comes in.

Tagging and Keywords

Every video that you upload to YouTube can be tagged with keywords that relate to the products or services that you offer and as Google highly rate YouTube videos, your chances of appearing higher up the search results are massively increased.

Bear in mind that you are not on YouTube to peddle your wares as people don’t head there to be sold to. The best way to use YouTube is as a platform for advice, helpful tips, free services, tutorials, interviews and so on.

So for example, lets assume that you make cupcakes and you want to rank higher in the search engines results pages. You could create a video of you making some cupcakes or adding some amazing frosting – this could be a ‘how to’ style video.

Optimizing for Search

Once your video is uploaded, you can give it a keyword rich title and tags. I also highly recommend some keyword rich text within the description area as this text is also picked up by the search engines.

So if you were targeting ‘cupcakes’ as a keyword, I would suggest a title like;

Cupcakes – How to Make the Best Cupcakes – (getting the keyword both at the beginning and end of the title is always good if it sounds ok).

Your description could read something like;

http://www.mycupcakesite.com – Cupcakes are a real crowd pleaser and gaining in popularity. Cupcakes are often now the choice for weddings and special occasions and in this video I will show you how to bake the best cupcakes.

Darcy McCake

Your Company Name

Make sure that your web address is clearly visible within the video and that you include a link to your site within the description – ideally this should be the first thing you add to the description.

Next you want to add your tags and obviously ‘cupcakes’ would be the first one here, but don’t forget secondary keywords that you can also add. I would go for something like;

cupcakes, “best cupcakes”, “how to make cupcakes”, “cupcake recipe”, “cupcake video”, cupcake frosting” “your company name”

This is a rapidly expanding niche and you could create a real buzz and community around your cupcake videos, especially if you create them regularly.

Getting Customers and Traffic

The more views your video gets, the more it will hang around within the rankings on Google, so make sure you promote your videos on other social platforms like Twitter and Facebook whenever you create a new one.

Also, keep some of the goodies back so that you can send additional traffic back to your website by finishing off each video with a quick ‘For more information and videos on cupcakes, visit our website’.

An excellent way to increase views and to start getting some links in, is to use your video as an answer to another YouTube video within the same niche. Google likes the relevence and will follow the link to your video and other viewers of the video will click through to yours if its within the same field of interest.

There’s lots more advanced things you can do once the video is out there, but if you create videos on a regular basis and follow these few simple steps, you will see an influx in traffic, brand awareness and sales.

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When you are running a small business, time is often an issue and keeping up with the new wave of Social Media Marketing can, at times, become difficult.

A blog is an essential part of your marketing tool kit and you should be looking to post fresh new content 3-5 times a week, especially when your blog is a fledgling. However, coming up with ideas on what to write can be frustrating.

Below you will find some tried, tested and proven blog post ideas that can be adapted for use on your own blog.

Lists

This is a proven winner as many people looking through blog posts automatically home in on a list of hints, tips or ‘how to’s’. It makes it easier to scan through and find what they are looking for. It also gives you, the author and business owner, a chance to show off your knowledge and that you are an authority on your subject.

This method will cover any topic of blog from ecommerce business to  service based businesses. And as you can see from the idea below, you can drill down into this further to create individual posts from this initial concept.

The ‘How To’ or ‘Tutorial

Following on from the list idea above, you can take your list and create a more in-depth post on each item. So for example, let’s assume I have created a list of the Top 5 Plugins for Your WordPress Blog. This list will consist of 5 plugins and a little info on each one, plus a link to be able to download them from the developer.

If I am now stuck for ideas on what to write about, I can take that original post and create 5 more posts that focus more in-depth on each plugin, maybe even include a video tutorial on how to install it, use it and get the most from it. This video can be uploaded to video sharing sites like YouTube so that more traffic can be driven back to my blog.

Advice

Although this still loosely falls into what I have discussed above, I feel its worth singling it out a bit more. Writing a strong blog post that is both interesting and helpful to your readers is a sure-fire way of encouraging them to return and become faithful readers/customers in the future.

If you can save your reader time and give them some actionable advice then create blog posts from this. Whether its some free legal advice, a recipe shortcut or an insider tip on training a puppy – it’s all good advice for your particular niche.

Not everyone who reads your post will become your customer but blogging is about creating awareness of your brand and your expertise within your field and it will increase your authority and sales will naturally follow as time goes on.

The Sneak Peek

Social Media is all about keeping it real, so why not let your customers have a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes of your business.

Maybe you could walk them through a typical day, show them what happens during part of the sales process, talk about new systems you’re considering using or products/services you’re thinking of introducing and ask for feedback. It’s a great way to let your reader know how much you value their input because without them, there would be no business.

Again, you can adapt this for most small businesses; for example, if you make jam and sell various jams and conserves, your customer might be interested to know where you source your produce from. Maybe you could take a hand-held camera with you when you next shop to show your customer that you are using the very best ingredients.

Or maybe you recruit people for party plan, again – consider filming one of your monthly meetings with your managers to give potential new employees the chance to see what goes on behind the scenes if they join your business.

There are so many ways that you can adapt this for your blog and it’s a great way to let your customers know that you are human behind the company logo.

Interviews – Human Interaction

People love to watch people so combining what we have discussed above, you could perhaps interview some of your employees. If you are a one woman business, then interview people within your industry or ask people who’ve purchased from you to give a video testimonial. It’s a great way to keep that social interaction going and again to let your readers know that you are not a faceless company.

Even just talking to the camera yourself can be great way of interacting with your readers and drawing more traffic and attention. If you don’t like the camera then consider a podcast or record and interview using free software like Skype.

The Competition or Giveaway

This is a really good way to drum up interest in your business or product. If you offer a good prize and give people plenty of opportunity to spread the word, then you can create a buzz and gain a lot of new readers.

Make is easy for your readers to spread the word by having Twitter buttons for them to Tweet about your competition and include a Facebook button too.

Finally

Read plenty of other blogs for inspiration. Don’t ever copy or plagiarize someone elses work, but there is plenty of fuel for inspiration by reading what others are doing and keeping up with current trends.

What do you do to keep your blogs fresh with new content? Let us know in the comments below.

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These events are becoming more and more popular and it’s great to see a high profile event like this down in the South of the UK.

Annabel Karmel is the main keynote speaker and, as the founder of a multi-million pound company, she will be sharing her advice for budding or even established mumpreneurs. I’m sure this will be a really inspirational talk with plenty of take-aways that you can implement within your own business.

Throughout the day there will be ample opportunities to network with other business mums, so make sure you bring plenty of business cards with you!

You can see the whole program of events over at the Business Mums Conference website and you may be interested to know that I have been asked to speak at the event, so if you come along – make sure you give me a shout (not a heckle!!)

You will also be able to hear from plenty of inspirational Mumpreneurs throughout the day, including Antonia Chitty, author of The Mumpreneur Guide and one of the event organisers.

So come along, learn something new, share your own knowledge and have a great day out! Did I mention the day wraps up with a champagne networking session?

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Its a concept that many people struggle to get their heads around because there is so much bad stuff happening – we surely don’t ask for that?

I can’t tell you why there are natural disasters that take peoples lives or why there is poverty and famine, but how we react and deal with situations is how we shape our futures.

Did I Ask For My Marriage to End?

It’s a tough one because I love my husband dearly and I genuinely ‘thought’ we had a strong marriage, so to find that I was wrong was an initial shocker.

However, now that the dust has settled and I have been able to think about it all, I can see that this had to happen. And although I didn’t outrightly ask for it as such, it will enable me to accomplish many, many things that I planned to do – but could never understand how I would all the time I was in a marriage.

Let me clarify this a little bit better; I have about three businesses that I am involved in from the ground up, I am often being approached for advice, consultation or client work and I know that these businesses will be highly successful.

This isn’t because I am being arrogant, it’s because I have learned my craft and thoroughly researched my market – but all the time I was in a marriage, I was struggling to ‘do it all’.

As a mum, I wanted to spend time with my children, as a wife I wanted to spend time with my husband and as an entrepreneur I needed and wanted to spend time on my business ventures – something had to give. And whilst I never in a million years would have chosen a marriage break up, I can clearly see why it happened – I asked for it!

The Power of Passion

When you want something so badly and you work hard and you ‘know’ that it is going to happen – then it will. My projections of building a business that will enable other women to maximise their own businesses is crystal clear in my mind. There is no ‘If’ there is only ‘When’.

When you truly know in your heart that it will happen, you dont question the ‘how’ you just keep moving forwards towards your goal and the answers will appear. For me it was my situation at home that had to change. To be able to spend time on everything, I was running myself ragged and getting nowhere fast. Now my quality of life has improved exponentially.

Sound weird?

One minute I am waxing lyrical about loving my husband and the next I’m shrugging my shoulders and saying ‘oh well’? It’s not quite like that – but I am fully focused on the positive aspects that this new stage in my life is going to bring – and I am excited about it.

My days are now structured, I have time to sit down each morning with my children and have breakfast with them before making their packed lunches. When they come home from school, I’m not dashing upstairs to do some work, make calls or answer emails – I am there for them. We sit and eat dinner together each evening and I am available to them for homework and cuddles until I put my youngest to bed at 7.30pm. I then work!

Before, I would be cooking a second dinner for my husband and then we’d spend some time together, which made it late to work and made me tired the next day – this was an ongoing process. We never sat down and had breakfast together during the week as we were up later and there seemed to be so many of us rushing about, ironing shirts, making lunches and cups of tea, trying to get in the bathroom and being stressed with each other. Plus many other niggly nuances that you don’t even need to hear about.

The point is, we were all a bit stressed out, under each others feet and maybe, if we had recognised what was going on, it could have been rectified, but we didn’t so now the circumstances have changed.

The Power of Projection

I know what I am going to achieve and I have been very clearly projecting those thoughts ‘out there’ for many months. When I think about my ‘vision’ it really is very focused on building a successful business to help other women and building a stable future for my children. I ‘assumed’ my husband would be a part of it, but ironically, I never really ‘pictured’ him in it.

So when I THINK about what has happened, I have to be completely honest and say that I probably did ask for this, albeit it was subconciously, but the universe will give you what you ask for. It will move and change your course for you to achieve your dreams and if that means that you have to accept and embrace things that you never imagined would ever happen – then go with it and never lose sight of your goals.

Moving Forward

We are on the brink of welcoming a new little family member to our home and we are very excited. She is called Annie and she is arriving next Tuesday so we’ve been busy buying cute little puppy things and preparing for her to join us. The children are so excited, I think this little bundle is going to be very happy with us in our new harmonious home!

And for the record – I always wanted a dog, but my husband never did. In my future, I always picture a dog…..

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Last Monday it was my birthday, Tuesday I found out that my husband was having an affair and I threw his stuff out. In the space of a week my life has completely turned around and been a roller-coaster of emotions – but I’m surviving it.

I have three children, ages between thirteen and three who are all looking to me for answers and support through this difficult time. And in what is the most upsetting period of my life, I’m having to look after others and give them a shoulder to cry on – that makes you grow up fast.

Amidst the tears and constant questions of ‘Why’ – ‘How Could He’ – ‘What Did I Do Wrong’ there is one underlying factor and that is that I will get through this.

Ten years ago, my dad left my mum – it was horrible and I saw my mum go through almost two years of depression. I had younger siblings who still lived at home and the emotional torment they went through, seeing their mum in such a state has had a surprisingly positive effect on the way I am handling my own situation. I don’t want my own children to see me fall apart.

There is a big difference between me and my mum and that is self-belief. I am an entrepreneur and i have entrepreneurial spirit. Building an online business can break even the toughest of people, so if I can get through that then I can certainly get through this.

In the space of a week (today), I have dragged myself out of bed every day, showered and put on some make up. I have cleaned my house from top to bottom and I have redecorated my bedroom completely. I have revamped my new ‘home office’ and built myself a new desk. I’ve ordered and built some garden furniture and I have secured a business contract that will help me financially in a big way.

Every night I have let it all out and I have cried, spoken to friends and been grateful for their immense support.

But here is the thing, and this is what I want to reiterate to you – I am still thinking positively. I have absolutely no doubt that I will still accomplish everything I have set out to do with my business and my children. I have had to tweak the picture in my head to accomodate circumstances but i have not lost sight of the end goals.

For every negative aspect of my situation, there is always a positive one. I am more determined than ever now to use this to make myself stronger. I just lost my best friend, my soul mate and the one person in my world that I thought would never deceive me or let me down – but I wont let this take away everything that I am working towards.

So, what I want you to take away from this is the following;

• Never give up on your dreams just be open to tweaking them as you go

• Always believe in yourself even when you feel like nobody else does

• Dont close yourself off from support through hard times. Talk to people who care because we all need support and love if we are to make it through

I hope that you never have to go through something like this, or worse, because it’s heart-wrenching. But if you do – then hold on to the faith in yourself that you will get through and be better than you ever imagined you could be.

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Add this to any other friction within your life and you are heading for disasterville!

In an ideal environment, we’d have a nice office at home where we could go and work in peace. We wouldn’t have other commitments through-out the day, we could just…. work!

No school runs, no shopping, no housework, no friends swinging by for coffee (because they know and RESPECT the fact you are working) and no children wanting something every five minutes!

The reality is that many people working from home don’t have a separate room to work in, their office is their kitchen, lounge or bedroom, the housework is mounting up around their ears, the fridge is bare, the washing basket is spilling over and the children do want something every five minutes.

You’re fully aware that when you are on the computer, and all this is going on around you, you should be working – focusing on your business – but how can you be organised online when there is so much disorganisation around you?
That niggling feeling of knowing that a whole load of stuff needs doing leads you into a flurry of stop.start.stop.start.
This kind of behaviour can lead to feelings of despair, helplessness and you may often find that these feeling spill into your non-working life as there are no definitive lines between the two.

When you start to get snippy with your partner and children, it’s time to sit down and re-evaluate how you spend your day.

You may feel like you are not getting the support that you need from your family. Sit them down and explain how you feel. Tell them you are trying your hardest to create an additional stream of income that will greatly benefit you all, but without the help and support you need – it will only ever remain a pipe dream or you’ll drive yourself to the brink in the process.

Older children can help with chores and if you have older and younger – then they can also help a little with childcare. Husbands and partners can come in from work and cook a meal a couple of evenings a week. It’s not beyond their capabilities – and if it is, have something simple that you have pre-prepared or stick to something like soup with a crusty roll.

Try and put your day into blocks rather than merging it all in to one. What I mean by this, is actually visualize the day ahead as sections containing achievable tasks rather than an endless day with a jumble of jobs.

Write lists of the jobs you wish to accomplish, but don’t put an unrealistic amount of things down because it will only end in feelings of failure if you don’t achieve it all.

Keep your lists small and you will experience feelings of achievement which will then lead to motivation and more success.

And always keep in the forefront of your mind that what you are doing is amazing and what you are achieving is something to be incredibly proud of. Remember that you’re not alone, there are many other amazing women out there building businesses and we’re all here to support you through it.

Photo Credit Mattox

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I never knew if it would succeed or if I would ever reach out and actually make a difference.

Secondly, I could never imagine actually making any money from it because it would just be too good to do something I have a great passion for and have someone pay me for it – right?

It’s coming together now and the road I am on has a few less forks in it, the dust has settled and I can see a fairly clear path ahead – but let me tell you that it wasn’t like this for a very long time.

You see, I never really knew if I had it in me to succeed. But then – who does? You never know until you try and it takes a leap of faith to absolutely go for it. I felt like there was a huge pool of success that people were happily swimming in, but I was too afraid to take the plunge and so I settled for splashing about in the puddles around the edge.

Plus there was pressure to learn fast, implement and do something tangible. I needed something to show my family. I felt that if I could say ‘Here, look see – I have a website, I’m not just on here chatting’, they would be more inclined to have some faith in what I was doing.

But what I didn’t realise was this ‘It wasn’t that they didn’t have faith in me, it was that I didn’t have faith in myself’. I needed to prove it to myself!

