Motivating Mum UK

Do you ever make one of those phone calls where you are talking to machines all the time, and wish that you could speak to a human being?  I’ve just come off a call where I think I was speaking to human beings the whole time, but they were as close to machines as it is possible to be.  Each interaction was perfectly polite and scripted – I think the sort of thing that we would all like to see in business, but the excess of it, and the different stages I needed to go through to get my query “registered” are beyond belief.  As to whether my claim will be dealt with or settled – well we will have to see. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been completely blown away by your response to my recent article, facebook and twitter campaign, suggesting that you should go and look at Andy Bailey’s new free video series “How to Get People to Notice You on the Internet”

If Andy Bailey’s stats are to be believed then I have managed to persuade more people to go and look at that in the past week, than I have persuaded to visit the rest of Motivating Mum in the past month.  Maybe I should take this as a hint……

I have to say though that the videos are excellent, and I can’t believe that they are free – I would gladly have paid for them.  I have learned a lot from them, and those of you that have come back to comment on twitter and elsewhere have all said that you have enjoyed them too. You must have done because you have spread the word for me – thank you so much for that.

Of course Andy Bailey hasn’t put out these excellent videos just for the sake of his health, nor is it total philanthropy – he wants to draw attention to the release of his excellent CommentLuv Premium plugin.

It is perfectly possible to view the videos and not buy the plugin, but I stand by my original decision to promote these videos even with the product attached – because I believe it is the best WordPress plug in I have, bar none. You can read my original review of Commentluv premium here.

The latest news is that the Commentluv Premium launch started on Wednesday 16th November. It is being sold at a special price until November 30th, with a whole pile of attached freebies – so if you are even remotely interested in having this plugin on your WordPress blog then grab it now.

So, seeing as so many of my readers are interested in Andy Bailey, his videos and his plugins, I have decided to give away a free copy of Commentluv Premium, or rather, I will reimburse to one of my readers, the purchase price that Andy Bailey announces on Wednesday.

If you would like to be in with a chance to have your purchase price reimbursed, please leave your name and email address:

Then when you have purchased and installed your copy of Commentluv Premium, please come back and leave a comment on this post with a link to your site.  That way we can get to know each other better.

On 30th November, I will pick one subscriber who has left a comment, and will reimburse to them the sum that Andy Bailey picks for the launch price of Commentluv Premium on Wednesday.

Please note, I am not insisting that you buy your copy of Commentluv Premium using my affiliate links, although it would be nice.  If you are already signed up with one of the other affiliates – and even if you have entered their competitions and giveaways too, that is fine by me.  I don’t even mind, if, like me, you have already installed Commentluv Premium.  As long as it is on your site on 30th November and you have left me your email and a friendly comment, then you are in. If you leave your twitter name then I will follow you too, and visit your blog.

I just want to get to know a large community of fellow Commentluvvers, because I think that community is what this plugin is all about.

If you have been to my blog before, or if you are a regular blog reader you may have noticed the Comment Luv box at the bottom when you come to leave a comment. You may have wondered what is so great about the Comment Luv system, and why people would want to use it on their blog. Here for the record are the main reasons, in no particular order, why I choose to use Comment Luv Premium on Motivating Mum.

1. Comment Luv asks you to tick a box to confirm that you are not a spammer.  That very small action means that the vast majority of spam that was coming to my blog before, now doesn’t get through.Comment Luv Premium comes packaged with some very efficient anti-spam software called GASP, which so far has proven even more efficient on Motivating Mum than the premium version of Akismet. That one feature in itself makes Comment Luv Premium worth the money.
2. When you leave a comment on Motivating Mum, you are encouraged to post a link to your most recent blog post. That is great for you and great for me too.
   - It’s great for you, because why wouldn’t you want a back link to your site coming from Motivating Mum?- It’s great for me because I love to see who my followers are, read their blogs and communicate with them.  I promise that wherever possible I will come, visit and comment on your blog if you leave a sensible relevant comment on mine.  If you have Comment Luv too, I will come back several times (I like my backlinks…).

