For some stay at home moms, myself included, lack of money can be a constant challenge that you face. Maybe that’s why you have decided to start your own business. For me… it helped to nudge me in that direction.
The first thing that a stay at home mom realizes when she sets her mind to starting her own business is that “they” really do know what they are talking about when “they” say… it takes money to make money. So what is a stay at home mom supposed to do to get the money it takes to make money?
Thought I was going to have an answer? Wrong. I am currently going through this situation as we speak. I was fortunate enough to be interested in a business idea that doesn’t take all that much money to start up. But when you are dealing with little to no extra money… it’s a challenge. Read the rest of this entry »
I am very, very happy to announce that Body Art by Erin is now up and running. I am super happy with it’s design an would like to give a big thank you to my husband Ken Savage for all his work.
He dropped everything he was doing to work with me in creating this site. It actually came out almost exactly as I had imagined it in my mind… how often does that happen? Read the rest of this entry »
I have been all consumed with getting the website up and running for my newest endeavor, Body Art By Erin.
I figured I would let you all know how it’s coming. I have most of the content ready to be put online and I have been working feverishly to document all the different face painting and body art designs that I have done. Now that I’ve figured out a technique for taking my own picture this is going a lot quicker.
For some reason I am unable to upload any images in my posts here at the moment so I’ll just provide you a link for my flickr page where you can check out some of my photos.
I have two festivals in September that I plan on attending and am working to spread word of mouth about my services being perfect for birthday parties.
Well it seems that I will be getting to experience yet another role in this life… children’s face painter. I have volunteered to run a face painting booth at an anniversary celebration for Shaw Farm which is a local dairy farm.
This has been a very interesting couple of weeks for my kid since I have used him to practice many of my face painting designs.
This weekend was a big hit and I have really learned something important about myself throughout all of this… I love face painting. Read the rest of this entry »
Mother’s Day only comes around once a year so you really need to make this Mother’s Day count.
There have been times in the past when I was left disappointed on Mother’s Day. It could have been because I thought we were going to do one thing or another and didn’t, I had to run around to all the other “mother’s” houses in my life, or I still found myself doing things around the house on my special day.
Making your Mother’s Day special this year is easy. I’m going to give you just a few tips that will help you make your Mother’s Day count this year.Read the rest of this entry »
As a stay at home mom/work at home mom it is easy to fall into a trap of thinking that you have no time to incorporate exercise into your schedule.
After all, not only do you have your work at home job to do but now that you run your home like a business your time management is very important.
But do you know what’s even more important than running your home smoothly? Your health and the example that you are setting for your children. If mama’s not healthy, ain’t nobody healthy.Read the rest of this entry »
In a time when everyone has a website you need to be thinking into your child’s future about their website and secure a domain name for your child.
Do you think this sounds crazy? Think again. There are countless future uses that your child could be using their own name as a website for. What better way to ensure that your child has all of their options open then by securing their domain name for them now? Read the rest of this entry »
What’s even harder than getting up and going to work on days when you just feel like hiding under your covers all day? Getting up and going to work even though your bed and couch are in your general vicinity all day long.
Every person in the world has days from time to time when they are feeling a little off and their motivation is in the toilet. But not every person has to try and be productive on these days while they are sitting in their own home. Now that takes some doing.
Mama told me there’d be days like this but she didn’t really tell me how to deal with them. Luckily I’ve figured out a few tricks that help me keep my motivation on bad days. Read the rest of this entry »
So, you wake up sneezing every morning and you lay there wondering what it is in your bedroom that is causing your allergic reaction. Sorry to tell you, it’s probably the dust mites in your mattress that are making you sneeze. But how do you remove dust mites from your mattress?
About 10 percent of Americans have a severe allergic reaction to Dust Mites but countless others have slight to moderate reactions which include annoying sneezing fits.
So if the typical used mattress contains anywhere from 100 thousand to 10 million dust mites inside of it, what are we supposed to do? Well before you go throwing out all of your mattresses and sleeping on the floor, there are several techniques that can be used to greatly reduce the amount of dust mites that live in your mattress. Read the rest of this entry »
In a time when a single income usually isn’t enough to support an entire family, there are more and more mom’s who are both a stay at home mom and a work at home mom.
