Working from Home

Please note, this post is sponsored by Diamond Bloggers. All opinions are my own. Thank you.

There are so many daily tasks that bloggers perform daily. Some mundane such as checking our SEOs or altering tags and categories. Others are more interesting like the creative endeavors that make blogging fun and exciting. The tasks that help to make the everyday humdrum of working from home more enjoyable. So if you’ve been in a blogging rut remember the following 3 creative endeavors to help you jumpstart your administrative process moving forward this year:

Advertising

For anyone who has made that transition to blogging knows that bloggers are nothing if not writers and art directors of their own personal public relations firm. To our credit, blogging has helped me to understand just how important crowdsourcing advice and tips can be when it comes to promoting and sharing my work with others.

Approachability

Blogging allows me the ability to be able to reach out to my audience in new ways each day. My platforms allow me to have a digital platform to express my feelings and commentary to others in a manner that is both approachable and accessible to others. Something especially important to me as an introvert extraordinaire.

Cultural Engagement

Bloggers have a constant opportunity to create a culture of honest engagement. Allowing anyone at any level to speak their mind, throw in an idea, or express their opinion about your work in small, feasible ways. Blogging allows you to be able to ascertain who your readers are, populate your media kit for potential clients, and create new seasonal campaigns. Work that helps you be a more creative writer, director, and interviewer moving forward.

Friends, those are the 5 ways that blogging helps you be a more creative director in your own digital perspective at home. Now I want to ask, how does blogging help you be a more creative person at home? I’d love to hear about it below!

Please note: This post is sponsored by Diamond Bloggers. All opinions are my own. Thank you.

One of the biggest buzzwords in the blogging world surrounds analytics. Or the way by which search engines are reporting and analyzing the information you post to the world each day. Which makes analytic tools for bloggers a true must.

Because blogs that struggle with disparate misinformation sourcing still must find a way to make data fit their niche and purpose. Through aggregation, standardization, and enrichment of posting sources.

An effective IT strategy can assist in the development of better posts, higher SEO rankings, and can help to eliminate gaps in advertising strategies. This helps bloggers create comprehensive and robust technology environments that boost engagement and improve cost-efficiency for marketing your posts too!

Now if you’re looking for more ways that you as a blogger can better manage a robust analytics platform for your blog, here are 5 ways to get started:

Scraping your browser: Scraping is a way to get information from a website into an Excel or sheets document. A carbon copy of your site that helps give you a better glance at how your site is performing. You can hire someone to build you a scraper or you can do the job yourself with a few clicks using a Google Chrome extension scraper that works right within your browser.

Behind the scenes, scrapers also help manage and guide individual blog posts as well. As a scraper retrieves HTML elements from a page based on the rules you specify. For everything wrapped in an <a> tag. Having your scraper data at hand will help you to find missing tags and help clean up your blogs SEO ranking. 

Surveys: Want to know who reads your blog? Consider using Google surveys. Google Surveys, when administered to your readers in posts, on media channels, or in newsletters, help you to ascertain who reads your site, what posts they enjoy reading, as well as a wide range of demographic data they include about your respondents. You don’t just get answers to your survey questions, you can see who answered them. This will help you down the road, especially when creating a media kit or giving demographic information during pitch netters to sponsors. 

Google Trends: I love to use Google trends to research keyword analytics. This allows you to discover how popular certain topics are over the past decade in terms of their global search volume. Basically, is this topic being searched more or less around the world, or in your specific area. I then use that data to splice blog posts based on how I perceive my audience will want to know that information or if the information would be better served on live broadcasting, in a podcast, or in a newsletter. 

Facebook Advertising: Facebook gives marketers lots of control over their ad targeting. If you need to get some calculations for how many people are interested in a particular topic, simply you set up a random advertising campaign and use the audience targeting feature. This will allow you to see how quickly your audience engaged in a specific product, service, affiliate link, or blog topic idea before investing vast amounts of time and money into that field. Its a great resource tool before rebranding your blog or adding new social media features too. 