   This is how communities are formed and I just love it. Motivating Mum has had lots more comments since I installed Commentluv Premium and I’ve been to see lots of interesting blogs

3. When you come to leave a comment on my blog you are also prompted to leave your twitter handle and also to Like the post on Facebook, Tweet and/or +1 the post. Once again, if you do this little job for me (it takes all of one second to press those little buttons) then I promise you, I will come and do likewise, and I will follow you on twitter too. Share and share alike!
4. If you hang around a bit and make three sensible comments on different posts of mine, then you will get all sorts of cool benefits. Firstly you can choose any of your last ten posts to link to – so you can show me lots of your wonderful content, and I will come and read and comment on it all! Also you can put keywords after your name when leaving a comment, so you get a link to your site from mine with a keyword of your choice, How much more of a present would you like me to give your blog?   (by the way, if you have Comment Luv Premium too, you will get this benefit on all Comment Luv blogs even before you leave 3 sensible comments….)
5. As you can imagine, once people find out about the cool benefits of Comment Luv enabled blogs, not only do they want to get Comment Luv installed on their own site, but they also want to go out and find loads of Comment Luv enabled sites to leave comments on and build those juicy backlinks. It’s becoming quite a community.Those of you who want to go looking for a targeted list of Comment Luv enabled blogs, here is a great list curated by my friend Ana Hoffman of Traffic Generation Cafe.

   Her list is sorted by Page Rank and all the blogs on it have something to do with internet marketing.  It’s a great resource to start Comment Luv blog hopping. And yes, Motivating Mum is on it! (PR3 for those of you who care about such things).

So those are the reasons why I have Comment Luv Premium installed on my blog.  I think you will agree that they make a fairly comprehensive and exciting package.

If you want to get Comment Luv on your blog, you need to register on the Comment Luv site – the next batch of Comment Luv Premium licences will be for sale in a few days.

While you are waiting – the author of Commentluv, Andy Bailey will treat you to a series of free videos entitled How to Get Noticed on the Internet

These videos are worth signing up for on their own even if you didn’t want to buy Commentluv Premium at this point. Andy is an amazing presenter and his content is fresh and compelling.

Once you have signed up on Andy’s site, and while you are waiting, why not test this fab new plugin by leaving some comments below or on some of my other posts, then tweeting and liking them. Then look out for me lurking near your site sometime soon…..

I know some of you will be thinking that I am four months early, but bear with me……Now that my children are back at school, my life seems to revolve round the school year. I buy an academic year calendar for the kitchen, so I have just taken the old one down and put a new one up.

Also, having spent the summer in downtime, planning, September always feels like a rebirth, a new season for my business, and also for me. This just seems like a more sensible time for me to celebrate New Year, so I would just like to say Happy New Year to you all.

So having got that out of the way (you probably still think I’m weird but hopefully you have decided to humour me)  I have decided to make my New Year’s Resolutions now. Part of me always feels January is the wrong time anyway – it so dark and cold and miserable – very hard to get up and find the energy to commit to anything new. If I make the resolutions now and get started on them, I will be in a much stronger place come January.

So here for the record are my New Year’s Resolutions – business and personal.

1 To grow my social media following and interact better and smarter and more personally with you all

2 To move my business as far as is feasible onto the Cloud, to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy that engulfed me in July.

3 To find ways to work smarter and more efficiently and to stop giving my time to unproductive activities.

4 To finally once and for all, declutter my house, and set up routines and tidy habits that will make my whole life run more smoothly.

5 To look out for and act on money saving tips and advice, cutting down on wastage throughout my home and business

6 To eat healthily and take regular exercise.

So far so good. But I also know that all the productivity gurus reckon that one of the best techniques when setting goals is to hold yourself accountable. So for that reason, I am going to be sharing snapshots from my journey towards these goals on my blog.

I hope to share with you the hints, tips and tools that I have found the most useful in achieving the goals above. Once a month or so, I hope to do a wrap up blog where I will set out the progress I have made in each area. I hope to be able to inform, inspire educate and entertain you, as I journey towards my goals in these areas. I would also be very happy to hear your advice and anything you can share that will help.

Is anybody else setting goals at this time of year? What are you committing yourself to, and what are you going to do to make this the best year ever?

Most of you will know that I suffered a fairly major computer crash last weekend.   Thankfully I didn’t lose absolutely everythng as my main email database is stored online on Mail Chimp (thank goodness) so the first thing I did was send out and let you all know what was happening, and delay some things that I was working on.  Thank you to all of you who offered words of support and encouragement, and thank you too to those who offered suggestions as to things I could do to prevent it from happening again.

I pride myself on being fairly IT literate, and smugly I thought I had a reasonably good back up strategy in place.  I have a computer, an iphone and an ipad, and I regularly synchronise my diary, contacts and to do list between the three.  However it just goes to show that you mustnt get too complacent – in my case several things happened together which threw me into disarray, and highlighted some bad habits I had let myself get into.

Firstly my main computer wouldn’t let me in to my log in at all – all emails, files and everything was inaccessible to me.

Then by coincidence my ipad crashed on the same day – but the back up for it was stored on my main computer – grrrrr…..

