If you're a busy mom entrepreneur (wait, is that redundant?) subscribe to The Mogul Mom by email for fresh content, ideas & information delivered to your inbox. Photobucket

3

Last weekend, my husband and I took our three kids and one big dog to New Hampshire for three days. The stars and planets must’ve been aligned just so because, before we left, I completely outdid myself with planning ahead. I:

  • Scheduled a blog post
  • Turned on my email autoresponder letting people know I was away
  • Planned the next week’s dinners
  • Had Peapod deliver my groceries on Friday morning before we left
  • Washed, dried and set out Hope & Grace’s uniforms
  • Filled the van with gas
  • Made a list of everything we needed to pack for the trip
  • Packed everything we needed

We spent three whole days with family and friends, having a blast with the kids and some great laughs with the grownups. On Sunday, we packed everything up and headed home.

When we arrived back in Rhode Island, the only thing we “had” to do was unload the car. Planning ahead had made reentry so effortless.

Which started me thinking…how else could I plan ahead to make life easier?

I came up with one major thing that would make life – and blogging – easier: creating a blog editorial calendar, something I’ve thought about for years but have never done.

So yesterday, I spent about 30 minutes brainstorming blog topics and another 60 minutes creating my Editorial Calendar page here on the blog.

Spending 90 minutes of my time planning ahead will save me countless hours all year long, scrambling for blog topics or worse, not writing any posts at all. (Which is where I was headed before I created this editorial calendar…)

So…my February action is to plan ahead.

Right now, I want you to take 10 minutes (c’mon, you can spare 10 minutes) to think about a few ways that you can plan ahead to save time, save money and make your life and business easier. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • A monthly meal plan
  • A yearly promotional calendar
  • A weekly “uniform”
  • A daily social media schedule
  • An FAQ page for your website

When you’ve come up with a few ideas, I want to hear about them in the comments below. If you’re stuck or not sure how to implement your ideas, let me know that too.

{ 12 comments }

0

Back in 2007, I started blogging here on The Mogul Mom using Google’s Blogger platform. I didn’t know anything about blogging but thought it was a great way for me to share with mom entrepreneurs everything I’d learned along my own journey without the hassle and expense of a website.

Not long into my blogging career, I started hearing about Wordpress and how it was the absolute best blogging platform for “serious” bloggers.

But Wordpress was completely foreign to me and frankly, the thought of learning the ins and outs of a new blogging platform scared me. There were all kinds of weird Wordpress words like plugins, widgets and codex. So for awhile, I took the coward’s way out and stayed with Blogger.

And then I stumbled upon a course called Become A Blogger Premium, offered by Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick, two of the best-known bloggers in the world. Become A Blogger Premium drew me in right away – it was exactly the type of course I needed, one for total blogging newbies. It offered step-by-step, beginning to end, video tutorials on literally every aspect of starting a successful Wordpress blog from scratch, including SEO, content creation, multimedia, traffic generation and earning an income from your blog. For those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while, y’all know that I love the step-by-step, “this is how we do it” learning style.

So I signed up for the course and quickly began implementing the steps each point-and-click video tutorial taught me. In just a few weeks, I transferred all my Blogger posts to The Mogul Mom’s new home on Wordpress and had it up and running and looking awesome. Before long, I was a blogging whiz thanks to Become A Blogger Premium. Seriously.

Blogs are a powerful way to build your business and connect with your customer. If you’re thinking about starting a blog but feel overwhelmed by the whole process, I highly recommend signing up for Yaro and Gideon’s Become A Blogger Premium.  The Premium program is made up of over 50 videos, delivered to you in a sequence designed to take you from zero, to building a thriving, popular and profitable blog.The course is perfect for busy mom entrepreneurs who really want to start a blog but feel time and technically challenged.

Gideon Shalwick is the main teacher for all the how-to videos. He demonstrates to you by recording his screen what you have to do with your computer (like I do in my Get Retail Ready video tutorials) to learn how to:

- Set up and optimize your blog

- Add powerful plugins

- Create content that search engines and humans will love

- Market your blog so you can build a huge readership

- Make money from your blog using smart profit models

Yaro is your strategic mentor, presenting key lessons on:

- What it really takes to create content people love

- The key mindsets you need to adopt so you succeed

- How to avoid the common mistakes that kill success

- How to leverage multiple streams of income from your blog

- Why you need to look at your blog as a business

The powerful combination of Gideon teaching you the “how-to” and Yaro explaining the “why it works” results in an incredible learning experience you simply can’t get anywhere else online or offline.