Izenda: Using a professional reporting and analytics company can equip your blogging platform with the tools to take your SEO from novice to robust in a matter of weeks versus years. While giving your potential sponsors insights they need, when they need them, to begin working with you. 

For such services I recommend Izenda. Which help bloggers and small business owner daily better utilize digital data management and ad-hoc reporting across various departments, blogs, and fields. This can also help bloggers determine domain strategies are no longer relevant to your blog management strategy.

Companies such as Izenda can help you master data management relationships that offer Microsoft MDM and Multi-Domain platform master data management to influencers and strategies from all digital walks of life. A service that can help take your blog to new platforms in the months and years to come.

Those are my top 5 ways to help you better address your blogging and blog marketing strategies this season by way of data policies, analyzing SEO, and database management systems. Methods that can help propel your blog and pitching to the next level in 2018. Now I want to ask, do you have any top strategies for assessing your blog analytic strategies? I’d love to hear about them below!

Please note: This post has been Diamond Bloggers. All opinions expressed are mine. Thank you.

There are so many everyday tasks that bloggers perform daily. Some mundane such as checking our SEOs or altering tags and categories. Others are more interesting like the creative endeavors that make blogging fun and exciting. The tasks that help to make the everyday humdrum of working from home more enjoyable. So if you’ve been in a blogging rut remember the following 5 creative endeavors that help make blogging fun:

Advertising

For anyone who has made that transition to blogging knows that bloggers are nothing if not writers and art directors of their own personal public relations firm. To our credit, blogging has helped me to understand just how important crowdsourcing advice and tips can be when it comes to promoting and sharing my work with others.

Setting Objectives

Bloggers have the awesome opportunity each day to set creative objectives that help improve their work moving forward. Each day your blog allows you to transmit helpful material understandable way to your audience by way of infographics, informative links, or convincing points of reference.

Approachability

Blogging allows me the ability to be able to reach out to my audience in new ways each day. My platforms allow me to have a digital platform to express my feelings and commentary to others in a manner that is both approachable and accessible to others. Something especially important to me as an introvert extraordinaire.

Temperature Taking

Each time a blogger ends a post or newsletter they are able to gauge the temperature of their reader’s opinions and positions. You are given the opportunity to engage your readers by asking them how your piece resonated with them, how you can tailor future pieces.

Cultural Engagement

Bloggers have a constant opportunity to create a culture of honest engagement.  Allowing anyone at any level to speak their mind, throw in an idea, or express their opinion about your work in small, feasible ways. Blogging allows you to be able to ascertain who your readers are, populate your media kit for potential clients, and create new seasonal campaigns. Work that helps you be a more creative writer, creator, and more interview post sources moving forward.

Friends, those are the 5 ways that blogging helps you be a more creative director. Now I want to ask, how does blogging help you be a more creative person at home? I’d love to hear about it below!

(Photo Source)

In such a fast-paced world, balancing your time whilst also making enough money to survive can be a challenge; as can ensuring a plentiful supply of time with your family whilst simultaneously nurturing your career… let alone squeezing in the “me time” necessary to keep you sane.  

Without a doubt, life can feel like a balancing act where we are trying to squeeze the most out of our two most precious resources – time and money.

Time is an often overlooked and under-appreciated gift. We are all blessed with 24 hours each day, yet many of these hours are spent doing things that truly don’t matter to you or create value to your life; as an example, being sat in traffic each day.

Life is short and unpredictable, and of course, there are necessary things that none of us enjoy which need to be taken care of, but sometimes we live our lives as if tomorrow is somehow guaranteed and forget to squeeze the most out of life.

Indeed, whilst we all know we have a finite amount of time here – it’s not usually until something shakes us up, like the death of a close friend or a terminal diagnosis that we truly appreciate the value of time.  Consider, for example, the film “The Bucket List” where two guys are diagnosed with cancer and decide from that point in to use their remaining time to fully experience life.

Today, new mom’s for example, are having to work such long hours they end up missing out on the joy of parenting; either they’re too emotionally exhausted from having to balance their career with being a mother, or they are so time-starved they barely get the chance to spend time with their family.