With the average stay at home mom working about 90+ hours per week around the house it really leaves the question of how to fit your work at home mom duties in with your stay at home mom duties.
My answer to this baffling question is to run your home like a business and perform both your work at home mom duties and your stay at home mom duties seamlessly. It’s not always easy…but I can tell you first hand that it can be done. Read the rest of this entry »
For anyone who has never been in the position of a stay at home mom or stay at home dad, let me tell you that if you’re not careful you can wind up with low self esteem.
It’s not always easy for a stay at home mom to realize that she’s losing her self esteem until it’s too late. Forget that! Here are some ways that a stay at home mom can maintain her self esteem and keep herself motivated to do the very important jobs of raising a family and running a household. Read the rest of this entry »
You want to start a site or a blog so you begin to think about what you like, what you know, and what you could stomach writing about on a daily basis…you create your niche.
What happens when you begin to slowly realize the horror that your niche is over saturated? Welcome to the plight of the stay at home mom niche.
What to do? Do you throw in the towel for your current niche and move on? Do you just move forward with what you had planned hoping that you can somehow rise to the top of your niche market? OR…do you try to use your over saturated niche market as an advantage?
The thing that being a stay at home mom and being a content creator have in common is…I love doing both.
But was it always this way? Did I come out of the gate loving my role as a stay at home mom? If it weren’t for my position as a stay at home mom would I have ever taken on the role of web content creator? Hmmmm.
If you really break down the roles of both the stay at home mom and the stay at home web content creator you actually can see how one compliments the other.
What? You don’t want to go through the hassle of breaking down the important qualities of each? Well, that’s what I’m here for. All you have to do is keep reading. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s easy to keep repeating the SEO mantra of “content is king”, but at the end of the day, sometimes it can be difficult to produce mind blowing and optimized content on a daily basis. Sure, some companies are blessed with a copywriting and public relations team which can churn out content at the flip of a switch, but what about the companies and consultants who do not?
A great copywriter is worth his or her weight in gold, but it can take years to find a writer who can transform what they learned in copywriting school (if one so exists) into SEO and blog post style copywriting; like having a 1,000 word article writer transform their thoughts into the restricted world of Twitter posts or AdWords copy.
For the rest of us, we tend to go onto the web and try such services as eLance or Odesk, which can deliver good people, but a lot of trial and error AND wasted money is needed to find those good people after you’ve burnt through hundreds of bad ones.
So, how do yo find a good copywriter? I’m going to review some tactics which have worked for me and others, along with some resources that should help you along your path.
To start things off, here are some tips we discussed at IM Spring Break on hiring and grading copywriters:
Never pay for your first article : If you were a magazine, newspaper or other publication, chances are you would require that the copywriter pitches you with a fresh article given the criteria you want. For example, if you have a home improvement site, give the copywriter 2 or 3 ideas for an article, a deadline, the amount of words and other basic info and see what they come back with. If it’s great content, then formulate a copywriting agreement. If it’s not good at all, move on to another writer. At least this way, if you get bad content back, you’ll only be losing money in time, and not paying out a writer. Furthermore, you’ll have an idea on how they are at reaching deadlines and turn around.
Do They Have a Grasp of SEO? : So once you obtain your first sample article from the prospective copywriter, look at their writing style and their structure. Do they have SEO in mind? I can’t tell you the amount of time I’ve spent re-doing a good article with no SEO what-so-ever. If you find a good copywriter, make sure to introduce them to keyword research tools, basic SEO guidelines, and the proper use of headers. This will not only save you editing time, but also will help with your traffic in the long run.
Formulate a Payment Structure: This is a rather big one in my book. If you are outsourcing a copywriter for the purpose of generating good content for a low price, not to over pay them. I suggest that if you are contracting out to India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Russia or even New Zealand; get a grasp of the local payment structures and common wages. Chances are that you’ll pay way too much if you do not. If the average daily income is $5 and you’re paying someone $10 an hour for their time, something is wrong with the picture. Sure, if the contractor is churning out good content and service, then bonuses are key, but start at a managable and reasonable level so you can move up the payscale when needed, and not overpay in the beginning.