Now don’t get me wrong – I have had great support, really great. But unless your family or friends have experience in building an online business, it’s near on impossible for them to understand what is involved – so don’t waste too much time trying to explain.
I build my own websites, but first I needed to learn how. I wanted to help others to turn a business dream into a reality, but first I needed to experience it myself – I needed to be credible – and sheesh – that takes time! Time I felt I needed to constantly account for!

My husband often used to jokingly ask ‘Are we rich yet?’. He was under the illusion that for the amount of hours I spend on the computer, we should be dripping in cash. I’d be really interested to know how far he would have come in the same space of time – but we’ll never know because it’s not in his nature to do this.

Plus, I have this awful tendency to come up with a ton of ideas and jump from one great thing to another, I needed to calm down, focus, implement and build one thing at a time. I basically needed to practice what I preach.

But why am I telling you all of this?

Because I have wasted a crap load of time and time is the one thing that you need when you are trying to build a business.

• I’ve wasted time wondering if I could do it

• I’ve wasted time explaining ‘What I am Doing’ to family and friends

• I’ve wasted time learning more than I will ever need

• I’ve wasted time procrastinating and wondering whether I’m good enough

• I’ve wasted time because I didn’t have enough faith in myself

Honestly? I’m hoping that if you are feeling lost or alone you might gain a little hope from this post. Don’t ever give up and don’t ever feel that you are alone because most entrepreneurs go through this whilst they build their businesses. The successful ones are those who realise that they do have what it takes and they push through any barriers or constraints that they might have.

Your business won’t be built overnight – it does take time, but don’t feel pressurised to ‘prove’ anything. Just keep working at it and have faith in yourself and your abilities.

Realistically it can take 4-5 yrs for a fledgling business to turn a good profit, so if you are no where near that stage and you’re doing alright then give yourself a pat on the back.

Accept that family and friends really have no concept of building an online business from scratch so don’t waste time trying to explain it all. And know that you are not alone – even if it really does feel like it at times. There are many people who are in the same position and even more who can help you.

So make the plunge into the pool of success and know that there are other more experienced swimmers out there to keep you afloat if ever you get out of your depth. Don’t continue to paddle in the puddles because toe-dipping won’t bring you the success you deserve!

Photo Credit Erik Charlton

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Dear Aspiring Mumpreneur,

I’m writing this open letter to you to outline some crucial points that I wish someone had laid out for me. I’ll keep it as short as possible because I know your time is precious but I’m sure that if you read this through, you’ll save a ton of time in the long run.

If you are truly serious about becoming a part of the wonderful world of mumpreneurialism, read carefully what I have written below, you’ll gain the information you need to act now and get in the right mindset.

Here are, not necessarily in the best order, my top tips to set you on your way:

• You don’t need a university education to start a business… but you do need passion. If you have enough passion for what you are about to embark on then your chances of success are already sky high.

• Market research ― please do your market research before you steam ahead with any product or idea. Just because you think it’s good – doesn’t mean it is and on the flip side, if someone tells you it sucks ― it doesn’t mean that it does. You need to get out there and research your target market, then and only then can you move forward.

• Do your best to start your business on a shoe string, and then start to invest the revenue you make back in. You won’t turn a ‘profit’ for some time but your business asset will be growing substantially.

• You have an array of skills at your disposal because you are a resourceful woman but it never hurts to brush up or learn new skills as you go. Unless you are hiring professionals you will need to know about marketing, social media, basic technical skills (if you don’t have a web designer), search engines, advertising, networking, blogging… but before you panic, there are resources out there to make this process painless and you don’t need to be an expert, you just need to know the basics and get a little bit of experience and training.

• Find a mentor or a few people that you admire and have a good connection with. If they are knowledgeable and willing to help you, then grab it with both hands and learn from them. It’s far better to connect, follow and utilise a small number of people rather than hopping from site to site trying to find answers.

• Be strict with your time – time management is an art and one that you would do well to master. Some of the key areas to running a successful business are self-discipline, focus and managing your time effectively. Procrastination is an entrepreneur’s worst enemy and very common downfall. My best piece of advice here is to get yourself a simple kitchen timer and work in solid chunks of thirty minutes at a time. Within that period you focus on the task at hand – no email, no calls no Twitter (gasp!) or Facebook ― unless of course networking is your thirty minute task.

• Fail fast – I suggested you do your research and work on some skills but ultimately put something out there, get going, don’t drag your heels waiting for perfection. If your project isn’t going to work then fail fast and move on to the next venture.

• Set yourself up with a blog – preferably a self-hosted WordPress blog. Start talking about your business with the passion that you have for it. Draw your niche market in to your blog with insightful posts about you, your business, your plans and anything else that will interest THEM.

• Network and revel in the strong support of the Mumpreneur community that is already out there. You’ll never be judged, you’ll always receive encouragement, opinions, advice and you will have the opportunity to create partnerships and life-long friends. Remember that these Mumpreneurs know exactly the struggles, hopes, fears and aspirations you have, because they have them too. Whilst it’s really important to get your family and friends behind you, the Mumpreneurs you meet online will understand your business goals and any problems you face far better than any of your offline friends. So don’t be afraid to reach out to them.

• Learn the way of the Web 2.0 world of marketing and build relationships with your customers. Be completely transparent and react quickly to any queries, complaints or mentions of your business. Times have changed and the playing field has been leveled – you have the same social tools to market your business as the big guns, so utilise them well.

• Suppress your whiny inner voice – the one that tells you you’re useless and makes you doubt every move that you make. Have faith in yourself and believe that you will succeed. If you can get yourself into the right mindset then half your battle is won. Never lose sight of your goals, always tackle everything with a passion and drive that feels like fuel running through you ― if it doesn’t feel like that ― something isn’t right!

• Finally – be happy! Make time for yourself and your family because without them it will all be for nothing. You will need to work hard, you’ll likely be up to the early hours of the morning day in, day out to make this really work, but the passion you have for it will see you through, the love for your family will keep you going and the time and patience you allow yourself on this journey of discovery will make you feel proud, enlightened and like you’ve scaled the highest mountain.

So there you have it, the open advice that I wish I could have received when I first started out. I hope that it serves you well and that you go on to be truly successful and accomplish all that you set out to achieve. Maybe you could look me up in the Mumpreneur community and let me know how you’re getting on sometime ― I’d love to hear all about it.

So, from one Mumpreneur to another – good luck, stay focused and live each day to the max!

Photo Credit KRSPO

This post first appeared as a guest post on Start Up Donut

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So how do you protect yourself and what is really happening with these bogus URLs?

If you haven’t yet come across one of these phishing attempts, or you have and haven’t realized, let me explain what is happening;

Via a DM, you will receive a message from someone that you are following, so you will be inclined to trust them. The messages will always contain a link and entice you to click. Some of the previous scams have included messages such as;

“LOL – is This You __________ <—– link”

“Someone wrote something about you on this blog _________ <—— link”

If you click on the url, time will not cease – not will your laptop explode but what happens next could expose your personal details to the pondscum of the scam world

You will be redirected to a page which may look similar to the Twitter login page, you will see the user name and password box and without thinking, you may enter your details

DON’T ENTER YOUR DETAILS

Ideally, don’t even follow the link but whatever you do – don’t enter your details.

What Happens When You Do

Stage 1) If you entered your details – act fast. The fake page is noting everyones login details and stage one is that they can access your Twitter account, this means that not only can they ‘tweet’ from it and send the same message by DM to your followers, they can also see your email address and any other details you have on your account details.

Stage 2) They will Direct Message as many of your followers with the same fake link as they can, not only will you lose followers – fast – you will also have many of them falling victim to the same scam. They are also likely to ‘Tweet’ from your a/c with fake tweets persuading people to ‘find out how you made a ton of cash’ and rubbish like that.

Stage 3) Now that they have your details they have potential access to your email account. Do you use the same password on Twitter that you use elsewhere? Maybe your PayPal account?

Stage 4) Once they are in your email a/c, they have access to alsorts of details, probably including financial details.

Has This Happened to You?

• If it has, change your details/passwords immediately. Especially if you do use the same password to access numerous places. Many people believe that the Twitter phishing scam is purely to access your followers – but it runs deeper than that.

• Make sure that you use a different password for different accounts – yes, it can become tedious but use an encrpyted page on your computer to keep track of them all, or a notebook or something like Roboform (I use this) to securely remember all of your passwords.

• Don’t assume that sending DM messages is a safe way to pass information around – it isn’t

• Always think twice before clicking on any URL sent by direct message unless you are expecting it

• Don’t let the scammers ruin your use or enjoyment of Twitter, remember that they don’t get your details unless you log in to their fake page, so if you happen to click on a dodgy link, don’t panic.

I hope this helps you to understand the importance of using unique passwords and the possible consequences if you don’t. Please pass this article on to anyone who you feel would benefit,

Stay safe online,

Nikki

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I’m starting to wonder if all the emphasis on writing lists for everything we should be doing is missing out a rather crucial point and something that I recently discovered for myself;

What About The Other List?

You know the one, the list of all the things that we shouldn’t be doing! I think that in many ways, this list can be more beneficial to you and will help you actually accomplish more in the long run.

We talked the other day about ‘inner voices‘ and I think it struck a chord with many of us because we all have those nagging doubts and demons telling us various things that we really don’t want to hear, most of it is deflating but within that confusion there is a little voice of reason.

This is the part of our sub-concious that’s trying to keep us on the straight and narrow and normally – it’s worth paying attention to when it tells us we’re ‘wasting valuable time surfing around the Internet, when we should be working’ or ‘You’ll regret that extra glass of wine in the morning’ – yes, the voice of reason is often tangled up with the voice of self doubt, so you need to drag it out and write the ‘List of Things Not to Do’.

Gaining Clarity

By writing down the ‘sensible’ things you know you ‘shouldn’t be doing’ you can determine what needs to be done far more efficiently. Let’s look at an example; I have to accomplish a ton of stuff today – I need to write two articles, build a blog on a sub-domain, spend an hour on Social Media and then there is the family commitments; Housework, ferrying children to and from nursery/school, seeing a friend for an hour & shopping.

The thing that will stop me accomplishing what’s on my list is distractions and procrastination, so rather than start my day writing yet another list of stuff I know I need to do I am going to write the following;

1. I’m not going to spend more than one hour for article writing
2. I won’t work past 10am on building the blog
3. I won’t have an extra coffee with my friend and worry about the consequences later
4. I won’t be distracted at the shops or buy anything that isn’t on my list
5. I won’t leave Twitter or Facebook open in another tab

So, you see what has happened here? I’ve shaken things up a little because it’s easy to get used to the same old programming, and lists, whilst useful, can become like white noise. We tend to think that because we have ‘written it’ on a list – it’s done!

It’s ok to have an extra coffee and spend 3 hours gossiping with your friends or to spend that critical time when the children are at school, wandering aimlessly around the shops being seduced by the new range at Per Una (it’s good, but not as good as it used to be).

It’s fine to spend 3 hours talking mindless rubbish on Twitter – it’s all fine because you wrote a To Do list.

WRONG!

It’s only fine when the list gets done and writing list after list isn’t going to accomplish anything – so shake it up a little. If you use the example above of the ‘Not to Do’ list, you will find that your brain embraces something new. When you friend says “Stay and have another coffee” you are far more likely to say “No thanks, I’ve got a ton of work to get done today”.

When you go shopping, your brain will be telling you to grab what you need and focus on getting back to utilize the time you have because rather than telling yourself what you need to do – you are now telling yourself what is ‘not allowed’.

I have been doing this recently to great effect, so I’d strongly advise you give it a go and see if it works for you too. It all came about when I gave myself a rather stern talking to a few weeks back and I did such a good job of laying down some ground rules, that my brain woke up with a sigh of relief that something fresh was there to get stuck into.

Have you done anything similar? Or can you see the potential of doing something like this? Let me know your thoughts on lists and any advice and tips you may like to share.

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If you are here, reading this blog, then the chances are you are like me – a small business owner aiming for success or a mum – aiming to juggle it all.

Most of us are trying, but until a few months back I had a warped view of how I was going to succeed in this. I’ve thought long and hard about writing this post because what I feel is difficult to put into words and I’m not sure whether it will help you or if it’s just therapy for me – we’ll see.

For some time now, I have been reading about ‘positive attitude’ and the ‘Law of the Universe’ it all made perfect sense to me; visualize what you want – action and reaction – positive and negative and so on.

I guess I wanted it to be real because it gave me a reason to keep chugging and do you know what? It is real! But I really dragged my butt through some hell to figure it all out.

My main mistake in trying to ‘love’ everyone and ‘please’ everyone is that I never really loved myself. In fact I’ve been pretty harsh on myself.

Do You Have a Berating Voice in Your Head?

How often have you tried to accomplish something and stuffed it up? It’s happened to me many times and do you know what I do? I tell myself off – the annoying inner voice pops up and says ‘That was Dumb!‘ or ‘God, you’re an idiot – what did you do that for‘

Here’s another one;

‘They think you’re stupid’

Yeah, that’s a good one. You spend time thinking about what would please others and then tell yourself they think you’re an idiot – and the harsh truth of the matter is that they actually might think you are an idiot.

Think of somebody that you really like? Someone you are drawn to? Even if it’s someone online – there is just something nice about them that makes you warm to them.

It’s called charisma and here is why they have it; They don’t spend their day thinking of ways to please others and then tell themselves they are worthless. They do stuff for others because it comes naturally to them, there is no thought process! If someone doesn’t like what they do, it doesn’t bother them because their lives are already full and they accept that they won’t be liked by everybody – in essence – they don’t have to try so hard that it hurts!

I wish I could pull back the time I spent trying to please other people, hoping they’d like what I was doing or what I stood for. I thought I wanted their approval but now I question whether I wanted their support as it might benefit me further down the line.

Don’t get me wrong, good solid relationships are built on mutual respect and the knowledge that if you help someone out – they may help you out down the line – but you’ve gotta really dig deep and question your motives. We don’t like doing that because any form of digging and self-realisation is often an ugly picture at best.

Get the Voice to Stop Yapping

To move forward in an upwardly progressive manner in anything you are trying to achieve, will mean you squashing that voice of doom. If you don’t, it will hinder you tremendously.

‘You can’t do it’

They won’t like you’

‘That was so dumb’

‘What did you say that for?’

‘it’s never going to work’

Does any of that sound familiar? Encouragement yields success – you wouldn’t say any of those things to a child, or they would become repressed. they would slowly sink inside themselves and recoil from life. They’d never accomplish their dreams, hopes or aspirations.

When you speak to a child you use words of encouragement;

‘You can do it’

‘They’ll think you’re great’

‘That’s brilliant’

‘You are fantastic’

‘Go for it’

So why do we feel ourselves unworthy of the same encouragement?

Society dictates various rules and as adults we all take notice and nod in the right places. If the majority likes something we jump on board and furiously agree – but do we always? Are we frightened to speak up in case ‘they’ think we are fools?

If there is something that I have learnt – it’s to be yourself. If you want to be successful in business, you need to work like a bloody horse or else it won’t happen – but whatever you do – don’t constantly seek the approval of others. You won’t always get it and you will be taking two steps back for every one step forward.

Learn to love you!

You ARE worth it

You ARE great

You’re NOT stupid

You CAN do it

Because once you learn to love yourself and accept that you can’t please everyone and that not everyone is going to like you, the sooner you will be able to move on and get to where you wanna go.

And here’s the thing; the real gem if you like…. once you accept you for you, everyone else will too. You won’t have to try to please people anymore as you will be focused on what matters. You will naturally help people along the way and they will naturally warm to you, you will have charisma!

My life has changed dramatically in so many ways since I truly grasped this concept. I care if someone doesn’t like me, but not enough to change what I am doing – I’ve worked too hard and it’s too important.

I’m impacting on peoples lives and helping them to succeed in ways that I never could imagine – I’m finally realising my goals and achieving them.

I don’t need someone else’s approval to make my life successful, I don’t need a pat on the back or to be told ‘Well Done’ every five minutes, although of course it is lovely when it does happen.

When I think about the time I wasted on wondering why someone didn’t like me because I never received an acknowledgement in a forum or a reply to an email. It’s infuriating to think about now!

The fact is, we’re all fairly insignificant, so we need to love and encourage ourselves because only then can we truly go on to achieve great things.