While trying to put it all back together I realised that although I do have a proper digital to do list, which was backed up on my iphone (smug pat on the back!), I also have an unofficial to do list, consisting of emails in my Outlook inbox, which I haven’t got round to replying to yet. This extra to do list is stored on Outlook and was lost completely – along with the contact details of those people that I hadn’t yet added to my (backed up) contacts file.

All in all a very hard way to learn about a bad habit that I didn’t even realise I was doing.  I can see those of you who still swear by pen and paper wagging your fingers and saying “I told you so!”

The resulting chaos, and lost week while I restored and rebuilt everything has forced me to take a very hard look at my systems and ways of working.  When you work in an office, IT is taken care of for you – you are given a secure place to store your files and IT takes care of back ups and computer failures for you. When you run a business from home you have to make sure that you have an IT strategy in case the worst happens. Looking back I can see that I had got a bit complacent and taken a few things for granted.

Thankfully for me the nice man at PC World was able to temporarily unblock my PC, so that I have now been able to have access to a lot of my files.  But I have bought a new laptop in the meantime, and I am taking great care setting it up, trying to make sure that my new system will be much more secure.

There are a lot of ways to store files, bookmarks, emails and passwords away from your main computer – and I intend to look at them all. Thankfully this is a good time of year to be doing this – Motivating Mum will quieten down a bit over the summer, so I have got some time to research and set things up slowly and carefully

I shall be looking carefully at all the suggestions that people have made about storing things securely.  I have been stubbornly using Outlook as that is what I know from my office days, but I am now looking into alternatives.  I have dug out my external hard drive and will put in place a more regular back up strategy (note to self  – “backing up” means more than just buying a back up storage device!).  I am also looking into some of the new “cloud” storage systems. And I suspect when I am all done that I will have learned enough to put together a good few blog posts and possibly even a workshop about IT security.  So maybe some good will come of the crash after all.

Everywhere you look these days you will see people filming themselves and adding video to their blogs and websites. Apparently video is the next big thing and you should definitely be doing it too if you want to get your blog noticed.

I dare say this is true, but I absolutely do not like this new development. I’m sure I shall adopt it eventually as I always do when a new technology becomes embedded in the public psyche. But for the moment I will not be producing any videos. The main reason is that with certain exceptions, I absolutely hate watching them, so why should I inflict my pet hate on others.

These are the main reasons I have for ignoring video content as much as I can:

1. It can be slow to load – I don’t want to waste even a minute waiting for a video to load.  When I click through to your site for information, and a video comes  up – if it is not ready to go in five seconds or less, I’m afraid I switch off.  And don’t get me started on videos that are not formatted to run on my iphone or ipad – I’m afraid finding one of those will put me off your site forever.
2. It is too slow to consume -  Somebody recently offered me a free 90-minute video presentation as a reward for joining her site.  Well I’m sorry, but I’m a working mum, and that means I very rarely have 90-minutes to sit and apply myself to one subject, and would never wade through 90 minutes of a video unless it was a gripping feature film.

   If they are available I will get hold of transcripts of video presentations.  I read very fast, especially if it’s a subject I already know something about.  I can usually consume the transcript of a 90-minute presentation in 10 minutes or less.  With a written article you can skim through even a long text, and pick out the interesting nuggets that you do want or need to know very quickly.  You can also go back quickly to recap if the argument begins to run away with you.

   With video you are at the mercy of the presenter – you have no way of knowing if it is worth sitting through the boring bit at first – you can’t see whether or when they are going to cover something that interests you.  If I sit through a whole video and then realise that it was of no interest from start to finish I feel cheated.

3. It isn’t always appropriate to watch video – I load up articles to read on the train and in odd places where I am waiting for my children.  Its easy to dip in and out of them and return very quickly to where I left off.  In the car I can listen to a podcast, whilst focussing on the road.

   Video demands too much of your attention – eyes and ears focussed – not good while trying to watch the children too. If you waver it is very easy to lose the thread, and very hard to find your place again if your attention has wandered and you have let the video continue without you.

4. Regional accents, Annoying mannerisms, Poor diction – I’m sorry to be prejudiced and pedantic, but I’m afraid not everybody is made for presentation.  I don’t think I would be, which is one of the main reasons why I don’t try.  If a video presenter has an annoying voice or habits, or even if the lighting is bad or the space they are in looks cluttered and untidy, I can very easily get distracted and or annoyed, which ruins the message that they are trying to put across.  I’ve  been disappointed so many times that I often don’t bother any more.

   Most people can write better than they speak – the best writers craft content, get it proofread before they publish it, and take care to produce an argument in a structured, clear and concise way. Nothing gladdens my heart like a well-written article, especially when it is accompanied by one well chosen picture or photograph.