I’d like to also add that paying per blogpost or per word is fine, but paying per hour and expecting a certain number of posts per hour can save you a lot of money, and heck, don’t most of us get paid on an hourly scale anyway?
Performance & Success Metrics : Link I hinted to above, use success metrics to grade your writers. Set up measurable metrics like the number of inbound links, bookmarks, votes and traffic each of their posts receive. This way, you’ll have some numbers behind the performance and this will also incentivize your writers to push your content out via social media networks and communication tools like Twitter. Give your writers that produce the most return different bonuses and keep the ones around who are producing. And if some aren’t, don’t be afraid to let them go because you may be opening up a spot for the next future Rockstar.
So, where to begin finding copywriters?
As I mentioned before, Odesk is a good place to begin. One aspect I really like about Odesk is that it uses screenshots to track the hours worked by the freelancers. So, if you’re paying for 20 hours of work per week, and 5 of those hours you’re seeing nothing is being done or the freelancer is playing World of Warcraft, you can catch them and either reform them or let them go.
Furthermore, Odesk works in a very professional atmosphere, working almost like a matchmaking service, and helps you to interview and select the best people for your job. Then, using Odesk, you also manage your remote development team, so it pretty much has all the services you need rolled into one in terms of managing a copywriting team.
In addition to Odesk, I’m also a big fan of using Craigslist as a recruiting tool for copywriters. By utilizing Craigslist, you can target seasoned professionals in various fields who are in your local area.
For example, if you have your Home Improvement site, why not look for out of work contractors who can also write? There are a lot of people out of jobs right now who need extra money and live right in your backyard. You never know, you may be able to not only find some really good local writers via Craigslist, but also bring them into the office for a part time or fulltime gig if they do turn out to be the Rockstar who you desire.
Furthermore, on a personal level I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment knowing that I can help out someone in my local area who is highly qualified, and can honestly churn out more work in an hour for a competitive rate (in the office or Starbucks) than an offshore copywriter may charge for just one article.
By hiring a part time contractor, I can give them the goals of churning out one or two articles or posts an hour, get them commenting on the posts of others and also using their social media networks to assist with our projects. These are also people who have networked in the local business area, and can perhaps bring in new clients or make excellent connections. They know other likeminded local people and can attract other students and interns to our business, and other Twitters via TweetUps.
One other service I’d like to mention today is TextBroker, which is a little different and simpler than the above methods of finding and hiring copywriters. TextBroker is a content generation marketplace which matches your ideas with quality copywriters (with strengths in various categories) who accept jobs and deliver them to you in a timely manner, matching your asking price on the piece of content.
TextBroker’s pricing structure is fairly cheap, and if you don’t like the content as provided by your writer, you can refuse it or ask for a rewrite. If you like it, you can “favorite” the copywriter and work with them via the TextBroker system in the future. TextBroker gives a reasonably priced fixed-word-rate or direct negotiations to get the best price possible. You’re not going to get the best work out of this service, but if you need to churn out 100 articles or posts for a site and need original content (all articles are checked for duplicate content via Copyspace), this might be a good option or alternative.
I only manage copywriters for several projects, but I’m sure there are many readers who manage a lot more. Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.
Well depending on who you are talking to you will be given one of two schools of thought on whether or not content is king when it comes to ranking well with search engines.
If you are talking to an SEM who’s job it is to make sure that a website is ranking well in the search engines you can be sure that they are not going to tell you that content is king. They are going to go down the list of proven techniques that are implemented to get a website ranking well on the search engines. That is, after all, their job right?
It is my opinion that while things like backlinks can be successfully used as techniques to improve ranking with search engines, these techniques should be used in conjunction with excellent content. Are you also using social media and web 2.0 sites to connect to people and not worry about the search engine rankings.
It just seems that with all the focus that is being put on algorithms we are forgetting what the purpose of the web is all about… information. If your site contains fresh, well written, informative, and entertaining content that is updated often you can be sure that you will not only rank well but that you will hold that ranking and more important, the readers attention.
For some stay at home moms, myself included, lack of money can be a constant challenge that you face. Maybe that’s why you have decided to start your own business. For me… it helped to nudge me in that direction.