And YOU WILL.

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Welcome to day 1 of the Twitter course. Directly below you will find the Ethos of Twitter which is a little introduction. You have the option of reading the PDF or listening to the audio – or both, depending on what your preferred method is. If you’d like to download it and listen on your mp3 player, you’ll find the link below.

To read the PDF, just hover your mouse over it – right click and choose ‘save as’ or ‘save a copy’. You will then have your own copy to read and keep.

So, now that you have a little background from either the PDF on the left or the MP3 above – lets move on to The Automated Tweet, so that we can really begin to dig into how we can utilise Twitter for our businesses.

You will find the PDF booklet for the Automated Welcome Tweet (pdf below), this will give you an insight on how to set this up, why you should do it and what you can write.

Sending an automated message to your new followers is a great way to connect and build your community, but get it wrong and it can be detrimental to your business.

This pdf report will explain to you exactly what an automated DM is, why you should be using it and the best way to go about using it – once you have absorbed the info, it will then require you to register and account over at SocialOomph.com – this is all explained in the video below.

So – read the pdf and then watch the very short video below to find out how you can set it all up.

If you have enjoyed this taster of the Twitter eCourse – why not tweet complete the rest of the course. It is a completely FREE course that covers everything you need to know about Twitter, including the following;

• The best free tools to make Twitter easier and less time consuming
• How to find the best people to follow in your market
• How to increase your own followers – ethically
• How to track the content you put out on Twitter
• How to manage more than one a/c
• A ton of resources for inspiration on ‘what’ to tweet about
• How to get traffic, sales and conversion from Twitter
• & some more ‘secret’ bonus stuff

Interested? Well, you should be! it’s a completely FREE course designed to help you get the best from twitter.

FIND OUT MORE….

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Here’s a problem I see over and over – stores who aren’t really sure who they are or what their target market is.

It’s all a bit of a mish mash and it’s also highly off-putting to your customers.

Here’s the thing – we already have an Amazon, so we don’t need another one. Unless you can build it bigger and better (I’m gonna suggest that you can’t) then leave it alone and specialise within a niche.

The main reasons for having a target market to aim for is because you can build a sustainable business with raving fans. You can become the expert within that field and be the ‘go to’ guy that people turn to for specific products or services.

If you try to be a jack of all trades it just won’t work. You’ll never have time to get really, really good at the one thing – you’ll just be average at all of it.

Plus when you consider the social media aspect of it, it’s far easier to build a tribe of fans within one niche than across the board.

Another point to consider is the SEO aspects of building anything other than a niche business. Google will find it very hard to bring you up in the search results if it’s not entirely sure what you are – plus, don’t forget, you’ll only be average at everything so you’ll be crushed in the serps anyway.

So get really, really good at one thing. If you are a store – try and specialise in a certain market and don’t just sell the products SELL the products. If you sell belts then you want to stock the lot – everything from high class leather to gunge belts with skull buckles. You want to be the go to person for a belt, you want to be top of the results pages for belts. You’ll blog about them, tell your fans about the hsitory of belts, the different styles from the different countries, the types of materials – you’ll have passion and you will grow a tribe of followers via Twitter and other social networking sites.

If someone types belt into Google – you’ll come back at the top of the list because everywhere Google looks – you are there – the seller, the expert – the tribe leader!

So don’t try and be Amazon – get good at one thing and then, and only then,should you consider adding a little bit more to your repertoire!

This post is from Tip 23 on the 55 Ecommerce Tips that Rock

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Karen is a well established speaker at networking events and I have seen her some of her talks, via online video, and they are always full of practical and actionable information.

If you head on over to Karens website you’ll find a wealth of information via the products she has created and also her blog – I’d suggest you sign up for her newsletter too as it’s always interesting and full of tips and advice.

I’ve known Karen ‘online’ via Social Networking for over 2 yrs and I’ve seen her inspire many women and home workers.

So – do yourself a favour and make sure that @CanDoCanBe is on your VIP Twitter list – you’ll be glad you did.

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Dear Mr Jobs,

I appreciate that you are a very busy man, what with running Apple an’ all but I feel that you are missing out on a global opportunity and I am happy to bring this to your attention.

The iPhone is great, infact it has enhanced my life in many ways for the better. There is however, one way, that has been rather unexpected and is rapidly going from a ‘positive’ to a ‘negative’ impact.

I’m talking about apps – and specifically apps for toddlers & young children!

To your left, you will note a screen capture of my iPhone and as you can see, I have rather a lot of apps for kids (I have 3).

My youngest is three years old and finds herself quite at home with my toy phone. There have been ‘scenes’ when I actually need to take it from her and use it myself.

So I find myself in a bit of a dilemma, on the one hand I do appreciate the hour of peace to get on with some work and the apps themselves are incredibly educational (hats of to the global app developers on that one) on the other hand

I WANT MY PHONE BACK

….and I’m full-on concerned that it’s demise could be on the cards from overuse or worse!

So – here’s my plan; I’m aware of the iTouch but it’s too expensive for a young child (not as expensive as my bloomin’ phone tho) to have as a toy – so there needs to be a hand-held device for kids.

Yes we have things like the Nintendo ds etc but I am talking about apps. In addition to a ton of fun, my girl has learned a ton of stuff through some of the educational apps – they really are quite amazing, many developed by primary school teachers.

If kids want an iPhone like mummy – let them have one. Cut out all the fancy pants stuff – they don’t need all the gear the iPhone or iTouch comes with – let’s just give them a device that ‘looks’ the same as the parental version and let us (the parents) fill it with apps – nothing else – just apps.

Price it up reasonably and I guarantee you that parents will buy. We will buy so that we can finally get our own phones back, we will buy because we don’t have to be on tenterhooks wondering if we will be fishing our iPhone out of the toilet, we will buy it because the apps are educational (not all – but plenty) so we know we are not ‘bad parents’.

The beauty of the app store is that it is ever updating, there is always something fresh and new and that is what kids want – so I am willing to take a small bonus (call me) for coming up with such a fantabulous idea and I look forward to hearing when this is going into production,

Yours Sincerely

(Slightly worried) iPhone Mum,

Nikki Backshall

PS May I suggest a waterproof exterior?

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So let’s begin with number 1

Constructing SEO and Customer Friendly Titles

There are two good reasons for thinking about your titles, the first is whether anyone will search for it and the second is whether anyone will click on it.

Before you write a title for your content- this could be anything from a blog post to a sales page, you need to think about what your potential customer/reader is going to be searching for.

Lets consider for a moment that you are looking to purchase a belt buckle. If you put the term ‘belt buckle’ into Google, which one of the following results would you click on?

Both of these are front page results so neither are doing a bad job, but lets look a little more deeply. The top one is more customer friendly as it has a more professional feel. When people are in ‘buying’ mode they are more cautious about where they click and this title and meta description is your chance to shine.

You need to ‘sell’ the click – make the customer choose you over the next guy and there are various ways to do this. In the examples above you can see the use of pipes in the first title. This is a great way to showcase some products without looking like you are keyword spamming. Let me show you the difference without the pipes;

You might think it’s a subtle change and you would be right, but it makes a difference to your clickthrough rate as the version that is seperated with pipes looks more professional.

The bottom example isn’t utilizing keywords at all and whilst it’s good to get your brand out there, it won’t get you clickthroughs if no-one has really heard of you.

The Meta Description

The meta description tags are where you get to reinforce the customers decision to choose you. Again, if we look at the examples above, the top one has a far more enticing description, it gives me more confidence about shopping there and they have also managed to get their company name at the beginning of the description.

The main point, once you have established keywords and optimised pages and actually made it to the holy grail of Google front page (or close) is to now get that customer to click. These few words of blue and green are often a customers very first impression of you – heck – Google is giving you a priority ad space, so it makes sense to really utilise the opportunity.

Top Tips

• Keep your title tag to no more than 65 characters or roughly 8 words. If you go over that it will end abruptly like th…
• Keep your meta description to no more than 150 characters – around 25 words
• Use words that inspire confidence like ‘guaranteed’ ‘unique’ ‘best’
• Don’t fill your meta description with keywords, use this space to sell that page
• Consider adding words like ‘telephone orders welcome’ as it gives customers another way to deal with you but again – it builds the trust factor
• Test your results until you get it right
• Try to weave in your keywords but always write titles for the consumers not the search engines

In the next installment, we’ll dig in to the power of good images and as ever – please feel free to leave any comments below.

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*cough* …Apart from me?

But you must have been living in a wardrobe the past week to not notice the *buzz* about Googles new offering – Google Buzz!

I know your heckles are going up as you feel you are expected to get to grips with yet another Web 2.0 site that probably does the same as all the others. You may have only recently caved in to the realm of Twitter (after much arm wrenching and persuasion from the marketplace), so why, oh why has Google gone and brought out something else and what will it do for us?

Well, the inner geek in me has been sucking up the Google Buzz goodness and now, for your ease of consumption – let me explain;

• Just what the heck it is
• Why you should be remotely interested
• And whether it’s going to be the new Twitter….

What the Heck is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is Google answer to the new wave of social media. Unlike Twitter and Facebook who have built up their followship, Google already have millions of users as it’s integrated within the Gmail system.

This means that when you sign into your Gmail a/c (if you have one) you will get a message about Google Buzz and it’s integration. You just need to click to get some more info and set it up. If you don’t yet have a Gmail a/c then I would strongly advise you get one (more on that in a futher down).

Google Buzz is a real time platform – just like Twitter, but there are many differences and no doubt folks will question whether its enough to lure them away from Twitter and Facebook etc And I’m sure there are many loyal FBers and Tweeters who won’t see a need for an additional social network – but – I think you may want to hop on this one!

There are some great features within Buzz, the sharing of different media being the most notable. If you share a link then Buzz will pull back a selection of images for you to choose from as you will see from the image below.

As you can see from the image, you add your blurb and add your link and Buzz pulls back numerous images of which you can choose to enhance your ‘Buzz’ and encourage some more participation. You also get to follow people of interest and they can follow your Buzz stream too.

Check out the official Google Buzz video below for some further insight;

Do You Need To Use It?

Let’s take at a look at some of the facts; Google has hot wired themsleves into an instant hit because they’ve tapped into the vast Gmail userbase. This means that although some people will bitch and moan about it initially (remember the Twitter early days?) they will likely jump on board because Buzz is staring them in the face evertime they check their mail.

What if you don’t have a Gmail a/c?

This is something that I’ve heard a few people mention, they have an email a/c set up, have no intention of using Gmail and so on. Well, to be honest you should really be setting up a profile on Google as it’s a good place for people to be able to find you in the search.

Your Google profile is a great place to aggregate the various sites that you are active on.

You can add links to any sites of your choosing and name them what you want.

So I have the main sites that I am active on including my main business site, my blog, Twitter, Facebook fan Page and Friendfeed.

You will also notice that Buzz is now integrated within this page so you can keep up to date with what is happening.

Your Google profile is a great link to use in places like forum signatures because people can check out a ton of stuff from the one page!

I would encourage you to get a Gmail a/c and if nothing else, get yourself a profile page and start to use Buzz. If you want to, you can easily integrate your other email a/c’s into the one a/c over at Gmail.

If you are concerned about answering email from a Gmail a/c rather that from you@yourbusiness.com then fear not – as you can specify what address your email is sent from.

Gmail is an excellent mail server with some great features, plus there are so many other great applications available for free, once you have a Google a/c  – I really would encourage everyone to have one. But back to Buzz…

Will Buzz be the New Twitter or Facebook?

No! Twitter and Facebook are too established and google isn’t competeing (well…) – it’s more of an added enhancement. As things stand at the moment, you can integrate your Twitter feed into Buzz but there seems to be no plans for a Facebook integration – well, none have been mentioned thus far. This could be something that might deter the ultimate success of Buzz and really an issue that I would hope would be addressed.

There are also a few issues with Tweets being aggregated in chunks, so someone following your ‘Buzz’ might suddenly see a stream of your Tweets and not realize that you tweeted them over a long period of time – the consequence of this is that it has the potential to make you look a bit spammy. But, I believe this is a temporary glitch and will be addressed – in the meantime, I have turned my Twitter stream off.

And although you can aggregate your tweets, you can’t post to Twitter directly from Buzz yet – something else that would need addressing.

Bearing in mind that within two and a half days of buzz being rolled out, Google reported over 9 million posts and comments which averaged out around 160,000 comments an hour – that is HUGE!

So if you sat on the fence over Twitter and only joined in after peer pressure from the masses, why not be a pioneer in Buzz and check it out now. At the end of the day it can’t be ignored – with a user base that far surpasses Twitter, Google Buzz looks like it is here to stay and we all know that the masses go where the cool kids hang – and Google Buzz is set to be cooler than a penguins ______.

Of course, in an ideal world we’d be able to take the best parts from all three giants of Social Networking because as a user we neither have the time nor the inclination to keep flitting from one site to another.

So what are your thoughts on Buzz?

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The awards were launched, with great success, last year and this year the conference is set to be even bigger and better.

This year there are 6 seminars (at the time of writing) covering various aspects of running a business, of these you will be able to choose three. These cover anything from the practicalities of accounting, to the more motivational side of the business.

The tickets are only £20 and include the following:

• Access to the Mumpreneur Conference

• Access to the Mumpreneur Awards

• Access to 3 out of 6 of our Seminars

• Listen to three inspirational Mumpreneurs

• Lunch & Refreshments

• Access to the Exhibition

• Fantastic Networking Opportunities

• Complimentary Invitation to the Mums Mission Launch

There will also be a variety of speakers throughout the day, although they are yet to be announced.

This is a great way for you to network with potential JV partners, gain valuable exposure for your business and be inspired by the many other entrepreneurial women that are building businesses each and every day. You can tap into the wealth of knowledge being shared by the speakers and learn some great tips during the seminars. And who knows? Maybe you’ll even win an award?

The Award Categories

The award categories this year are as follows;

Best Start Up

Best Online Business

Best Business Support

Best Green Business

Best Saleswoman

Best Interactive Business

Most Unique Product

The Inspirational Business Mum

For more information on what each category requirement are, head over to the Mumpreneur Conference Category pages. If you feel your business is worthy of winning an award or you know another mumpreneur who will fit into any of these categories then make sure you get your nominations in by 2nd August 2010

If you are a mum running a small business, then you should check out the Mumpreneur Conference website for all of the details. You can nominate yourself or another mum for one of the awards here.

Don’t forget to check out some of the speakers and organisers of the conference on Twitter as they not only have great information to share, they will also be talkiing about the conference on the lead up. I’d highly advise you add the following folks to your  Twitter rolodex…

Judges

@RachaelElnaugh – Rachel Elnaugh – One of the original dragons in Dragons Den

@PaulaWynne – Paula Wynne – Womens ambassador and founder of Remote Employment

@FinkCards – Lisa Warner – Founder of Fink Cards

@PreciousParcels – Natalie Hickey – Founder of Precious parcels and winner of last years Best Start Up Business

@B72Imaging – Andy Baines – Professional photographer and founder of B72 Imaging

@LauraARigney and @EllaAnnounce – Laura Rigney & Amanda Farren – Event Organisers

Seminar Speakers

@RobertaJerram – Founder of Giant Potential the networking site for mumpreneurs

@AmyAccountant – Founder of Taylor Accountancy

@RebekahHarriman – of R&R VA Services

@Lawyers4Mumpreneurs – Suzanne Dibble of Laweys 4 Mumpreneurs

@glassraven - Sandie Knight from Web Design company glassraven.com

Event Details

Where?

Saturday 18th September 2010
Heart of England Conference Centre
Meriden Road, Fillongley, Near Meriden, Warwickshire, CV7 8DX

When?

Saturday 18th September 2010

Go and book your tickets today – I’ve booked mine and I’d love to meet you there!

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However, that’s for another post – there is something far more worrying about what I have found when checking out some of the blogs that have been brought to my attention.

I’ve been receiving many little notes that read ‘here’s my blog…but er…..it needs updating’.

Of course that’s understandable, we’re busy people but a blog isn’t something that should be relegated to your ‘to do’ list, it should be considered a fundamental part of your business.