Similarly, with single career-focused women, their career can become their life… and with so many distractions now vying for our attention, in today’s world we need to look at ways to have more free time freedom so that we can engage in the important things in life; rather than living in a perpetual state of reaction where we are just trying to keep balance.

As women, we are often guilty of playing the role of “caretaker” too well, in that we take care of everyone else first and leave ourselves to last, but it’s worth thinking about the safety announcement you hear when flying; how you should always attend to your own oxygen mask before helping others.  

In a similar vein, it’s important to remember that life is for you… as well as your family and your career… it’s important to set time aside for yourself too and really connect with yourself.

We’ve established that time is an incredibly valuable resource so let’s now take a look at some time-saving tips to help you focus on what matters most:

1. ORDER GROCERIES ONLINE

Think of how much time you could save if you were to simply order your groceries online and have them delivered to your door.  The drive to the store, the time in the store, packing bags, driving back, unpackaging bags, not to mention the potential for traffic.  Setting essential items to repeat on a weekly or monthly basis is a great way to keep on top of things without having to exert much mental energy.

2. GET A CLEANER

It’s true that not everyone can afford a cleaner, but this can be such a time (and sanity) saver, particularly for busy moms.  In the alternative, you can always turn cleaning into a fun game where the kids get involved with cleaning as playtime activity; or set yourself a timer and see how much you can get done in just thirty minutes making cleaning a slightly more engaging and manageable task.

3. WORK REMOTELY

If possible, see if you can work remotely, from home, in a way that enables you to work flexible hours; this way, your time is your own.  Similarly, if you study, nowadays you can study most courses online without needing to attend a physical class – as an example, you can even study online rn bsn degrees.  This not only saves time but also money, as online courses are often cheaper due to the reduced overheads… plus you don’t need to travel to the course or get overnight accommodation, which in addition to cost savings, means more quality time with your family.

4. ORGANISE YOUR TIME

The convenience of online working and online studying means you have much more time to enjoy your life, and for that matter build a life.  We spend far too much time living in reaction to work – trying to fit our lives in, yet it doesn’t have to be that way; the amount of time you can save by having a good planning system in place is phenomenal… a lot of “time management” comes down to first planning your tasks so that you can keep on top of things with ease.

6.  WORK WHEN YOU WORK

Brian Tracy, a pre-eminent time management expert advocates the idea that you work when you work and rest when your rest; meaning if you are sitting down to work – ensure you have a singular laser-like focus on the task at hand in a distraction-free environment.  Today, particularly when working from home, people multitask by working with their laptop on their lap whilst having the TV on in the background or even dropping in and out of a conversation with their spouse.  

By fully working when you work, you can reduce the amount of time you are needing to work – and you’ll get the added benefit of being able to fully rest when you rest.

7.  THE PARETO PRINCIPLE

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule suggests 20% of our activities account for 80% of the outcome.  In simple terms, you want to focus on what tasks are going to have the greatest impact and get these done first.  Often, we can get lost in the small tasks that create a lot of “busyness” in our lives and detract from the time we need to manage our “business” – be that in a commercial or personal context.  

The best way to determine what your most valuable tasks are is to write out a list of all your tasks for the day, week, or month and then determine which tasks are going to create the greatest impact; then make sure you focused on these tasks above all else.  This time management principle is the cornerstone of almost all books on the subject and is just as applicable to busy mom’s as it is to busy executives.

Friends, those are my tips for managing The Great Balancing Act at home and in life. Share your story below. What are your best tips for managing it all at home? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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You might have already noticed a new trend for mothers to give up their full-time job and embark on a freelance career from the comfort of their own home. There are many reasons why lots of ladies are now choosing to become mompreneurs this way.

For instance, it cuts out the expensive and long commute from their day, and it also gives them the chance to create a working schedule that works around their other commitments.

Not only that, though, but it gives them the chance to stay at home with their baby so that they can spend more time with their little one and they don’t have to pay for costly childcare.

Do you think that being a mompreneur could be the answer to some of your problems? If so, you need to make sure you have all the following traits to ensure your new career is a big success!

