Having a plain-Jane blog with a few scattered keywords nowadays isn’t enough to
grab any search engine’s attention. The home-based working mom must choose her
categories and keywords carefully so her important pages will move to the head of
search engine’s list.

What categories does she choose? It depends on what her blog is about. For instance,
if she’s a life coach, and she posts affirmations often, she can use affirmations as a
category. The main thing is to make the categories reflect the subjects she posts about
most often.

Also, there should be no more than five categories, all of which must be short (two
to four words), to the point and keyword rich. Those categories have to be general
enough to have a lot of entries, however. Each category can reflect a different part of
the business. She mustn’t be whimsical about the categories; changing them means
anyone who has earmarked category will lose it. It’s better to add another category, but
not too many.

If the mom is having difficulty finding the right categories, she can go to http://
www.blumenthals.com/index.php?Google_LBC_Categories , which is a Beta site right
now, but has a search engine that offers a multiple choice of category names. Also,
http://google.com/analytics examines the Web site’s traffic so postings can be refined
to boost viewings. Warning: Google Analytics requires putting HTML code into the site,
so the working mom can have a knowledgeable person do it for her or give it a whirl
herself.

Keywords, also only two to four words, should appear in the title of the blog and in the
first sentence. They can also appear in other parts of the blog. The minimum number of
words for a blog is 250.

Remember, search engines look for pages not Web sites, so the categories and
keywords have to be so full of information that once visitors click on the search entry,
they’ll click through other parts of the site. Any mom from life coach to retailer can
maximize outreach and potential income with targeted blog categories and keywords.

To market and brand your business, a home-based business mom needs more than just a Facebook page, you need a fan page also. Everyone who clicks on as a fan can see whatever you include on the page. this is the beginning or a continuation of building your own tribe.

Your tribe will consist of like minded individuals and you will have the chance to flush out information, latest trends as well as have your updated blog post show up every time you add a new post. Keeping the fan page informative and entertaining will take some effort, but it’s worth it when you get queries through this page. It’s fairly easy to start a fan page.

First, it’s a click on “Advertising,” then “Pages,” and finally “Create a Page.” From there the only thing stopping the stay-at-home working mom is your imagination. There are a number of tabs already included such as “Discussion” and “Video” that can draw readers in. The wall is also customizable and can include pictures, video and blog. Include a daily or weekly update and people can leave comments just as they do on an individual’s page. You can connect your blog post your fanpage so it goes on all your fans’ news feeds. There are many applications that can enhance the page, make sure you check under the applications tab to take advantage of all the treats facebook fan page has in store.

When the page is complete, you can e-mail blast your family, friends and clients to let them know the page exists. I highly recommend you also announce the new page on your regular Facebook page. It’s a good idea to add a link on her Web site to the Facebook fan page and a link on your page to your Web site. Also, Google is very quick to put Facebook pages at the top of the list. The job is to get the page to go viral.

Even in a working mom’s busy day, it’s important to take the time to build (or have your Web designer, if your lucky enough to have one) a fan page. A fan page is the another avenue in the social media world and people are strolling along every day.

When a stay-at-home business mom wants to reach a wide audience, she can turn to a social radio network such as http://www.blogtalkradio.com or other podcast outlets (seehttp://www.podcastdirectory.com for a list of sites). These outlets offer several different ways to spread the word: as a caller to a show, as a a guest on a show or as a host.

As a caller to a show she can let the listeners know she’s out there and available, but it’s hard to let friends, family and business contacts know beforehand.

In order to be a guest she only needs to find her category, click on a host’s name to get to an About page, which will probably have contact info. Once she’s accepted for the show, she can e-mail and Facebook blast the time and place of the interview to her client list, friends and family. If the listener registers with blogtalkradio and posts a picture, it will appear on the host’s page as either a listener or fan. The show is archived and always available to future audiences.

The corporate mom dropout can check the show’s audience by noting the number of listeners and fans. If it’s a small number, maybe there’s a different site to promote her business. I’ve appeared on several shows, and a recent talk about my book, Corporate Mom Dropouts, increased my book sales by 40 percent.

Finally, if she can find the time, the business mom can host her own show. The site is easily set up for the entrepreneurial mom to get on the air. All she needs is a computer and a phone. Also, it’s another way to increase SEOs. And it’s free.

When working on a marketing plan, the home-based business mom has to wring every drop from the social media for the greatest possible exposure, and talk radio is a good way to go.

Even the most self-directed, organized stay-at-home business mom sometimes needs someone to turn to for guidance, ideas or an objective viewpoint. That person can be a trusted ally or a complete stranger, but she must be someone who can stand back and look at a business and present plans for increasing profits or to build the business, whether the business is services or selling products. Business that stagnate are out of business.

The person who provides this help is often called a coach or mentor. A coach can look at the business overall and make recommendations for improvement. For instance, if the business needs new marketing ideas, the coach can either present a plan or help the owner to develop a plan to market the business in new ways to reach new audiences. Remember the coach has different contacts for outreach, even it’s just a new store to find cheaper paper.