Times are a changing folks and we need to change with them. Our blogs need to reflect us as a person, a way for our audience to connect with us before there is even a glimmer of a chance that they may become a potential customer.

If you are writing a blog, you need to be consistent and update it on a regular basis. As I’m sure you are aware, a blog is great for getting your info up and out into the search engines and a more personable way to connect with your customers about your company, products and services.
But if someone comes across your blog and finds that the last time it was updated was three months ago – what are the chances that they will click through to read more about your business?

Will your blog reflect the kind of person they want to deal with? An outdated blog will harm your business more than no blog at all – so take five minutes today to write a few lines on your blog, and then commit to doing it each week.

Let’s sum this up with an quick list of reasons of what could happen if you dont keep your blog updated;

1. You could be missing out on potential JV opportunities
2. Google will stop ranking your blog if you don’t keep it updated with regular content
3. You are under-utilizing one of the best communication channels that you have with potential customers
4. You’ll give out the wrong impression or vibe to your audience – a bit of a ‘hit n miss’ kinda biz
5. It won’t build trust and brand loyalty

Think of your blog as the doorway to your business, if it looks messy or unkept, will anyone want to come through to the next room and make themselves comfy or will they be aprehensive about what lays on the other side?

Stuck on what to write about? Bookmark my blog or sign up to my RSS feed as I will be back with a post choc full of ideas that you can use to generate content for your blog.

In the meantime let me know, in the comments below, if there are any other blog related worries you have and we can address those too

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I like to get to know people a bit, use their services or see examples of what they have acheived before making a recommendation, so with that in mind – I’ve decided to expand my Follow Friday and bring it over to my blog.

This way, I can let you know a little bit more about the person or people I am recommending rather than just a short recommendation on Twitter.

So, to kick off this new series – I’d like to recommend Antonia Chitty as my first follow Friday.

I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Antonia, although hopefully our paths will cross this year, but I have had a lot of contact with her over the past couple of years.

Antonia epitomises and defines ‘Mumpreneur’; she is the author of numerous educational and informative books, including the recent Mumpreneur Guide, runs her own PR Agency, ACPR, and tirelessly promotes products aimed at the child and baby market.

I first connected with Antonia when she joined the Web Mums community, she’d regulalry blog on there about products, events and general advice for work at home mums. Whenever I stumbled across a new community of mums, I’d normally find that Antonia was on there too – I started to think she’d been cloned…..!!!

Right up to the point of LABOUR, this woman was working! I kept expecting her to disapear off for a while to rest…but no, another blog post would appear, a tweet or some information would flow down the Mumpreneur information highway. I imagine that the midwife physically wrestled her laptop away from her so that she could take some time out!

Eventually, after the arrival of baby number 3, she did take some well needed rest (she said it was rest, I think she was still mentally planning the next book) but was back with us and working harder than ever within a matter of weeks.

Amazingly she does all of this and still makes sure that she spends precious time with her family, attending all of the school events and being ‘mum’.

It’s a trait like this, a work ethic of sheer proportions, that really make the difference between someone who is successful and someone who isn’t. Some of us may be mums struggling to build businesses around our families, and no doubt our whining of how tired we are can be heard from afar at times – but ultimately it’s all about how much you want it.

If you want success, a business to be proud of, time with your family, a better future and prospects for your children – you have to work and you have to work damn hard! If it means you work between 9pm and 2am some nights, then that’s how it is – no sugar-coating – just facts!

So – because of her work ethics, her commitment and contribution to the Mumpreneur community and because she is a shining example to us all – antonia is my first choice for Follow Friday.

You can connect with Antonia at the following places:

Twitter

ACPR – PR and Training

The Mumpreneur Guide

Family Friendy Working

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As I’m sure you have already realized, I’m not referring to THE Gary Vaynerchuk, more of a by-product of the man himself 

To be precise, I am actually listening to the iTunes audio book of Crush It, the New York Times bestseller from Gary Vaynerchuk.

I don’t normally go in for audio books, I prefer to have the actual hard copy of the book, but recently I’ve tried a couple and up until this point, it wasn’t going all that well.

I started off by listening to the acclaimed 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, and whilst I know that it is full of excellent information – I am finding the audio version a bit of a sleep aid and have often dozed off whilst listening. At least with the book version, I could read it in my ‘own voice’ and then easily find my place again – not so simple when you’ve dozed off listening to it on your iPhone!

However, I decided to give it another go with Crush It from @garyvee because unlike many audio books, it is actually read by the author himself and in the past I’ve found him really interesting to watch. Plus, since getting my iPhone – I’ve become a little addicted to podcasts and spend far too much time browsing through the iTunes library! It was only a matter of time before I progressed up to a full blown audio book.

If you have never watched any of Garys stuff, then you won’t be aware of the enthusiasm and passion that comes across. I have popped a couple of videos below for you to check out, so that you can experience his style for yourself. These were taken from the Crush It book signing tour.

Gary is another example of someone who knew what he wanted from life, he came from humble beginnings to take life by the balls and follow his dream. It seems that failure was never an option for Gary and I don’t think that is even a word that exists within his vocabualry.

He prioritizes his life with three simple rules and family is by far the top one of those. He attributes much of his success to his parents and that success includes turning his fathers business into a 20 million dollar business within the space of a few years.

Gary invokes the power of social media to reach out to his target audience and he is very specific about the ‘hows’ of doing this. One of the main focus points of using social media in such a way as Gary has, is to make sure that you are never selling to your customer – Gary says, quite intently, that using social media is purely for you to build your brand and that brand is you.

I am only at the tip of the iceberg with this book but it’s been a while since I have found something quite as inspiring as this. The main reason that I like this guy is because he is real and he doesn’t talk crap. He talks from his own experience and tells you to get up off of your ass and work hard. He doesn’t sugar-coat it – he says that you can be full-time workers and you still have plenty of hours between 9pm and 3am to build a business – I love that. Anyone who whines that they are too tired or throws out any other excuse as to why they can’t do this – just doesn’t want it enough!

Will it make a difference to my life? Will I become a success story within my own niche? Well, only time will tell. I certainly have the passion and drive and maybe, with the wise words of someone who is living proof that it can be done, I will be able to reach out and help as many women as I possibly can to get online, start earning or improving their businesses.

I will write another post with my final thoughts once I have finished listening to the audio, but I wanted to share this with you now as I really am finding it incredibly inspiring. If you want to listen to a snippet and try out the audio version then head on over to the iTunes Audio Book library – but I warn you – it’s addictive!!

I’ll leave you with some words from the man himself…..

Part One

Part Two

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Comment Luv

Comment luv is a ‘share the love’ kinda plugin that rewards commenters with a link back to their last blog post.

As the blog author, it can encourage more people to leave a comment on your blog and enables you to discover lots more cool and interesting bloggers out there.

After a commenter types their reply, they get the choice of leaving a link to their blog, digg or Twitter stream. If a user chooses ‘blog’ then the plugin pulls back the title of their last post and add it to the reply.

A great plugin which really encourages participation and community spirit amongst your fellow bloggers.

Sexy Bookmarks

Sexy Bookmarks is a neat way to encourage your readers to bookmark your posts for better visibilty and traffic. I won’t add pictures of the actual layout as you can see it for yourself at the bottom of this post.

If you hover your mouse over the icons they pop up – which is a nice feature. This plugin did run into some issues with load time due to the high volume of icons that were added to it (over 80) but with the developer, Josh Jones, now switching to PHP5 and condensing the files in smushit – the plugin is now running seamlessly again.

So – encourage your readers to give your post a rise in popularity by installing the fantastic Sexy Bookmarks plugin – that really is very sexy.

WPTouch

If you are not yet optimized to recieve iPhone traffic then you are missing out on a huge potential of readers. Although the iPhome will navigate the Internet to a fashion, this plugin makes the whole process seamless when they arrive on your blog – this includes pesky stuff like loading time.

With the smartphone market taking over in terms of users vs PC users, it would be crazy not to make sure your site is fully compatable with these devices.

Being the owner of an iPhone myself, I can vouch for the huge difference it makes when loading sites – I’d highly recommend you get this today!

The WPTouch is compatable with the iPhone^TM, iPod touch^TM, Android^TM, or BlackBerry Storm^TM touch mobile device.

Part 3 will be coming soon and if any of you have iPhones – look out for a series on iPhone apps coming soon!

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Staying positive and focused about your business is the first step. Imagine you had to run a marathon and you are halfway through – you’re be knackered and feeling a bit crap (unless of course, you’re Paula Radcliffe).

At this point in the race, you start to question yourself and doubt whether you’ll ever cross the finish line.

“Why the hell did I start this?”

“I must be bloody mad”

“I’m not strong enough to do this”

“I think I should just turn back or give up”

It’s just the same as your working life, especially when you are building a business from scratch. Sometimes it seems like it would be easier to just give up – but once you get past that halfway mark, something happens…

You are closer to the end than the beginning and a sense of camraderie starts to build amongst your fellow ‘athletes’. They encourage you and support you to complete the race and the finish line starts to loom into view.

The feeling you get at you cross the line, compared to the feeling you’d be stuck with if you gave up, is incredible and you’ll start to flip the coin and have more cash than month!

To achieve anything in life you have to have commitment to that goal or that purpose. If you know that you are going to be a success, then focus on that thought and don’t ever waver. Self-belief is a powerful thing.

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Of course I want to take this a lot further and show you how to get great results – but let’s talk about five things that are the most important to the success of your online business.

So – Number 1 – you must optimize your title tags. Yes, we have spoken about this already and yes we will be speaking about it again, because this is step one in your on site SEO campaign. The first part of telling the search engines exactly what the page is about.

And remember that this is every page that you want to rank for. So we’re not talking about your terms and conditions page, your about us page or returns and so on – we’re talking about the pages that make you MONEY.

Number 2

You need to repeat your main keyword within the page description. So, let me clarify in case there is any confusion here.

First let’s talk about an e-stores home page – the rules are slightly different for what I will be teaching you with blogs.

Your home page – your www.mystore.com page will have the title tags optimised for 2 – 3 main key-phrases that you want to rank for overall – the most. These will be the key-phrases that you have determined will bring the most targeted traffic for what you are selling and the most bang for your buck. They will most likely be keywords that you will initially not expect to rank for, but that’s cool because you are going to be concentrating on those long-tail keywords initially.

Your meta description tag will then also have a repeat of your number one key-phrase in it – again this is what you want to rank for the absolute most for your overall site.

You will then have those key-phrases repeated and optimized again within the content of your HOME PAGE.

Ok – so that the stores home page – so what about the category and product pages?

Your category pages are really important and you will be choosing the ‘theme’ of these and then targeting the long-tail keywords for them. So perhaps your site sells baby clothing but you have a category for baby shoes or maybe more specifically – baby shoes for girls and another for baby shoes for boys, you’ll be establishing the best long-tail keywords for these and then optimizing them in the same way as the home page – title tags, description, header tags, content and anchor text.

Finally you’ll be at your product pages and these again will be optimised via title tags (containing the product title and keywords) – you’ll need to be descriptive and specific and you must do your research for this as a small tweak can make a huge difference.
Going back to selling baby shoes, let’s imagine that you have some little baby shoes for a girl made from pink leather and they have bits n bobs stuck on for decoration. Now you may have them in your store with the title tag ‘Pink Shoes for Baby Girl’ and sell one or two pairs a week, that’s great but a quick bit of research and you might find that that phrase ‘Pink Shoes for Baby Girl’ only gets searched for 15 times a week in Google. So even though you may be ranking highly for it – no one is looking for it.

Then you notice that the search term ‘Baby Girls Leather Shoes with Embellishments’ is having a high search rate of 100+ searches a week and as that is the product you are selling – you change the title tags, the description and start to optimize it differently – and now you are enjoying sales of 30+ a week.

Now, I’ve pulled those figures out of the air to give you an example of how keyword research can make a dramatic difference but the truth is, whilst those figures are made up, I’ve only used small numbers to portray how highly effective this is, the truth of the matter is; a store who recognises the value of this and makes the changes correctly can enjoy an increase of thousands over their product range.

Your description will likely be pulled from the first sentence of your product description depending on what shopping cart your use. IF and this is a BIG if – you have the ability within your shop platform to change these titles and descriptions – then do it.

If you have the ability within your shop to write one title for Google and one for your on-site customer – then do it as you can use more keywords to drive traffic to that product but less within the titles of your store – so it doesn’t look offputting to a customer.

If you don’t understand that – don’t worry, we’ll be looking at that in more detail.

Now not all of you will have that software available, so use your noodles. You have to tailor to both the search engines and the customer. Your description, if pulled manually by the search engine will likely be the first sentence of your product description – so make it good.

Number 3

Make use of your header tags as Google uses them to reinforce what your page is about. So a title of a page will be in <H1> tags but you can also use <H2> <H3> and so on until about <H6> although there’s really no need for you to take it that low. It’s best to use it in order of importance too, so as you write your description for your products or your text for your category page, think about breaking it up a little with some header tags and add in 1 or 2 of your researched keyphrases in a way that flows for your customer and doesn’t look odd.

Ok – so number 4 then – links and anchor text. This is actually number 4 and number 5 – but let me break this down a bit.

First of all we want to use descriptive anchor text to pass from one place in our site to another – (now apologies again if I am boring you and repeating myself – but this has to become a complete no-brainer for you!)

So, back to that anchor text then – you want to let Google know exactly what the page you are linking to is all about – and Google reads anchor text. If you send Google to a page about lemons with the anchor text lemon – it’s worth more to the rank of the page of lemons than if you just said – click here.

Now every link to the page of lemons is a good thing – but tell Google its lemons, and it finds lemons and now we are starting to get a lemon page that is ranking.

I mean its logical, loads of people – links – have told Google there’s a great page about lemons – Google has noted all of these links and thought – d’you what, that page is about lemons and it’s pretty damn popular. It’s getting a load of links!

Now, this can be done internally as well as externally. A link from a page in your site with a page rank of 1 is worth more than a link coming in with a page rank of 0.

But this does move us neatly on to number 5 – which is links part two! A page will rank higher in the search engines based on the amount of links it has pointing to it! FACT!

Now – Google is pretty good at finding spammy sites and getting rid of them but they do enjoy an initial rise because of the sheer volume of links that point to them – orchestrated of course by the spammer or website owner! Once some nice person from Google HQ has looked at the page and decided it’s not actually worthy of the high ranking it seems to have – it starts to vanish!

But – if it’s a nice product page that clearly sells what it is optimized for – it’s left to enjoy its high ranking status.

So the upshot of it is – you need back-links – and you need a lot! We can do our on site and off site SEO but without the power of 5 – as just discussed – we’re fighting a losing battle.

So – we will be drilling down into all of this. I will show you the way – and if you implement it, you’ll soon be heading up the Google highway to riches!

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What Kind of Person Are You?

I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve read many, many times (that in itself is a bit of a clue here) about people who ‘take action’ and people who just – well…..don’t!

I think it extends way beyond what we wallow in here on the Internet – we buy marketing products and courses to improve our chances of making money online, we buy books that will tell us quick ways to achieve our goals and then about 10% of us actually read those books or do that course. Of that original 100%, only about 2% ever take any action even if they finish the book or the course. But in our every day lives away from the Internet – we do the same crap!

How many of you have exercise dvds? Or have joined a gym and paid for the membership each month without actually going?

The action takers among us have every right to a selection of a few exercise dvds – they use them and a bit of variety in your fitness regime is a good thing. The rest of us who buy the latest dvd becuase this will be the one that ‘makes the difference’ should put our hands up and confess to being a limp ‘Non Action Taker’.

But at that very moment, when we see the new, shiny dvd being adveretised with the ‘before and after’ pictures, we feel in control and powerful – it’s a heady feeling because most of the time we just bitch and moan about how unfair everything is.

So we seize that moment to really soak up as much of that feel-good factor that we possibly can. Now that we’ve ordered that dvd we are going to be fit in five months time just like the woman in the dvd – that 28lbs is sooo gone!

Or is it?

