This morning I let myself sit with my son at my computer. He was snuggled perfectly into my lap, thrilled at the permission to explore typing on a computer. I let myself sit there without being stressed about doing the next thing I needed to do for my business.

I spent a lot of time this weekend playing school with my daughter and ball with my son. I spent a lot of time with my kids this weekend, and my soul is better for it.

While I make a valid attempt to focus extra time on each of my kids every day, rarely am I able to do it and completely let myself go - put the stress off for later and make a commitment to be in the moment with my kids. And just giving myself permission to let it all go for 15 beautiful minutes with my son actually gave me new life. It was like a breath of fresh air.

Most importantly, I could tell that my son could feel my calm. And his calm increased my calm. So, I’m on a mission to give myself permission to enjoy my children and my time with them without thinking about the outside world or the rest of life - or anything except them, what we’re doing, or where we are.

I started blogging for our business by writing about our start-up journey. We went through a lot of turmoil to get a website and e-commerce store launched, so I started blogging about it. However, it wasn’t long until I decided that I would keep my “startup” diary on a seperate blog. It is still a journey that I want to document, and I most definitely have plans to make money off of it, but our business blog wasn’t the appropriate place for me to rant about the trials and tribulations of starting a new company.

I made this decision because I want our ecommerce site, our business website, which is such a large part of our brand - to be nothing less than 100% professional.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t blog about experiences of running the business on our babyfabulous blog; especially since I’m a mom of two young kids and have plenty of experiences worth sharing. But I do not blog about problems I’m having with our business, whether it’s sourcing issues or time constraints.

I’m lucky, because for our baby products business, I can blog about all sorts of things “mommy-ish” and get away with it; new parents and parents of toddlers are a large portion of our customers. I’m sure you’d be surprised by how much there is to blog about for your business if you let yourself expand beyond the topics of your products.

Here are some ideas to get you started blogging:

• New products or services
• Events you are sponsoring or attending
• Industry news or links to articles your customers will appreciate
• Surveys
• Features of your customers or partners (I’m just about to post our first ’boutique’ feature - the boutique is escastic, I get a fresh blog post, I’m promoting one of our distributors, and I get a ton of keywords on baby gifts for my website - win, win, win).
• Post contests
• Share images
• Post your press releases

If you have an informative blog, you’ll keep your readers coming back!

Blogs are fast becoming the number one form of business-to-customer communication. Not long ago, blogs were still considered ‘out there’; a wild-card tool for the political arena. However, it didn’t take long for businesses to start exploring the use of blogs on their websites. People started asking, “do we or don’t we”? If you are serious about an online presence, then a blog is as much of a “must have” as a Contact Us page.

Today, I’ll touch on the benefits of having a blog for your business. In later posts I’ll get into optimizing your blog for maximum traffic generation, where to host your blog, and what to write about.

Here are the reasons you need a blog on your business website:

• Increases your visibility to your customer: In the online world, a website can be very cold and impersonal. A blog can change that by putting a personality behind your business and making your business feel more “real” and “accessible”.
• Increases traffic to your website: Online, the mantra is “Content is King”. A blogging platform is the simplest way to increase the amount of pertinant & relative content on your website.
• Opens your site to a whole new world of directories: Blogs can be listed in literally hundreds of blog-only directories which are not open to traditional websites. The caveat is that you can’t just be pitching your business - but if you set up your business blog as a valuable tool for your customers, your blog will be accepted by blog directories 8 times out of 10.
• Search Engine Optimization: A blog optimizes your site for the search engines in SO many ways. In an upcoming post, I will cover the details of optimizing your blog. Most importantly, a blog enables you to create content on a consistent basis, which draws the search engine spiders to your site on a consistent basis. The amount of visits your site gets from spiders and crawlers is crucial to your online presence.
• Link building: Link building is a good side-effect of a blog, but it shouldn’t be enough to make you create your blog on a different domain. The trade off for a few links is all of the content you create on the side domain; so all that content is doing nothing for your site. Content will bring you traffic much quicker than links will. And you will still be building links on your site by hosting your blog on your own domain. Keep your content for yourself, don’t lose all those hundreds of keywords in exchange for a couple of incoming links.

I can help you hit google page one for your keywords in a matter of months, if you start blogging for your business now. So, next we’ll talk about keywords and content.

Please comment if you have any questions or input. Would love to hear it!!

Hello! This is “blogging mommy” finally blogging in for the first time. Just to give you a quick introduction, my name is Amber, and my husband and I run two businesses; one is an infant / toddler clothing and accessories company called Baby Fabulous. The other is a blog-site setup business called Bizy Blogs.

I’ve been blogging for our infant and toddler business for over a year and a half now, so I’m here to help with all things pertaining to setting up your business blog, generating traffic through your blog, and even best practices for writing blog posts.

I’m a mother of two children, my son is 2 and my daughter is 4. They keep us on our toes, but they are THE reason that we run our own businesses in the first place.

As far as my writing background, I was the Arts & Entertainment editor for my college newspaper, and in my pre-”mompreneur” life, I made my living as a technical writer. I love to write and I love to design, so that’s why Baby Fabulous is a dream business for me. I get to blog and create press materials and web site copy, and I get to design cute little baby things, and most importantly, we get to do our own thing, manage our own time, and be a part of our children’s daily lives.

My husband handles the web-design and blog-site setups, as well as creates our graphic t designs and manages the website for Baby Fabulous. Luckily we’re a good team!