   It is a lot harder to achieve the same effect whilst standing in front of a camera.  Only a very few people can manage this well (I am not one of them), and I’m afraid I don’t want to watch the rest of you.

When I see a tweet pointing me towards video content, I cringe and very rarely watch it. I return to the Internet and find a site with written words on the same subject.  The only exceptions I can think of are music videos and short videos that demonstrate how to do something on the computer – I can see the point in those and often use them. But for the moment the video revolution is passing me by.

So don’t think you are going to find me doing any video content for Motivating Mum anytime soon. Mind you (as some of my older friends would no doubt remind me) I did once say something similar about texting……..

At least when I do create and post my first video (short and sweet, shot  in a great environment with a well- thought out speech & good diction) those of you who are embracing the video revolution will be able to say “we told you so”.

I saw a statistic the other day that over half of all adults are now on Facebook. It was probably based on the USA, but I guess that figures in the UK are not far off. A significant number of these are now using Facebook for Business.  Not bad for a tool that when I joined it only three or four years ago, I felt a bit embarrassed and thought I was one of the oldest people on there.

So I’m guessing, if you are the kind of person who has found Motivating Mum and is reading my blog page, that you probably have your own personal Facebook account. Maybe you keep in touch with friends – maybe you post photos and look at other people’s- maybe you share interesting stuff on the web. Maybe you play online games to pass the time (I have recently kicked a fairly serious FarmVille and Bejeweled Blitz habit that was threatening to take over my life).

But although most of us are old hands now at the personal stuff, many small business owners have yet to discover the joys of Facebook as a business tool. Quite a few people that I’ve met at Motivating Mum networking events say they just haven’t got round to it yet, or they just don’t know where to start.

It doesn’t help that Facebook changes the formats round and moves the goalposts every few months, so that even if you find out from a friend what to do, by the time you get to doing your own page it all looks completely different and could confuse the heck out of anyone.

I will freely admit that my Facebook page has been the most neglected of my social marketing efforts to date. I have focussed big time on twitter and had huge success there (more on that another month I think). I set up my Facebook page, and thanks to the wonders of Hootsuite, and Networked blogs (which I will cover in other posts if you haven’t got them yet),  it is now just about a carbon copy of my twitter stream, with my blog added in for good measure.

However, I’m well aware that Facebook can be so much more. There are all kinds of apps out there to make your Facebook page really stand out and attract people to your business. Also there is just so much scope for connecting with people, getting to know them and hanging out, which has got to be good for business. I promised myself that once I had time, I would get over there, tidy up my page and make it the best that it can be.

The time for my Facebook cleanup has come. For the next month I’m going to be really concentrating on my Facebook page, cleaning it up, getting to know the users and finding a lot of other peoples sites to like and share information from.

I wil keep you posted about what I’m doing on this blog, and on the site itself, and I also intend to blog about the basics – setting the page up in the first place and what you can use it for.

So if you want to come with me and find out about Facebook in the next month or so, please hop over to the Motivating Mum Facebook page and press Like. Once you have done that, watch your own Facebook stream, as these blog posts should appear in it each time I write them.

Please join in too with my discussions, polls and competitions, and don’t be afraid to post up your own page details too. I’ll follow/like anyone who stops and says hello!

Do you know what this is?

If you have a barcode reader on your mobile phone, grab it now and read that code off the screen.  Go on, do it, it won’t hurt your phone I promise.

If you don’t have a barcode reader, go and grab a free app from the App store, or wherever you get apps for your phone – this is big new technology, and I really urge you to give it a try..

You should find a copy of the Motivating Mum newsletter on your phone.  How cool is that?

Technology like this just gets my head buzzing.  I can think of all kinds of uses for that little button.  I’ve already put one on my email signature, but it can go on business cards, labels, all sorts of things.  And the data within it can be anything you want it to be, from just your name and contact details, to a whole load of advertising blurb about your business.

I first saw these codes advertised on my MailChimp email software, and that was what led me to do a bit of further research.  My research led me to this, a Word Press plug in for generating codes, which you can then save, copy and use in your own site.  Go on, have a play – the form doesn’t look very pretty but you can have lots of fun with it!

When you generate the QR code using the form above, it will appear here.  You can check it, using your phone. After that you can right click it, copy it and save it anywhere you like.

I’m going to be experimenting with QR codes over the next few weeks.  Expect some more blog posts on this subject as I tell you what I have learned.

If you want to get this plug in for your own WordPress blog, you can download it here .  Or just bookmark this page and come back and use mine whenever you feel like it. And please don’t forget to press the Like button and tell all your friends about this.