Maybe the 28lb will be 30lb in 5 months time because we are too damn lazy to actually take any action to get the results. Even taking the cellophane off the dvd is too much effort – far better to pop it in the cabinet with the 7 other fitness dvds because there is a much better one coming out and this has had AMAZING results.

What about that gym membership?

We don’t go because some pointless shit has happened that we really need to attend to RIGHT NOW but we will obviously go next week (lmfao), we can’t possibly cancel that membership or we might…..get fat…..ter? The fact that the money comes out each month makes us feel a whole lot better because we are doing SOMETHING about our problem – the only exercise being conducted here is a completely pointless one.

If I asked you if you were a liar you might be quite offended, you don’t lie – it’s wrong….cruel….mean and you’re a nice person.

So why in the hell do we lie to ourselves? Why do we keep trying to convince ourselves that paying the monthly membership fee to the gym will make us thinner, fitter and an all round better person…..even if we don’t go?

Because we hate failure almost as much as we want to succeed

- but unless we put a stop to this continuous wheel of deceit – our chances of success are little to none.

All of these things are like a security blanket to the serial ‘non action taker’. By constantly researching the next best thing, the non action taker tries to convince him or herself that they are indeed taking some sort of action. The fact that it’s a time wasting, often money sucking kind of action is irrelevant.

How many times have you read about ‘taking action’? If it’s more than a handful of times then you probably also have a membership subscription of some kind that you don’t make use of. Either that or a shelf full of ‘self help’ books that haven’t helped…..cos you haven’t read them! Or else you read them and…..did nothing?

Joining in the throng of ‘yeah, I’m gonna take action this year’ and then moving on to the next blog to beat your chest again about taking action….isn’t taking action.

Reading about or watching the success of others isn’t going to make you successful.

Me telling you to take action and be one of the 2% isn’t going to make you successful either.

You putting the dvd on, heading out to the gym, working through the course and actually doing something proactive to get you to the next step is going to make you successful.

Below is a video with snippets from Will Smith (posted over at YouTube) and he is a perfect example of someone who takes action. The whole video is excellent and I’d encourage you to watch it through to the end, but there is one part of it that really stands out for me.
Will says that as a boy, his father tore down a wall and asked Will (12) and his brother (9) to rebuild it. They said it was impossible and it took them a year and a half – but they did it. Their father then said to them ‘Don’t ever tell me that there is something that you can’t do’.
Will then goes on to say that you don’t set out to build a wall, you lay the first brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid and then you do the same every single day and soon you have a wall.

So in 2010 are you going to start construction? Or will you order the ‘How to Build a Wall’ manual and leave it on the shelf?

If you are looking to be one of the 2% you might be interested in what we are offering over at Web Mums – start off with this competition – the prize is worth clicking through for, better hurry though cos it’s closing pretty soon. And take some damn action by leaving a comment – tell me your thoughts and plans then come back in a week and let me know that you made a start…..

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Quite possibly one of my favourite subjects and I’ve been known to while away many an hour (full blown day) just testing out new plugins for the awesome WordPress platform.

I’d like to share some of my ‘Must Haves‘ here, there are of course many, many more lists out there from other folks who also have a plugin addiction, but here’s my take on the wonderful world of the WordPress plugin.

I am going to have to break this up into more than one post or I fear that you will be coaxed in to a frenzy of plugin downloading that even the most well-adjusted plugin addict would find hard to cope with…

But before I unleash the list, I just wanna say a

REALLY BIG

thank you to the developers who bring us the awesomeness of the plugin, as we all rave about WordPress and what a mind-blowingly great platform it is (cos it is) but I feel that the developers behind the plugins often get over-looked and without these guys, WordPress wouldn’t even be a fraction as good as it is. So, to all of you WP Plugin developers THANK YOU – you rock our world!

So In No Particular Order…..

Mingle by Blair Williams

I really love this plugin by Blair Williams as it enables you to have a social aspect to your blog or site without the headache of using BuddyPress. I have this plugin enabled over on the Web Mums site and if you pop over, you’ll see that you have the community members in the right hand column.

I am using this in conjunction with the Wishlist plugin (see below) so I have a private members site with the ability for members to interact socially.

The plugin enables you to have your own profile page and to comment on others. There is also a main activity stream where you can join in the one long conversation by adding your own comments to the throng – think FaceBook and Twitter  and you’ll get the idea.

The WordPress community really needed something like this so thank you Blair for such a fine addition to the directory. You can also see the Mingle plugin in action on Blairs site WPMingle.com. If you join the community there, you’ll get a feel for what the plugin can do before you decide to install it yourself.

Mingle is currently FREE but don’t forget donations to the developers.

WishList Members Plugin

Membership Software

I have already written a review of the WishList Plugin but I had to mention it within my ‘list’ as this is such an incredible piece of software.

There are other platforms that you can build a membership site with but WordPress is my tool of choice, unfortunately up until now it’s been near on impossible to build a solid membership site without being a coder yourself.

This plugin has changed all of that because it’s not only simple it’s incredibly powerful. There are more and more folks arriving on the Internet each day and social sites are proving very popular. If you can combine it with a method of teaching or some other niche you happen to be in, then this can be a great way to earn an online income.

This WishList plugin enables you to use various shopping carts, including PayPal, you can drip-feed content if you want it delivered weekly or monthy – or even daily – you choose. You can have different levels of membership, different price structures and so on. The possibilities with this plugin are pretty much only limited by your imagination and I highly recommend it.

The plugin isn’t free but is a drop in the ocean compared to the value you are receiving. It’s currently (on writing this) being sold for $97 for a single site license.

HeadSpace 2

In a word ‘AMAZING’ this is no ordinary plugin, it’s an absolute box of tricks so kudos to developer John Godley over at Urban Giraffe. When I first tested this plugin I was looking for an plugin to aid my SEO efforts. I have always used the All in One SEO plugin which is another great plugin, but this does the same and so, so very much more.

Depending on your needs, this plugin may be way more than what you want, but I strongly urge you to check out some of it’s functionality and it kicks ass!

In addition to multitude of SEO tasks it covers, it also does some really cool stuff like allowing you to use a different theme on specified posts/pages. It also allows you to enable/disable plugins for various pages/posts. It allows you to display a message to visitors who are arriving at your site for the first time (covered in other plugins but included as part of this).

There really is just so much in this plugin that it’s already one of my ‘can’t live withouts’ it’s just incredible. Rather than me tell you (badly) what this plugin can do – go and check it out yourself, that link will take to you to a full in-depth explanation of what this plugin does. It takes a little bit of getting used to as it’s quite involved but guys – it’s so worth it, so read the documentation and start to take advantage of the incredible HeadSpace 2 plugin.

.
So that’s part one for you. I’d really encourage you to go and check these plugins out as they will really enhance your WordPress experience. I have lots more to add but I didn’t want the post to go on too long but there are about 20 plugins I want to take a look at with you and perhaps we’ll dig a little deeper and I’ll show you behind the scenes how to set some of them up so that you can get the most from them.

Make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed to get the updates and please leave a comment below and let me know what your favourite plugin is, maybe we can add it to the list.

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But when you are just starting out online it’s difficult to get testimonials as people want to see them before they trust you enough to buy – but of course without buyers, there are no testimonials, so what can you do?

Before we go on, let’s address the big ‘no-no’ and that is of course ‘The Fake Testimonial’ – makes me kinda shudder just writing it…
Please don’t ever be tempted to do this, it’s utterly wrong on so many levels and your professionalism will be called into question immediately. Rather than creating a positive vibe, you will be achieving nothing but negativity and mis-trust – but I’m sure that you would never consider something so loathsome, so how does a genuine person like you get some credibility?

The easiest and fastest method is to give away some of your stuff, so if it’s a service you offer you may have to approach some potential clients and ask if you could do some work for free. If they are happy with the results you can then ask them if they would like to put something in writing. If it’s a physical product, then you can do the same (depending on what you are selling of course).

Make sure that you have open lines of communication with any customers or clients because if someone does purchase a product or service from you it’s much easier if you can contact them and do a follow up. Try and survey some of your customers, ask them if there is anything that you could be doing better or if there is something in particular that stands out to them as excellent.

There are numerous places to ask for feedback depending on whether it’s a service or physical product that you are selling. A follow up email is great because you can word it so that you are asking the customer if they were happy with the experience they had shopping with you, you could perhaps offer an incentive of a discount if they would spend 2 minutes filling out a very short survey form. At the end of the form ask them if they mind if any of their responses are used as an on site testimonial.

You could also ask for opinions on products or services via your blog – just make sure that you have the authors permission to use their words on your site before re-publishing them.

But by far the best thing you can do is create brilliant stuff and present it in a professional way. If you do that then folks will buy without a testimonial and then will be only too happy to give one after. To have have someone email you and thank you for your brilliant service without you even asking is a great indication that you are on the way to great things!

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Here are a few ways that you can consider tweaking your customer service to encourage long-term loyalty from your buyers.

Feel free to add your own thoughts and ideas in the comment box below this post.

1. Treat Your Best Customers With Respect

I was in a restaurant recently with my family and I witnessed a scene that is becoming typical of frazzled business owners.

Whilst I was queuing to get some more drinks, a lady in front of me asked if she could have a word with the manager. When the manager returned the woman very calmly explained that the service she had received from her waiter had been terrible and that he was unhygienic and rude. She also went on to say that she had been coming to the restaurant for many years and this was the first time she had ever complained but she felt she ought to bring it to the managers attention.

Fair Enough?

I though it sounded fairly reasonable for this lady to discreetly air her concerns but the reply from the manager was quite remarkable. He tore strips of this woman and the whole thing escalated, he started off by suggesting that she was wrong because he personally hired all of the staff and they were highly trained individuals, he took the whole thing as some sort of personal attack and ended up having half of the restaurant hearing this verbal onslaught – a big, big mistake.

The woman quite rightly ended the conversation by saying that she would never return to eat there again and that she would make sure none of her friends would either. The manager told her that he didn’t want people like her in his restaurant and the whole situation seemed to nose-dive into a toe-curling display of playground mentality.

The whole situation could have been avoided if the manager had just taken responsibility. What he should have done is apologised to the woman for the bad customer service she received and either discounted her meal or given it to her for free, the latter being the choice I would have made here. Not only did he lose one of his loyal customers he lost the respect and possible custom of every other diner within earshot. He also lost the friends of the lady that dined there and any further people that she would have recommended the restaurant to.

Had he given her an apology and a free meal, that woman would have been raving about the restaurant to her friends who in turn would have told their friends – and so on. The knock on effect from something like this can be incredibly powerful.

So, rule number 1 is take responsibility for your mistakes whether you personally made them or not. By saying ‘sorry’ you are diffusing a situation – even if you feel the customer is wrong. Think twice before letting them know that you are too damn important to need their business!

For the price of that one meal the manager could have increased his business, instead he has probably lost quite a bit.

2.  Make Everything Dead Simple

We all want and need simplicity – we’re busy and we don’t have time to jump through hoops. If you want me to be your loyal customer, don’t make me try – I can’t be arsed! Hand me the loyalty card on a plate and I’ll come back but don’t make me beg for it.

Last week I decided to buy some wrapping paper and be a bit more organised for Christmas this year. I tend to buy most stuff online these days as I find it easier and cheaper, so I went along to a very well known site that sells some great Christmassy products.

I must have spent about 30 minutes on there choosing various rolls of paper, tags and ribbon. I then had a mooch about and found some gorgeous Christmas table wear (black with sparkly lime bits – I fancied a theme change) so I decided to buy the whole set. this comprised of a table-cloth, table mats, a runner and napkins. In total the bill came to about £80 and I headed off to the checkout to pay.

I filled out the usual name and address forms and was then taken to page 2 where I was told that they may use a credit agency to check my background – weird, i just wanted to pay in total, I wasn’t opening an account, but I ticked the ‘ok’ box and carried on. On the following page I was faced with a barrage of questions of which I don’t remember them all except the top two, which were ‘Are you a Home Owner?’ and if so ‘How Long Have you Lived There?’

WHAT? Are you Serious?

I want to buy some wrapping paper here – do you need a blood sample too?

They lost the sale – i just do not have the time nor the inclination to fill out utter crap like that! I would have happily given them my card details and paid but I don’t need to give them a full history – I wasn’t opening an account and there was no where on there for me to just hit the ‘no account – pay in full’ button!

How many sales are they losing each day? I dread to think what their cart abandonment rate is like. And do you know what I did later that day? I phoned my mum and bitched about it to her and she has now been put off ordering from them too, I’ve also had a moan to a couple of girlfriends about it and I’m obviously still pissed off because here I am ranting again! What if I named the company in my blog post? What if I went on Twitter and moaned about it too? This is powerful people – don’t make your customers jump through hoops – they don’t like it, you lose the sale and then they go off and bitch about you!

Stand By Your Products or Service

You sell great products right? Or maybe you are service based, in which case your service is second to none? Well, stand by it and give out a good guarantee. If customers know that you are confident enough to offer a long or even lifetime guarantee, they will be more inclined to buy from you. If your service or product is excellent, they won’t ever need to ask for a refund!

“But What if They Do?” I hear you cry….

You have to weigh up the pro’s and cons – but let me lay it out clearly for you.

There will always be the odd p#@s taker who will ask for their money back after 2 months and quote your guarantee back atcha, but in comparison to the larger proportion of loyal buyers you are creating – it pales in comparison.

Lets imagine ten people come to your website one day to make a purchase (let’s hope it’s more than ten, but we’ll go with that for this example). Now, they all kinda want your product but consumers will normally go through the motions of justifying their purchase to themselves. One justification to encourage that purchase is a loooong guarantee. You are so damn confident in your product that you are willing to stand by it. That sheer amount of faith in your own product or service will cement a customers decision to buy because they know that if they are really not happy – you’ll give them their money back, so they are not losing a thing.

Those ten people will happily recommend your product or service to their friends and even if it was only to one other person, that’s another ten people recommending it to another ten people and so on and so on.

For the one or two p@#s takers who decide they are strapped for cash one month and ask for their money back, the new band of loyal customers that have arrived since, will more than make up for the few refunds you find you give out.

(If you’re giving out a lot of refunds – you might want to check the quality of what you are selling).

And don’t forget, not everyone that asks for a refund will be p@#s takers, they may just find that you’re not offering what they need right now, but by giving them their money back in a friendly manner, you are ensuring that they will return and possibly buy a different product or service from you in the future.

Let me give you an example of something that I am doing soon. Over at Web Mums, we are creating numerous online courses for mums to either enhance their online businesses or to get up and running (head over and sign up for an early bird discount ). The courses are affordable but packed with high quality content that people can use to maximise their businesses – but – we will be offering a 100%, no questions asked, lifetime guarantee!

We’ll be doing it because we want our customers to feel confident in their purchase and we are confident in our products and service. Will we get refunds? Yeah sure, we’ll get a few but at the same time we’ll be building a loyal base of customers and at the end of the day if our customers aren’t happy – then we don’t want to take their money!

So have a look at your systems you have in place for customer service and loyalty and see if there are a few areas where you could maybe offer more. You’ll soon be encouraging a loyal customer base that will buy from you for years and recommend you to all of their friends.

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I’m sure most of us ‘Internet Marketers’ have experienced it in some way or another. It’s why we feel such a bond with our online peers, and why we often spend too much time on Social Networks. These people online ‘get you’, they understand the language you speak, the hopes, fears and aspirations you have and they don’t collapse into fits of laughter when you mention that you sent out a ‘Tweet’. (sigh).

I actually find it quite amusing that I mentioned Twitter over a year and a half ago (how time flies) and I got that look – the picture illustrates it well – and yet now, as Twitter becomes more mainstream with celebs jumping on the bandwagon, everyone suddenly seems to be a Twitter expert. Of course the same divide still exists on Twitter, just because some of your ‘real world’ friends jumped on Twitter, it doesn’t mean they’ll understand more than 50% of your tweets, infact I prefer it when my friends don’t follow me on Twitter as it takes too long to explain what a PDF report is or why I would recommend someone reads a list of SEO tips, sheesh that’s a minefield – SEO to a non Internet person!

