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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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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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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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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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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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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