(Photo Source)

A Willingness To Learn

Once you do set up your own home-based business, you will be responsible for it and how far it goes. In order to keep on growing and developing it, you will need to be willing to keep on learning and further your education.

For instance, there are many courses, such as an operations management degree online, that will help you to create a solid foundation of knowledge to help you get started with your freelance company. Whenever you see a relevant course or training day, it really is worth taking it, as all of this learning will set you up for the future!

A Strong Imagination

All mompreneurs need a good imagination – and that’s not just so you can come up with new stories to tell your kids every time they expect a bedtime story! First of all, you will need to think of a niche and USP for your freelancing business.

Imagination can help you settle on one that will help you stand out from the crowd. Having some creative imagination will also help you develop your brand and settle on a cool design for your website!

Plenty Of Energy

Even though new moms aren’t known for being the most energetic people on the planet, you are going to need to find a lot of energy from somewhere.

Even if it means upping your daily intake of coffee, all that extra energy will certainly help you push your business as far as you can take it. The energy that will come in useful when your child is demanding your attention!

Great Networking Skills

All business owners need to be good networkers, but it is especially important once you become a mompreneur.

Not only will good networking put you in touch with new clients, but it will also give you the chance to reach out to similar moms in your situation. You’ll be able to help each other and swap advice and useful tips.

If you have these traits, then you definitely have what it takes to become a successful mompreneur! 

Now, friends, I want to ask, do you have traits or skills you think are essential for moms and women working from home? If so, I’d love to hear about them below!

Recommended by MovingBabies

Please note, this post is being sponsored by Diamond Bloggers. All opinions are my own. Thank you.

Most of us remember the days when journalists held the key to a company’s earned publicity. Companies hired PR personnel to cultivate relationships with journalists and land coveted print and communication placements. 

Today that landscape has changed by leaps and bounds. With bloggers and digital influencers replacing traditional media relationships and working to build strong ties with traditional media outlets.

Because with influencers growing purchasing behavior, they have become the gatekeepers to your audience. Which is why build strong relationships with online influencers are key.

As a blogger myself I know this first-hand how intricate the working blogger to PR relationship can be. If you too are looking for 5 ways your PR agency or company can reach out and better work with bloggers this year:

Bloggers know your audience: Bloggers understand the age, gender, location, interests, hobbies, and desires of your audience. These are the people you want to target your audience. They are the pulse of current social trends. Make sure to do your homework and work with bloggers who they themselves fit the dynamic you are looking for in a potential online customer.

A great way to ensure a perfect blogger fit is by asking to see their media kit. The working tally of their readership’s demographic data, reach, analytics, and post sponsored work. Bloggers love sharing their portfolios and many even list them directly in their about me or disclosure section of their blogs. Never be afraid to ask to see their kits before working together!

You need to know what your offering to bloggers: Before reaching out to bloggers its best to have already determined what it is that you want to offer the blogger in exchange for them to do a blog post on your company or what shared information you are looking for on their social channels.

You may be thinking that a compelling interview, interesting infographic, an entertaining video would be enough. This is not the case. Bloggers should be provided with a sample of your product or service, a giveaway that they can share with their readers, and monetary compensation. Or a mix of all three. You’re looking for a total figure equal a blogger’s current rate of promotion.

Also making sure to never ask bloggers to recommend services and products they themselves have never experienced, sampled, or used in their homes or businesses. It’s disingenuous. To your business and our readership’s time and money, respectfully.

Bloggers require funding for publicity and PR agencies and businesses to utilize their platforms. Writing to bloggers stating that “we don’t have the budget for that at this time,” is just in poor taste. It’s manipulation. When the brevity of the situation is that you don’t want to budget blogger fees in your current business plan because you’re seeking free publicity.

Bloggers may not openly say this, but they all think it: That it’s not a bloggers responsibility to help you meet your budgets. To offer you free publicity at the expensive of their own time, income, and platform. Unless you can compensate bloggers for their time, don’t reach out at all. 

Afterall, we are not journalists. Blogging is our livelihood. Our time, value, and worth is far greater than earned publicity. Would you work for acknowledgments? Neither should we.