I Have A Gift For You

As I started to ponder the divide, I thought more and more about what it involves – this running a business online malarkey, and I decided to map it out. You’ll be surprised when you see what’s involved but mainly you should be proud! If you even accomplish a small portion of what I have included within this report, then you deserve a pat on the back – you really do!

Within this free PDF (which you can grab by clicking on the icon below) is a mind map, if you haven’t seen a mind map before, you’re in for a treat. You will need to zoom in and move your cursor around to see all of the sections as mapping the life of a Work at Home Parent is no mean feat.

You’ll also have a handy reference for a ton of sites you will be able to use throughout your entrepreneurial adventures online, it’s packed full of golden nuggets of goodness. And not only does it contain a ton of great websites and resources, it also maps out SEO and Website Optimisation in an easy to understand and logical way.

Use it wisely and don’t understimate the power of the info contained inside, I can’t reach every parent or home busines online, but between us we can get hold of a fair few, so share it with other work at home parents by clicking on the Re-Tweet button at the top of this post – I’m pretty sure they’ll thank you for it! And – please leave me a comment and tell me if I’ve missed any great sites that you use, because I can easily and add them and I will credit it you in the pdf for the information!

Wishing you every success in your online business….

Work at Home Parents Guide and Resources

Click the PDF Icon for instant access – no need to sign up for anything, it’s yours to just grab! If you’d like to be kept updated on the latest news from the blog, then subscribe to my RSS Feed and you won’t miss a thing.

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So, to give you a little background; I have developed a training course primarily aimed at Work at Home Mums. I’m not segmenting myself off, as anyone is ‘allowed’ to join, but as I am a Work at Home Mum who’s been running various online businesses for the past few years, in addition to running a networking forum for WAHMs – it seemed appropriate to address the niche that I am personally familiar with.

I know how tough it is to get a business up and running and I’ve made a point of learning the technical aspects so that I could help others.

The course is designed to show women how to really maximise their online businesses using various mediums and tools. So we cover everything from SEO to Social Media Marketing.

So What? I Hear You Cry….

Well, for you to want to follow the story along, I needed to give you a bit of background info – and that was it. I hope that you’ll have an interest in this series as we look behind the scenes of building an online business and launching it.

I’m going to take you back to the beginning over the next few posts in this series but here is a video that I have produced to set the wheels of promotion in motion.

So anyway, below you will see the first draft of the video I am using. Now, bear in mind that the 3 mins or so of video below actually took a good few hours in the making, and that is something that we Mumpreneurs often fail to take into consideration. The bloody time it takes to achieve anything!!

Just to let you know, I’m not happy with this video. The reason is the mix of the poem and the music, you see, I feel that the poem isn’t read as a ‘poem’ when there is a distraction of music, and even though I have tried to keep the background music as low as possible – I’m starting to think that the poem needs to be read by a ‘human’.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts below – after you’ve watched it. Hopefully over the next few weeks, we’ll be able to tweak it into shape between us.

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Setting Up a Shop

Setting Up a Shop the right way will determine your long term success. If you already have an eCommerce store and are wondering why you have few customers, low conversion or little traffic then perhaps it’s time to consider some aspects of running an online store that often don’t occur to a new estore owner.

How to Get Customers

Often overlooked, but kinda essential, customers that buy stuff are crucial to a stores survival – without them your store is a failure!

I don’t even want to mention how many stores I see come and go within the Mumpreneur niche and it’s normally because of a lack of understanding of how to get an ongoing stream of traffic.

You do need to know about keywords and SEO – tedious and boring but actually essential. If you don’t know what people are searching for then you can’t optimize your store to meet their needs. It’s no skin off their nose as they’ll just buy from your competitor.

When I say keywords (and feel the draft from you yawning), I mean that you need to be finding out what people are typing into that little search box over on Google – we’ll call this a key-phrase, you then need to check and see who else has optimized for that key-phrase as you want a high search volume (from the customer) vs a low competition. Once you start optimising your own store for the actual keyphrases people are searching on, you’ll soon start to rise up the ranks in the search results pages! You want to be on page one of Google – don’t settle for anything less!

Now obviously there is a lot more to it than that, so if you think you can handle learning about keywords then pop your name and email in the boxes below and I will send you my ‘Mastering Keyword Research’ report, which goes into all of this a bit deeper. This does mean that you’ll be on my newsletter list, but you can unsubscribe if you feel that you’re not getting any value! (pffft…as if)!

How to Get Customers to Buy Something

So now that you are the keyword queen and have established how to get tons of targeted traffic to your store, it’s only a matter of time before you retire to your counting house and wallow in a stash of cash – right?

Hmmm – well back up missus – not so fast! These folks are not buying anything, so now what? There are numerous reasons as to why your customers are not converting as well as you think they should but one of the main ones is TRUST. If you don’t come across as the respectable establishment that you are, then I’m afraid that no-one is going to be parting with their credit card details today thank you!

Some of the main things that you can do to show your integrity as a merchant is to have a ‘trust’ sign, something like McAfee security badge which shows that they have verified you and test your site regularly. This isn’t any ol’ badge, if the customer clicks it, they will be taken to McAfee and shown your details are on their records – sweet!

Make sure that you have a business telephone number

Pref a 0800 or similar as your customer wants to know that they can contact you. For the shy ones who hate to talk, consider having a ‘live chat’ service. If you can be available as a live person for customer service in your busy periods, you’d be amazed at how many more sales you can convert.

And if you have all this covered but you still don’t seem to be converting then you need to start testing your landing page. It could be anything from bad product images to the wrong kind of ‘Add to Cart’ sign. Simple tweaks can yield great results.

But start with the keywords, download that free report cos it will help you understand what’s involved far better than a short blog post. And make sure that you have Analytics installed because you can’t test what you can’t measure!

Read the report and then come back and let me know if it helped you!

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Membership Software

It’s important to get the right membership software from the offset as it will save you hours of time and a lot of money.

When I opened my first membership site, which now has over 800 members, I used the popular Ning platform which is great for creating Social Networks – so for that, it served its purpose.

But using a third party platform like Ning is risky because you are not really the owner of your site and you are relying on them, or whatever 3rd party you choose, to always be around for you to sustain your business.

So whilst these kinds of platforms have their place, they are not something I would recommend if you are intending to build a solid platform with the functionality to accept paying members and to also be able to integrate with popular shopping carts.

I spent Hours looking For the Right Membership Software

It probably took me a good three to four weeks of research before I finally made a decision and I am so pleased with my choice that I thought I would share it with you to hopefully save you a lot of time!

The Membership Management Software that I finally chose was Wishlist Member and it’s a powerful plugin for WordPress. After reviewing so many of these various platforms, I found it unlikely that a simple plugin for WordPress could manage such a huge task but boy was I wrong. The scope of this membership software is far beyond anything I could have hoped for and the price is incredible at a one off payment of $97 – that’s just totally mindblowing!

Inside the admin area, you have so much control, you can set up different levels of memberships or even use it just for the one level. I have a site that is delivering content over a period of about 12 -16 weeks, so I will end up with 16 levels. I just input when I want the new level to become unlocked and Wishlist does it all for me! As I have chosen my course to be delivered weekly, the new materials automatically appear when your subscriber logs in. So, if they were on holiday for a couple of weeks and didn’t log in, they would have 2 new weeks of content available to them when they next sign in.

It’s So Easy – You Just Tick a Few Boxes!

When you create a new peice of content, whether it’s a page or a post, you get the option of who to make it available to. Underneath the content you have written there will be ‘tick boxes’ for each level you have created and you just tick the boxes for the folks who have access to this content – it really is that simple.

The payment processing is fully automated too, so if you are going to use PayPal you could be on holiday whilst someone signs up for your site, pays you money and starts to access the content – it’s just a great, great system!

Watch the short video below to get a little bit more of an insight, or visit the official Wishlist Site to have a look at some of their tutorials and FAQ’s.

Here is the raw link which I am happy to include as I rate this so, so highly http://www.member.wishlistproducts.com

And here is my affiliate link if you’re happy for me to earn a referral fee should you decide to buy it – either way, go check it out!

Visit the Wishlist Member Plugin site and tell them I sent you

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Do You Know How to Optimize Your Site?

I rather got on my soapbox the other day regarding Search Engine Optimisation, because it’s getting to the point where I think it’s more a case of many people just not ‘being bothered’ to learn it rather than just not ‘getting it’.

And this bothers me why? Well, I kinda get a bit peeved about it when I am always answering questions about it only to find that many of the web masters then don’t bother to implement it as it would cause them a little bit of work (sigh!).

And here we all are, this new surgence of brilliant mums coming through and breaking down all sorts of obstacles to bring our dreams of online business alive….. only to kiss it goodbye again as frankly, dunking a Hob Nob and chatting on Twitter is far more interesting than seeing to our Meta Tags!

I’d like to share some of my forum rant with you now, and I hope that you will get some value from it and consider learning about the fundamental basics of SEO. Sign up to my newsletter on the right if you want some more info.

The more I research into the background of reg folks trying to get a business, the more I want to get this stuff out there! I’m seeing designers, (mostly self taught) who are creating beautiful sites for people but with no SEO on them at all – none – nada – zip – zilch! It makes me wanna cry! More to the point, the people who are buying these sites have no way of accessing their templates and have to pay their designer to make any changes – which is scary when you consider that the designer has no clue about SEO in the first place.

I see shop after shop and site after site,  just not doing even the basic SEO, keyword research or marketing – then I hear them whining about how badly their business is doing and then eventually I go look them up and they’ve gone – Twitter – gone! Facebook – Gone! Website – Gone! And it’s so sad and often completely avoidable.

And then there are the *cough* SEO Experts *cough* that spout out all sorts of crap on Twitter and various other platforms. It’s frightening because people are FOLLOWING these people and BELIEVING what they are saying, but there is no real expertise here, there is no real ethos into the background of the ‘accomplished results’.

Am I an SEO expert? Or a Social Media expert? No – I wouldn’t label myself as an expert. I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from the very best, world class experts for the past few years, but even though that may be the case – I still consider myself their student. That said, I know more than the “Twitterspert” who seems to know everything from flicking through an eBook and having Aaron Wall on their friends list (sigh).

Let me give you an example of what I mean,

If you look at the images below, you’ll see that I rank very highly for ‘best ecommerce tips’ Wooooooh! Should I go over to Twitter with claims of ‘you can do this too’, or ‘I can do this for you’ – because I could, or shall we look a bit deeper?

Well, you’ll also see that I have included the shot from the Google adwords tool, where it says that there is insufficient data for ‘best ecommerce tip’ which basically means I am ranking at the top of page one for a term that no-one is searching for Now, I also rank highly for ‘ecommerce tips’ and that’s without me actually doing any promotion or linking, but the traffic for that is still fairly rubbish with about 260 searches.

So, what’s my point? Well, there is a lot more to SEO that just ‘ranking’ for a word, it’s choosing the right words for YOUR business in the first place and knowing how to do that, then it’s placing them correctly and then it’s all about the campaign around it. So whilst all of these ‘so called’ experts yap away on Twitter about how they got their client to rank for _____________ (insert pointless keyword) I just shudder and despair about another business going down the toilet!

But another problem we have – is the ‘instant results’ syndrome! Everyone wants results but no one wants to really do the work. There is so much stuff (much of it crap) about how to optimize your sites out there that people are rightly confused. Days can be wasted whilst you search about for information and then you give up and chat to your friends on Twitter instead.

It’s Not an Excuse or a Reason to Give Up!

As a mumpreneur you need to take responsibility for all of your business as you can’t always rely on the traffic you get from social networking.  If you are designing sites for clients, then at least try and learn the basics of SEO so that you can add title tags and Meta descriptions before you hand it over, or make it possible for your clients to be able to access their templates and make the changes needed. It will work in your favour too – when was the last time you checked your portfolio? Are all your clients still at the end of the link or have they vanished and did you maybe play a part in that by handing over a site that was essentially worthless in terms of traffic generation?

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Over at the WebMums camp, my group of BETA testers are doing a pretty fine job on learning how to optimise their sites and we’re already starting to see some great results. These folks have taken some action and realised that you can’t build a business on tweets alone, has the realization of that dawned on you too?

For SEO tips and info on the website optimizer course – sign up top the newsletter on the right.

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After working with and around folks (mainly work at home mums) with online businesses for the past couple of years, it hasn’t gone un-noticed how people are starting to (finally) savvy up to the importance of optimizing their websites.

It’s not enough to have a brilliant idea and just ‘go with it’ you need to have that idea verified before you go plunging in – and for the plungers, there is some serious treading water going on that needs to be addressed now.

Over at the WebMums community, I was continually getting asked: How to SEO my Site or Can You Explain What SEO is?

I wrote a fair few articles on the subject and I helped a lot of people out but I still felt that there was a bit of a ‘need’ for want of a better term. So, I decided to create an Ecommerce Course that covers everything from on and offsite SEO to Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Traffic and Conversion. The reason that the course is tailored towards ecommerce, is because most of the women around the Web Mums community were ecommerce based, but service based businesses and bloggers….read on….

I’m hoping that by creating this course, it will help lots more women (and some of them men folk) to have successful online businesses and to understand and appreciate the fine art of being ranked in the search engines and most noticably – Google!

So – why am I telling you this? Well, I’ve had some people testing the course out over the past few weeks and I’ve decided to let a few more in before I actually open it as a membership site. I think it really needs to be put through its paces before I release it and if you ‘fit the bill’ and you come on board as a BETA tester, then you get access to this course for FREE.

That’s a MINIMUM saving of £81 right there!

So, I will walk you through the steps you need to take to make sure that you have a profitable business. You’ll learn how to find the best keywords, how to use them within your site, how to drive traffic, how to become the market leader within your niche – plus a ton more. This is all backed up with a forum where you can ask specific questions and get help with any aspect of the course or your business that you are struggling with.

It’s Not All Plain Sailing

In return for me handing you this free course on a plate I will require your feedback. This will mean that you will give feedback after each week and you’ll also be required to fill out a few questionaires. If you fail to abide by that, then your place gets offered to someone else.

I refuse to put this course out without having had a certain amount of feedback from people across the board, that meet various criteria, because that way I can be sure I am releasing a quality product that will help people rather than some utter crud that many people try to convince us is ‘great’.

Now, I mentioned above that Bloggers and Service Based businesses should read on, well that’s because a lot of the info contained within the course is still relevant and I am going to tailor courses more focused on these groups after this one is released, in the meantime, I could still use your feedback on the relevant parts and you will still gain a huge amount of value. So do feel free to sign up and let me know what line of business you are in.

Once you have filled in your details in the boxes below, you will receive an email asking you to confirm that you’d like to be included on this list. This is to protect you from spam emails. Make sure you click the link to confirm your interest, you will then receive an email from me explaining the next step.

I look forward to hearing from you,

BETA TESTING FOR THE ECOMMERCE COURSE HAS NOW CLOSED, IF YOU WOULD LIKE INFO ON WHEN THE COURSE GOES LIVE, THEN FILL IN YOUR DETAILS IN THE OPT-IN BOX.

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Time and time again I see web masters flogging themselves to death to rank for a certain keyword. They believe that if they can only get to page one on Google with this keyword then the floodgates of wealth will open.

After weeks (sometimes months) of trying, they finally make it to the prime front page on Google and (man the trumpets) ….. er…….nothing / nada / zip / zilch!

WTF?

When I find these poor, broken souls, weeping softly in the dank, dark corners of forums, I offer to help and often find that their keyword is actually worthless! The reason that it hasn’t changed their life is not because they sucked at getting the traffic – it’s because they sucked at doing the research!

A simple search using the free Google Keyword Tool shows me that no-one is actually searching on that keyword. No-one is going to Google and typing in ‘ Where Can I get Me A ______’. I ask “Have you checked whether there is any value to this keyword before you decided to ruthlessly pursue it?” The deafening silence is normally answer enough!

So, first things first – make sure that the keywords you are targeting are actually worth it or you will be wasting your time.