5 Reasons Why I Loved Become A Blogger Premium:

1. Learning Style – I love the “this is how you do it”, step-by-step teaching style and that’s exactly how Become A Blogger Premium works. Gideon demonstrates in the videos and you follow along, completing the exact same steps on your own computer.

2. Affordability – at just $47 per month for 6 months, Become A Blogger Premium offers incredible value for the money. At the end of the course, you’ve spent under $300 to create a blog that can earn you thousands each month.

3. Pick Your Pace – Become A Blogger Premium offers the opportunity to pay for all 6 months up front to get access to the entire course all at once. If you choose to do that, you can go at your own pace – whizzing through the tutorials when you have some free time or going through them a bit slower when your schedule is tight.

4. The how and why of blogging – Gideon explains the how of creating your blog and Yaro teaches the why behind it. This combination really helps you understand blogging and everything involved in building a successful blog.

5. Results – at the end of the Become A Blogger Premium course, you have built a blog completely from scratch, a blog that will help you attract customers, increase sales and build your business.

Over 2,000 people have already participated in the Become A Blogger Premium program, so if you want to be one of their next successful members, now is the time - starting February 4th, 2010, Yaro and Gideon are offering for one week only a $1 trial of Become A Blogger Premium so you can check out the course and see if it’s for you.

If you decide to complete the 6-month course, it’ll cost you just $47 per month – still an awesome bargain and less than you’d spend on a month’s worth of daily coffee. And if you prepay for the 6 months, you get instant access to all the training modules so you can go through them at your own pace instead of week by week.

So, if you’ve decided that 2010 is the year that you want to start a blog, you now have no excuses – Become A Blogger Premium offers in-depth training at a can’t-pass-up price for the newest and frugalest of bloggers. Yes, I made up that word. But you get my point.

Join Become A Blogger Premium now.

{ 2 comments }

Pitch Perfect With Cristin Mitchell

This post was originally published on October 27, 2008.
To continue our perfect pitch practice, I asked Cristin Mitchell, my sister AND a former Boston news producer, to share some pitching peeves and positives with us from a pitchee’s perspective. The view is much different on that end.
Heather: Tell us about your background—education and professional experience.
Cristin: [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

Your Ambassador of Quan

So you have this incredible product that you’ve created, right? And you want to sell the heck out it and see it on store shelves everywhere, right?
But where do you start? How in the world do you get retail stores to start carrying your product?
That’s exactly what I wondered back in 2004 when I [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

Business Baby Shower Contest

Celebrating entrepreneurial moms and all they do to birth and grow a business

The Business Baby Shower, a new contest celebrating entrepreneurial moms and all they do to birth and grow a successful company while balancing family life, was recently launched as a partnership between The Mom Entrepreneur and Corporate Mom DropOuts.

The Contest, which runs from [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

3 No Brainer Ways to Market Your Business

When you’re just starting out as a business owner, no matter what your business is, you’re looking for affordable and easy ways to market it. These three marketing ideas couldn’t be simpler (more like DUH!) and they’re also FREE. Add the fact that they’re quick and easy to implement and you’ve got three no brainer [...]

27 comments Read the full article →

5 People To Consider When Packaging Your Product

When you create a product and bring it to market, how you package it is a big consideration–you want to showcase your product, protect your product and sell your product.
But have you thought about the people who will be affected by your product packaging? Through my packaging experiences with Swaddleaze, I’ve learned that there are [...]

14 comments Read the full article →

5 Ways To Start A Business For Under $1000

In 2004, I started 2 Virtues Inc. to bring my inventions, Swaddleaze and Blankeaze to market.
I spent money like a rock star.
Out of the gate, I spent:

$15,000 on a website with a custom shopping cart that didn’t work
$2,000 for a logo that looked more like a Kama Sutra position than a symbol of safe sleepwear [...]

59 comments Read the full article →

Diarrhea of the Mouth & Other Pitching Peeves

Remember that saying “diarrhea of the mouth”? I remember using that phrase to describe someone who would just never stop talking. It’s kind of a crude expression, but pretty accurate for some people.
I was reminded of “diarrhea of the mouth” (DOTM) when reading an article by Stephanie Quilao called “Open Letter to Fitness and Health [...]

9 comments Read the full article →

Time Is Money

A few weeks ago, I received 3 of the same fortune in 1 fortune cookie. It said:
“Time is money”
I found it mildly amusing and wondered if that might be my “theme” for 2010.
And then yesterday, “time is money” really hit home for me.
I arrived 5 minutes early for my 9am hair appointment [...]

28 comments Read the full article →