You might need to audit your current Blogger relationships: Do you have any current blogger relationships? If so, make sure you are checking in with your bloggers quarterly. Feel free to ask them what they want to hear about from your company and what would make a compelling blog post. Also, ask them to recommend other blogger friends that might be interested in learning about your brand.

You need to take time to build your own lists: Blogger outreach is time intensive. Especially if you are manually researching and building lists of the bloggers you are going to contact. It’s worth investing time in finding relevant bloggers in your specific niche. Social media is a great place to start, as hashtags can help you narrow down your search greatly online. Once you’ve found your bloggers, spend some time developing your own list as to why these bloggers will want to work with your company. This will help you better pitch bloggers. 

You need to learn what Bloggers want: Bloggers, like people, want personalized attention. Before reach out to them get an idea of their specific interests, needs, and life circumstances. Bloggers about me section will be a gold mine for you in this area. When it comes time to contact them, tailor, and personalize your pitch. Making sure to address them by name. I can personally attest that generic pitches are often deleted in my own business inbox. 

Bloggers have come to expect one-on-one professionalism. We expect to be pitched with offers tailored to our blogs and for sponsorships we can adequately and reasonably promote.

A great first step is to directly introduce yourself via email, say hello through social media direct messaging, and be accessible in the days to come. Allow bloggers time to respond to you before circling back around with errant pitches. It also goes without saying that a please and thank you will take you far in life. Especially with bloggers. 

A nice touch might be sending them a thoughtful email, handwritten letter, or even a discount code so they can continue using your product or service. I cannot tell you how much of a letdown it is to finish a post, gift guide, or media scheduling onto to hear crickets from PR agencies or agents. It’s tantamount to usury. Blogging is nothing but a symbiotic relationship.

Which is why keeping in contact with bloggers and influencers is a great strategy for future blogger outreach campaigns. Don’t make it a one-and-done project. Touch base. Schmooze. Be a helpful resource for topics they are interested in, and maintain ongoing partnerships this year. Bloggers will work harder when they feel they are in a relationship with businesses and agencies. 

An excellent example of corrective PR strategies when working with bloggers is Nancy Behrman, founder of Behrman Communications.

Nancy Behrman began her career at the 1984 Winter Olympics. Hired to create buzz around Jami Morse and her fiancé, Klaus Heidegger. A Public Relations outreach opportunity that within only helped land her clients on the cover of the New York Times’ Sports Section, in USA Today, on Good Morning America. Nancy made it happen by way of creating positive working relationships, creating symbiotic relationships with journalists, and maintains this same attention to detail and ethics when working with bloggers today.  With a career motto. “I will make it happen,” she is a force to be reckoned with in public relations.

In 1985, Nancy founded Behrman Communications. She landed her first client, Kiehl’s, the same year— a stellar case study in how an effective and innovative public relations campaign can elevate a brand. The company remained a star client until its sale to L’Oréal in 2001. In 1993, Nancy began working with Burt’s Bees, and later with other brand greats including Clarisonic, Creed, Eos, Fresh, Lancôme, L’Oréal Paris, Oakley, Philosophy, Red Flower, Shu Uemura, Trish McEvoy, Tweezerman, Ulta and Vita Liberata.

A pioneer in the world of lifestyle brand publicity, Nancy Behrman was also one of the first to understand the influential role that beauty and health could have in the media world. Over the years, she has developed successful creative partnerships with her clients because of her “hands on” approach. It works for her business and her family. 

Nancy is a great example of brands knowing the importance of allowing others to sampling their products or services. Including bloggers. For without that component, you will not have the kind of success you strive for. Because businesses who are not ready to allow others to sample their products, business strategies, and creative talent, bloggers shouldn’t work with these clients. They are not set up for success.

Nancy is the living, working example of the 5 previously mentioned things Bloggers want PR Agents to know in 2018. For all those fledgling businesses wanting to make this the year that you break the blogger working code, I hope these 5 tips will help you start healthy working relationships with bloggers too! 

Now I want to ask, what do you think has been your greatest misconception about working with bloggers from a PR perspective? I’d love to hear about it below!