So, now that you have done a little research and found the main keywords you want to rank for – where are your going to put them? Well, for the page to rank well in Google you will need them to appear within the following:

• Your meta title tag <title>Keywords here</title>

• Your meta description tag <meta content=”keywords within your page description” />

• Your H1 or H2 tags <H1>Title of your content with keywords</H1>

• Within the content of the page

• Within the ‘alt tags’ (for your images)

• As anchor text from external links to the page

If you can do all of this, then you are going to start to rank for your chosen keywords fairly quickly. The more quality links that you get coming in – the better your chances of ranking higher.
Now, you just need to do this for EVERY page that you want to rank within your site – not just your home page!

So, before you move on, make sure that you are targeting the RIGHT keywords for your market and not the ones that you THINK you should.

Photo Credit Chris Baker.

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• Shoving your business down other people’s throats is utterly tasteless and frankly – spammy. There is only one place for Spam and it is in a fritter (and even those have gone out of fashion). If you were invited to a dinner party, would you walk in and hand out your business card before you’d even been introduced? We don’t do it offline, so why oh why do people insist on doing it online? Do you honestly think that by writing all over my blog or profile page about the ‘amazing opportunity your business will bring me’ gives me any inclination what-so-ever to investigate it further? It doesn’t!

Perhaps if you’d introduced yourself first, I may be more inclined…..may!

• Joining too many groups or forums! Don’t do it, you’ll never have time to maintain them all so just frequent the ones that you find the most beneficial. If you join too many, you’ll be wasting valuable time that you could be ploughing into your business. Don’t get me wrong – social networking can be an integral part of your businesses success but too much can be detrimental – find a balance.
• Going into a social networking site and sucking up all of the great info without so much as a ‘Thank You’ or a ‘How Do You Do’ – it’s just rude! If I invited you round for a cuppa, would you come in – drink the tea, eat all my biscuits and then go without a word? Well, you might – but you’d never get another Oreo from me! You are there to add value, learn from others and make contacts for potential JV partnerships. Leaving thanks for something you have found beneficial will also earn you kudos – it’s a win/win situation.
• Underestimating your profile page – that is where you write about your business in a professional and genuine way. This is where people go, voluntarily, to find out more information about you and what you do. They’ve seen you adding value in the forums or around the site and their interest is piqued – they want to know more. It is far more powerful for them to click through to your page and then to your site than have you ram it down their throats.
• Getting into to ridiculous heated debates – I’ve seen this happen many times. So before you react to anything that you have read, make sure you have all of your facts straight or you could end up looking like a fool. There is nothing wrong with healthy debate, far from it – but an online argument is not something you wish to ruin your reputation with. Talk travels fast and it travels at warp speed online!

And as a bonus – here’s my final tip, learn the lingo! Not all sites run the same way and it’s common courtesy to suss out some of the rules before you go tramping in there in your size 9’s. Take Twitter for example – your first day on there is going to leave your head spinning – by the end of the week after some initial observation, you’ll be tweeting and retweeting (now cut to RT) with the rest of the @Twitterers.

Now go forth and socialise!

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The two main qualities that I really like are the ability to schedule Tweets and the Stat-counter – oh and the really easy user interface and did I mention the multi a/c use?

It’s nicely laid out, easy to grasp and it tracks individual tweets so that you can see what your readers are really intereested in.

In the video below I give you the briefest overview of a great way to use it that will save you heaps of time and prevent you having to spend all day over on Twitter…Tweeting! Let me know your thoughts about HootSuite below..

(I mention the ‘Library’ in this video – I’m referring to the library of videos we have in our members area at WebMums.com)

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2)     You must ensure that the images you use in your shop are of high quality. Customers will be quite put off by low quality pictures as they will perceive the product to be the same.

3)     Establish who the competition is, look at what they are doing and then do it a whole heap better. Also look out for opportunities of joint ventures and collaborations.

4)     Make sure that you have your payment terms clearly displayed on your home page. This is a convenience and an added trust factor for your customers.

5)     Have you started to capture email addresses from your customers? Make sure that you have a sign up box with a special offer for customers or you are leaving money on the table.

6)     Use a picture on your ‘About Us’ page where poss and an introduction video is even better. Write a great page as it’s often clicked and checked by a customer prior to them making a purchase, so use it to build trust.

7)     High traffic is irrelevant – it’s conversion that counts. Concentrate on using targeted keywords for targeted buyers.

8)     Consider using promotional items like fridge magnets in your parcels. Most people do actually pop them on the fridge and therefore have a constant reminder of you and your business.

9)     Put your most important info above the fold on the home page. Images, Special Offers, Contact Details and Secure signs have all been tested and proven to work well.

10)  Consider using a blog. Ecommerce sites are not consistently updated but blogs are, so by putting out fresh content that leads to your site, you are also keeping your site regularly spidered and indexed by Google.

11)  Don’t send all of your links to your home page. Spread the link juice throughout your site so that different products rank well in the SERPs

12)  Don’t add anything like ‘We’re a Brand New Store’ or anything to suggest that you are a newcomer to the business.

13)  Give your customers the WOW factor. Ways you can do this are by sending a free gift with their purchase, sending their purchase FAST, email a thank you to them or follow up with a special offer. Anything that makes them think ‘Wow, what a great company and a great service’.

14)  SEO is important but build your site for the customer and not the search engines. Any long paragraphs of keyword stuffed text will not only put a customer off, it will also get you penalised by the Search Engines.

15)  Never, EVER, ever have hidden text/keywords on your site. You will get your arse kicked and may even get de-indexed.

16)  Social Media creates a natural footprint for your customers or potential clients to check you out. Don’t say anything online that you may come to regret because once it’s out there, you can’t retract it – so use social media wisely!

17)  Don’t be boring – use your blog to inject a little bit of personality to your brand, whilst also building the trust factor.

18)  Don’t make your customers jump through hoops to buy from you because – they won’t! Making them register to see things like shipping costs is old school and detrimental to your business.

19)  Educate your customer and help them make that decision to purchase. If your product enable you to do a demonstration via video or even pictures, then add it to the product description or on ‘how to’ article pages within your site (with links to the product). This will dramatically increase your sales.

20)  Difficult customers that are dealt with in the correct manner, can often become your biggest and most loyal customers, so be patient and be nice!

21)  For SEO purposes, make sure that your product names are in the title tag of the corresponding page – before your company name if you are using it here.

22)  Become an expert within your niche. Don’t just sell the product, blog about it, the history, facts, stats etc. People like to buy from an expert and will actually pay you more for it than a competitor!

23)  Don’t try to sell everything, be niche specific. You are not Amazon so do not try to be, focus on niche products to a niche audience.

24)  Create loyalty by finding ways to reward existing customers, special offers, competitions, bonus points, discounts & freebies etc

25)  If you offer a live help or chat service, make sure that you actually log in to it and be on hand to answer queries. If you consistently get too busy, consider dropping it so that customers are not left waiting.

26)  Make sure that you constantly update for FAQ’s page with any new queries that come in. Not only is this great for the search engines it also saves both you and your customers precious time.

27)  A good place to remind customers about your newsletter is on your ‘thank you’ page after their purchase. They are already committed to you through their purchase and are in the best frame of mind to now sign up. Add an incentive like 10% off your nest order to clinch the deal!

28)  Keep the customer informed about the progress of their order BEFORE they have to come and ask you. It shows that you are a professional, caring company and adds an additional layer of trust. Plus, if there were any problems with their purchase, they are far less likely to kick off if they have already had contact from you and decided that you are a good company to buy from. Folks don’t like to admit they are wrong and tend to go with their initial appraisal.

29)  Utilise free services such as Google Base as these can bring you highly targeted traffic and more links within the SERPs.

30)  You don’t have to sell your products cheaper than the next guy (who probably isn’t making any profit). People pay extra for a professional and excellent service.

31)  Include promotional flyers in your parcels. Discount vouchers to encourage return visits, catalogues to showcase your other products etc

32)  Have a search facility, customers like to be able to search for what they want rather than wading through tons of pages. On the flip side – only have this available if it is a good search facility. Searches that result in shoddy results could mean that your customer won’t find what they are looking for even if you sell it.

33)  If you often get asked a lot of questions about your products then include a keyword rich FAQ’s page, very good for SEO purposes.

34)  If you hold your own stock the ship orders FAST. You’re now in the shadow of eBays ‘want it yesterday’ mentality. Within the past couple of years, people have gone from waiting a few weeks for their purchase to now expecting it within a few days of ordering. If you can’t meet those demands – have a clear and precise shipping policy so that you’re customer is aware. It’s also wise to include this information again on their receipt and any follow up emails.

35)  Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and go through your buying process to the very end. Is it easy? Are there steps you could eliminate? Are there add-ons that you could insert?

36)  Raise your profit margin and encourage larger orders by offering free shipping for multiple item orders or orders over a certain amount. You could also factor the cost of shipping into your products and offer free shipping on everything. If you do this right then the rise in sales will counteract any loss made on shipping and you will be in profit.

37)  If you are selling the same product as someone else, add something to the title tag that makes yours stand out from the competition.

38)  Try new things in your store. Promotions, layout, offers etc But test, test and test some more. You need to fail in order to succeed so fail fast and move forward.

39)  Your internal links are incredibly powerful. Learn how to structure these correctly to optimise your store to its full potential.

40)  If your thumbnail image says ‘click here to see a larger image’ make sure that a larger image actually appears!

41)  Study your after-sales care. One-off buyers do not create a business, you want to create a base of loyal, returning customers that rave about you to their friends.

42)  Remember the 80/20 rule. 20% of your customers prob make up around 80% of your sales – so work on creating the ultimate customer experience.

43)  Be contactable. Have your companies telephone number clearly displayed on your stores home page and make sure that all of your calls get answered or dealt with swiftly.

44)  Use testimonials if you have them. Electronic signatures and video also add the extra trust factor.

45)  Have a prominent area to feature special offers or products. Keep it either on the same day each week or do it daily so that customers become accustomed to where it is and look for it.

46)  Try and incorporate a reviews section. If you can do this on each individual product and get the software for customers to leave reviews themselves, then this is great for customer confidence. If a product gets continually bad reviews then stop selling it. Since companies like Amazon and eBay introduced reviews and feedback, it’s become a mark of trust that buyers like when they can have it.

47)  Make your site easy to navigate. Customers won’t hang around to dig for a product so hand it to them on a plate. If they want some green earrings, they won’t want to go through a process of clicking like this:- home page >> jewellery with stones >> silver jewellery with stones >> earrings >> earrings for pierced ears >> green earrings – keep it as simple as you can! Less clicks = more sales.

48)  Respond to customer complaints swiftly and politely. Bite your tongue if need be as your reputation is your livelihood.

49)  Make sure that you have a prominent and strong guarantee and refund policy. Offering a great policy will increase your sales.

50)  Avoid having flash banners that tell folks you’re in the top 50 of something or other. It looks lame and most people know that these ‘trophies’ are just meaningless. Unless it’s a badge worthy of showing – don’t show it. Also avoid those entire ‘listed in the blah, blah’ directories – so what? Your customer couldn’t give a hoot and it makes your site look cheap.

51)  Add a best-sellers section to your website. It encourages more sales as people are naturally curious to see what other people are buying and also use that as an endorsement of the product to buy it themselves.

52)  Make sure that your spelling and punctuation throughout the site is faultless. Use a spell check to make sure as it’s something that will make your site look very unprofessional. And it’s not even that you’re a bad speller, most folks won’t condemn you for that – but they will condemn you for not being bothered to ‘check’ your written word. If you can’t be bothered with that then maybe they can’t be bothered to buy from you.

53)  Use an 0800 number for your biz if you can or at the very least have a separate line so that your business calls can be answered in a professional manner, rather than your 2yr old as you’ve nipped to the toilet! If your company is getting very busy then consider hiring someone to answer the phone our re-route your calls to a call centre.

54)  Don’t make customers fill out unnecessary fields in the buying process. If billing and delivery addresses are the same, let them check a box to say that rather than having to type it all out again.

55)  If Google isn’t indexing all of your pages then you probably don’t have enough links OR you have some duplicate content issues. Double check the pages that are not being listed and find out why. Address the problem and re-submit (or add) an XML site map to Google.

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I’m Outing The Internet Time Thief!

I thought as much! How many times have you settled down to do some market research, learn a new skill, write an article, source some new products and so on and so on, only to find that 3 hours have slipped by and you’ve accomplished….nothing…..nada……zip!?!

Why are you working from home? No really, think about it, why are you working from home?

Can you even remember? Was it to earn some extra money to pay off the credit cards? Was it to save up for a holiday? Was it to create a college fund for your children? Or maybe you want a long term business model that will pave the way to a complete change in lifestyle.

Whatever your reasons for starting an online business – don’t lose focus of them. Write them down and pin them somewhere where you can see them. It’s so easy to lose focus and lose time procrastinating and these are valuable hours that you could have spent working towards your dream.
There are many valuable resources scattered around the Internet that will help you on your way but this can be your enemy. As you float from site to site clicking on more and more links, hoping and hoping that one of them will give you the quick fix you are looking for, you are wasting more and more and more……and more time.

There are no quick fixes but there are numerous ways to earn money – hundreds! You need to choose ONE that is right for you, focus your energy into it and do not move on to the next one until your initial one is underway. Maybe it won’t work, maybe it will flop but until you work on it – you will never know.

Stay motivated by setting daily, weekly and monthly goals. Consider teaming up with other people as it’s not only motivational it’s inspiring what you can come up with when you put your heads together!

It’s like having a jogging buddy! You don’t want to go, of course you don’t – you’d much rather gaze out of the window into the garden for an hour, maybe snack on a bag of chips and kick back infront of the tv…..but you don’t want to let your buddy down – so you get changed and you go jogging! What happens when you get home? You feel fantastic, that’s what!
You’re glad you went and the result is that you are looking after your health.

Take that attitude online and look after your business or procrastination and the Internet time thief will steal your precious dreams unless you sling them in the slammer now!

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That is a simple fact and there is no hoodoo voodoo working its mojo, giving some folks a break and others a damn hard time. The fact is this; the people who are living the lifestyle that most folks crave simply worked hard for it. They wanted it more than the next person. They sacrificed more time, gave more effort and now they are reaping the rewards.

Have you ever darted from one site to another looking for ways to make money? Start a business? Get rich quick? Work from home? I’m sure you have and I’m sure you have read some valuable information. There is a wealth of it online, you have access to the best resource in the world when you connect up to the Internet but that’s the problem – there is sooo much of it.

Think of yourself as a sponge, you flit from one site to the next absorbing more and more information. Eventually you won’t be able to hold any more and you will start leaking the information down the plug hole – that’s an ugly image right there!

And Hey! – Some Guy Wrote That For You – So Feel Bad

You read it, thought it was great but you just needed to find out a bit more (yawn) about how to incorporate it into your business model. Whilst you have been searching around for that missing piece of the puzzle, new things have caught your eye, more schemes, some scams and gradually you have forgotten what it was you were looking for hours ago, or was it days? Maybe it was weeks, months or even *gasp* years!

It’s like me trying to walk past a shoe shop or a jewellers without being attracted to the shiny things – it aint gonna happen – unless you condition yourself!

So what have you learned?

And More Importantly – What Have You Earned?

Take some info and take some action. You don’t need to learn everything to get started – trust me; I found this out the hard way. I spent years learning everything as I felt I needed to before I would deem myself worthy of starting a website, giving advice, designing a webpage and so on. I could have been tipping the top by now if I had only put out a product back when I first learnt about affiliate marketing, e-commerce, SEO and marketing.

Don’t waste time learning it all, learn and grow as you go.

Find one site or one mentor and learn something. Then go away and try it – please try it. Just try doing one thing and then add to it. Once you have found one or two places that give you the info or training or whatever the heck it is that you need, stick with them – don’t squeeze them out of the bottom of your sponge by piling loads more on top.

But I Do Work Hard…

I imagine you are reading this and thinking either ‘Yep. That’s me – I flit and don’t actually achieve anything’ or you’re thinking ‘That’s rubbish, I really need 8 tons of info to succeed’ or maybe, just maybe you fall into one final group. Now this group tries hard, follows the rules – they don’t waste time flitting (too much) they come home from their regular job and follow (to the letter) everything that their guru has taught them – to no avail. On the forums they frequent there are success stories and those guys don’t seem to be doing half the amount of work – so what gives?

If you are at this point then something just isn’t clicking – you need a little outside help, someone who can have a look at what you are doing and give you a little guidance. It’s often something quite simple, a step in the process you’ve missed, the wrong target market, incorrect market research or you’ve no passion for it.

If you genuinely feel that you have worked as hard as you could and it’s still not working out for you then get some advice. This could be from forum members, the guru (if you have direct access), some business coaching or even a friend (if they are business savvy).

It might just be that your particular project isn’t viable and it’s time to walk away or it may be that you need a little push in a certain direction. You’ve already learnt a lot so don’t let all of those hours go to waste – you can use that info to take it to the next level or plough it into your next venture.

So in conclusion; if you’re flitting – stop it and put what you’ve learnt into practice before you forget it. If you can’t sleep until you’ve bought the next big idea or read the latest shopping cart review, or decided between wholesale and dropshipping, or visited another forum to find out the quickest way to make a buck – then you are doomed to fail. I’m really not kidding you – you will fail. Every successful online business leader found out what they needed to make their business work and then they did it.

They didn’t buy an endless ream of reports and e-books to get there; they just took what they needed and did it. Of course that isn’t to say that you shouldn’t always be learning because some of these courses will add to your arsenal – but study and do, don’t just study.

If you fall into the second (minority) group then get some guidance. Don’t waste any more time asking yourself ‘why’ your business isn’t succeeding when you are doing everything right – get out there and find out why! Then correct it and/or move on.

Passion, patience and perseverance people, now go get yourself a slice of the pie. (That was a figure of speech – do not head to the fridge for a slice of pie – do some work!)

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And indeed you should – for Google rocks!

However, the scenario isn’t quite so rosy when you search for something specific to the niche that you are in, only to find that Google (stupid bloody Google) has dolloped you on page 89 and has frankly proved that it wouldn’t actually know a decent website if one came up and poked it in the eye!

So I have 2 questions for you at this point:-

1. Did you poke Google in the eye with your website?
2. Is your site actually better than the preceding 88 pages that Google has deemed to show?

The answer to question 1 is probably ‘No’! Metaphorically speaking, you did not poke Google in the eye with your website,

And as for question 2, well either the 88 pages of preceding sites are just plain better than yours or you answered ‘No’ to question 1.

Google does a very good job nowadays of sorting the wheat from the chaff and this is one of the reasons why they have risen to the top as the best search engine. It’s all about trust – and we trust Google!

And whilst (regardless of what some so-called SEO experts may tell you) we don’t know the exact algorithm that Google uses to determine our place within its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), we do know enough to make sure that we are placed well.

And how do we know all this?

Because Google tells us!

There is no great jaw-dropping mystery about getting good rankings on Google. If your site is good – no scratch that – if your site is better than the rest, you will get great rankings.

Okay, stop with the ‘sighing’ and just think about it for a moment……

I mean – actually STOP and actually THINK…

If a searcher types something in to Google, then it’s in Google’s best interest for it to deliver the sites that it deems most relevant to the search term entered. Because if it doesn’t – it loses the customer to another search engine – fact!

And let me shed some light on something else, you may think that the multi-million dollar Google machine can afford to rest on its laurels (be’ in all multi –million dollar-ish), but if you believe that train of thought then you’re choo-choo-ing out on the one stop express to NoHopeland,

Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm to make sure that the cream rises to the top.

But hey – let’s get back to you and that website of yours placed on page…what was it again? Oh yeah, page 89 of the SERPs (or worse). You’ve no doubt had a look at some of the tat in those preceding 88 pages and you are clear on one thing – YOUR SITE IS BETTER THAN THAT BUNCH OF CRAP.

So – you’ve got the goods – you just need to go poke Google in the eye with it!!

I 100% guarantee you that there IS a reason as to why J.Bloggs is at the number 1 spot for YOUR search term. You just need to find out what it is – and it isn’t a backhander from Matt Cutts  (Matt Cutts – the only real name that anyone ever recognizes as a member of the Google squad).

So if J.Bloggs – from here on in known as ‘JB’, has spent time driving traffic to his website then Google will note that he is getting popular. Traffic is drawn on most occasions by clicking on a link. This is one reason why links count towards the popularity of your site in the eyes of the Search Engine.

Maybe JB has also invested his time in maximizing his internal links so that Google could find ALL of his content. More content = Bigger site = Higher Rankings – for the majority of sites.

Or maybe – just maybe, that cheeky devil adds new, fresh content to his site on a regular basis! Now that alone would be killer…

Whatever it is that he is doing – content, linking, seo, social media etc – he’s doing it a darn site better than you or he’s been doing it a whole lot longer than you.

Keep it simple folks;

1. Get the key-phrase you want to rank for in your pages title tags
2. Get the key-phrase you want to rank for within the body of the page (in the content)
3. Have incoming links to that page using your key-phrase as your anchor text

So go and check out what JB is doing and do it heaps better. Let him be the cream that rises to the top, just so long as you make sure you are the cherry!

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Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich Free PDF Download

Free Downloadable PDF

If ever there was a good place to start, this is it. Now available as a completely free download to you today. Just right click and ‘save as’ on the book on the left and then get stuck in.

Easy format for printing if that is your preferred method – either way just read it, it’s been life-changing for many people and a top favourite among entrepreneurs world-wide.

Discover the secrets to wealth and success! Enjoy!

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Structuring Your WAHM Day

Structuring Your Day

Who am I to tell you how to structure your day? And doesn’t it get on your nerves when you keep reading these unrealistic articles about ‘Time Management’ and how you can work from home, whilst being a mum, a cook, a cleaner, a chauffeur, a teacher, a helper, a listener and… well – just you really!

Most of these bloody guides are written by men or by women who are trying to concentrate whilst a snotty 2yr old rubs jam over their keyboards.

The simple fact of the matter is – if you want to run a business from home, it takes a huge amount of time and a huge amount of commitment, and let’s not forget about the oodles of enthusiasm.

Most (but not all) women, who work from home, have chosen to do so for a few of the following reasons;

• We need money but can’t afford child-minding fees
• We simply do not want to leave our children with a childminder
• We’d like to be around for our kids as much as possible
• We have an entrepreneurial streak that drives us to run a business
• We no longer want to work for ‘the man’ and want to be our own boss
• We  want to make our children and family proud
• We’d like to feel like a ‘grown up’ now and again
• It gives us something to focus on other than wiping jam off the keyboard and snot from the 2yr old
• It enables us to contribute towards the household
• It gives us a feeling of independence
• It re-ignites a feeling of excitement – the kind that is only reserved for teenagers and entrepreneurs
• It stops us from going insane
• We don’t have a choice
• It enables us to be…..us
• …Insert Your Own….

Whatever the reason, it never really turns out quite the way that we imagined. Some of us like the thrill of setting up a new business, but once it’s up and running – we lose interest and the rest is just plain …. boring. (if we ever get that far)

Others really want to get to that place but just don’t have the right skills or tools to get there.

Then of course there are others who create highly successful businesses and want to push it further but are tied by constraints of family or …..insert the constraint….

But nearly all of us waste a shit load of time! And is it really any wonder? Look at what we do – we work online and we have access to EVERYTHING! If we have spent all morning being mum and finally grab 30 minutes to do some work – is it really work?

Or did you just check your email? Or go order something online? Maybe you popped into a social site like Facebook or Twitter and spent 30 minutes talking mindless crap and now the 2yr old has started to ooze snot everywhere again and you haven’t managed to get anything done – aaargh!

So what do we do? We’re only human and there is only so many Time Management articles one can read before we finally explode and say ‘You Just Don’t GET IT’.

Let’s take a look at a typical day here – I have taken these quotes from our forum:-

I feel like I have days like that all too often! I have such a long mental to do list that I should really learn to start writing things down and working through them consistently but I just never get round to do doing this.
I used to be such an organised person and over the last couple of years this has all but disappeared! Another thing to add to my to do list…..get more organised!! Lol

I think its been a gradual thing! But yes my whole mentality towards things like that has changed! I used to be to the point of being obsessive! My brother used to call me Monica (From Friends LOL).
Now I just never catch up…..
Oh well

It really does help to write things down, it takes the pressure off…well a little bit! I do a todo list every week, sometimes it just gets longer and longer and other weeks I really do hit the spot and get loads done off it. This weeks list has 87 things on it at the moment, but started with 48, so I seriously need to sit down and get on with it.

if there were a few extra hours in the day for SEO, picking and packing, emailing, twittering and sourcing new stock etc life would be easier!
I must start doing a to do list, trouble is it would be soul destroying as it would never seem to get any shorter..its funny how I work on my own things to do as well as my husbands things to do..chase payments, arrange insurances, confirm meetings etc and my own list stays as long as his gets shorter..ho hum..ce la vie!

I know what you mean about spending a LOT of time online but actually not getting a LOT of productive stuff done….every little things seems to lead to bigger things that need done!

I so understand that feeling about being online a lot but not feeling like you are achieving anything.

I too can totally relate to spending a huge amount of time online but don’t feel like I’m progressing far.

I probably have too much goin on lol always feel pulled in 100 directions and guilty for lack of time I spend with Kaden after all Im doing this to be with him but tbh he doesnt get enough of my quality time

I had a mad morning and Tuesdays are crazy – both the eldest wet the bed last night (younger one twice – luckily he has the washable bed mat on top of his sheet so not too bad!) so I had a ton of washing, took both to school / nursery, took DH to work (so I can have the car later), then did the fruit & veg / market shop, home for about ten mins to change a stinky nappy and read emails, then to nursery for pick up (they need to do a lunch club 2 and a half hours is not long enough!), now its lunch, parcels, Tesco shop delivery, pick eldest up from school in the car to go straight to swimming lessons, then pick DH up from work, dinner, baths and bed for the boys, I have an NCT teleconference to listen to (speakerphone and mute so I can do other stuff at the same time!) – another day gone!

with my oldest it was just me and him. I’d just finished work and I could do whatever was required, go out if we were getting bored, shop or stay in.

with the 2nd, who has just started preschool here was my day:

out, drop off 2 at school, back up my massive hill (live in the pennines) for 40 mins before meeting with my PR woman (supposedly doing housework, but on computer and calling potential new stockist), back down hill into town for meeting. Rush off at 11.25 to collect daughter, back up massive hill with pram via co op to make lunch for friend coming round. eat lunch, friend goes, clear up, put on wash, daughter falls asleep on my bed whilst I do this. have to collect the other from school, get neighbour round to keep an eye. Drive down hill this time (woohoo!) collect son and friend who is coming for tea. back up hill. make drink from neighbour who stays for a chat. make tea for all the kids…..clear up….luckily the other half does bath/bed!

How good it is to know that wherever we are, Mums are ALWAYS busy. I sometimes think my time management skills need sharpening, but untill we add another 5 or 6 hours to each day, I’ll just keep running.
It’s our second last day of school before 2 weeks holiday…spring is here, yay!!
After class reading (my daughter is in grade 1), I had a 20 minute drive to a DR. checkup. I love living by the beach, but we are quite far away from lots of things. Then I treated myself to a coffee and magazine (research into the jewellery industry of course ). Now it’s lunchtime and I need to wake my husband up as he works nightshift and sleeps 4 hours in the morning and 2 hours before work at night. He’s off to an appointment with his dad, as he doesn’t speak English, only Chinese, and John needs to translate.
I have 1 hour now to get dinner sorted, fold washing, answer emails and do some work for my part-time office job (hopefully not for too much longer), then back to school for help with craft and more reading. I’ll get to sit down and do some of my real work from about 10pm tonight when John goes to work. Honestly, if it wasn’t for my whiteboard, I’d be totally lost!

All of these quotes were posted by WAHMs within the space of FOUR DAYS! There was no thread asking them about their day – they just really needed to get this crap off their chest!

So what’s the answer? Shall I give you some sheets to print off so that you can fill them in and structure your day? Well – meh! I could, and indeed I have included some within the goal setting section – but let’s be realistic here; if you have a family and a business and a house to run, you are going to be pushed to the max.

Is it impossible?

No!

Are there any easy answers?

No!

Here’s the deal, and I’m gonna give it to you straight! Your time is precious so you gotta stop wasting it. Stop feeling guilty about the time you’re not spending with your kids or with your partner etc And remember why it was you started all this! You wanted to spend time with your family and partner!

So, go get a piece of paper and write this down. I want you to write it because it will have more impact if you actually write the words down.

Got your pen? Paper at the ready?

Start writing….

• I WILL BE SUCCESSFUL IN MY BUSINESS
• I ADMIT THAT I HAVE SPENT TOO MUCH TIME ON STUFF THAT REALLY WAS A TIME SUCKER AND DIDN’T NEED MY ATTENTION
• I AM GOING TO RE-FOCUS MY EFFORTS
• I AM GOING TO BE MORE ORGANIZED
• I AM SCHEDULING TIME IN FOR MY FAMILY AND/OR LEISURE PURSUITS

Okay, we’re over that hurdle of the ‘writing’ thing, let’s now dig a little deeper. What you have just written should have some sort of impact. If it doesn’t then you probably don’t have any Time Management problems, so you can skip this if it is of little relevance to you.

If this is hitting a homerun with you, then I want you to do a couple of things. Firstly, I want you to pin you piece of paper up somewhere that you can see it. A good place would be on the wall above where you normally work.

Now, we put it last on our lists, but we’re going to deal with it first – family. Most of us went into this business because we wanted to make a better future for our families and spend more time with them, yet getting there is taking up so much bloody time, we are missing out on time with our family, we’re getting stressed with ourselves and our children and it’s not a good place to be.

So – first things first – schedule in your family time and your work time.

If you’re at home and you have children, you normally have school runs, nursery runs, shopping to get, housework etc.  So your day is often gone before you know it. You try and focus on work in between but you get distracted by the kids wanting something else, the phone ringing, Twitter, Facebook, a friend arriving for lunch and so on…

So don’t do it! Just……STOP!

Now, I don’t know your schedule and everyone’s day is different, so I can’t write you a personal report but try and do the following;

Forget doing dribs and drabs of work throughout the day – swap it for spending time with your children. If you committed to working 4 evenings a week, after the kids have gone to bed, you would actually accomplish far more.

If you do happen to get a few hours in during the day when the kids are at school or nursery, then run round and do your chores first. Just get them out of the way so they are not playing on your mind – then settle down for some quality work time.

Speak to your family and ask for some support. My husband can’t cook – fact! But on the nights I ‘work’ he rustles up some pasta and tips a jar of sauce over it. Nuevo Cuisine it isn’t but it fills us up and it’s relatively healthy. I generally get the kids tea ready prior to this so they have already eaten.

If you don’t respect the fact that you have a JOB then nobody else will. You’ll have family and friends calling when you are supposed to be working because – heck – it aint a REAL job!

So – now you have established some actual work hours and you are spending time with your family too, let’s move one to the ‘to do’ list.

You need to make this list in order of priority. I would even go as far as to do it in days, so for example;

• Monday – write newsletter, update homepage offer

• Tues – Write a blog post and an article for marketing purposes

• Weds – Night off

• Thurs – Package items for posting

• Fri – insert whatever is relevant to your business…

Just by doing that – you’re more likely to achieve it and don’t forget – we’re all different people with different lives, different commitments and different goals – so you need to tailor this to YOU.

The other thing I want you to do is get yourself a timer. You could use an alarm, stop-watch or even the timer on the oven (if you can hear it from where you work). Now, set yourself a timer of 30 minutes and be totally committed to working for 30 minutes solid without checking your email or replying to a Tweet or doing anything that isn’t specifically on your list. YOU WILL BE AMAZED at how much you accomplish.

30 minute blocks work really well but if your timer goes off and you are right in the middle of something work-related and important, then set it for another 30 minutes. If you work solidly for an hour without distraction you will have produced more quality work that a whole week of dribs and drabs from Monday to Friday. This output will allow you to spend more time with your family and actually achieve quicker and better results.

Once your business really starts to pull in the pounds you can then start to outsource some tasks to enable you to still run your business but still enjoy the life you wanted.

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