If the corporate mom dropout is feeling stale and just needs a boost, the coach can do that too. It’s always nice to have a cheerleader, particularly one who can do more than say, “Go, team.” This cheerleader can motivate and assign life exercises to bring back the spark and passion to a pooped mom.

If the stay-ay-home business mom knows a coach/mentor, that’s excellent. However, when choosing a coach/mentor the mom doesn’t know, it’s best to find one who is walking the walk and talking the talk and is still doing it.  If you are interested in working with a coach or mentor for Business Moms, send an email to assistant@corporatemomdropouts.com and place “I’m Ready” in the subject to be included in our new July Incubator or one on one coaching.

We all form habits in childhood that may interfere with running a sound and profitable business.

For instance, did you procrastinate as a child, like not cleaning your room when your mom asked? Well, now you’re a mompreneur, and that nasty little habit can get you into a world of hurt in your business. You have to return phone calls promptly; you have to pay bills promptly; you have to write reports promptly. Well, you get the idea. Your livelihood depends on recognizing the habits that will hurt your business and learning a new more business-like habit.

Once you can recognize this baggage from your childhood, you can do something about it. Take a long, hard look at yourself and add up the good points and the bad. If the bad can hurt your business, be stern with yourself and start the retraining campaign. You can accomplish a lot just by taking note every time you slide back into the old routine.

Many years ago before the patches, the pills and the gum there was a smoking cessation trick that had the smokers put many rubber bands around the cigarette pack so that they were aware every time they reached for a smoke. It slowed them down enough so that they could decide whether they could do without. That’s what you need to do. Tie mental rubber bands around the bad habit, and every time you feel yourself slipping, you can stop and follow the new business habit.

You have enough enemies when it comes to getting things done—having your own brain plotting against you is just unfair. Hone up on a few strategies, thought exercises, and habits that get you past mental roadblocks and back to productivity.

Photo by CarbonNYC.

10. Pick Good Sounds

Megadeth doesn’t get everyone motivated, and classical is many folks’ idea of nap music. Music is a highly subjective thing, but that doesn’t mean lots of smart folks have spent time thinking about what kind of music works best for getting things done. Productivity guru David Allen prefers Vivaldi and other Baroque-period pieces that hover around 60 beats per minute. Founding Editor Gina and the editors at our gaming-crazed cousins Kotaku dig the ambience of Music for Airports. And while we’ve previously tried to tally up the best sounds for getting work done, the ultimate answer may be “Try something new. Not too loud, not too fast or slow.” And, for folks like your editor, stuff you don’t know the lyrics to.Photo by Ruud Hein.

9. Use Minor Distractions to Fend Off Big Distractions

Were you the kid who listened to mom’s advice about sweets before dinner, or were you the kid who tried to reshape the frosting so it looked like nothing was missing? If you were the latter, or it feels like that’s still the case, see how kids resisted marshmallows in a famous test. The main connection between all the good little kids who could hold out for a better reward was that they distracted themselves when temptation came up. Distraction, of course, is what you’re trying to stop doing, so we’re talking about avoiding one kind of distraction (wandering into email, getting coffee, checking a favorite web site) by using a more benign form (checking a project status, tidy up your desk a bit, stand up and stretch). If you acknowledge your temptations to get away from your work, that’s half the battle of stopping them. (Original post)

8. Set a Timer and Crank Until It Beeps

Which would you rather do: spend weeks on a big, multi-faceted project, or work 10 minutes on fixing typos and errors and then get a two-minute break? It’s surprising how easy it is to force yourself into working in a short dash, with a definite end in sight. It’s a technique beloved by 43 Folders, prolific personal finance bloggers,psychologists, and many others get to work when work seems overwhelming. (Original posts: 43f, GRS, Psychology Today).

7. Move and Breathe Like You’re Excited

Fast breathing, cold sweats, a pounding heart—when your mind is trying to stay cool before public speaking or other big events, your body knows how you really feel. Use that mind-body link-up to your advantage when you’re less than excited about a meeting, a task, or other obligations.Psychology Today suggests sports-style psych-ups, like moving around, talking to yourself with high-energy words, and breathing like you’re about to step into the ring. Your ability to do this stuff discretely will vary, but grabbing some quick private time is probably a better use of time than praying for an electrical outage, anyways. Photo by Andrew_Nielsen. (Original post)

6. Make Your To-Do List Doable

The demands that our jobs put on us is usually more than enough. The way many of us over-stuff and micro-manage our to-do lists makes it worse. Gina gave us the big picture ofmaking a doable to-do list, but her advice on saving your workday contains a fast-food take-away: cross one item that’s not worth doing off your list, right now. Whether it’s unimportant busywork, old ideas that don’t work, or something you can delegate to better hands, your list will speak more clearly to you and you’ll feel a lot better. Photo by ebby.

5. Don’t Check Email for the First Hour of Work

We know, we know—not everybody can technically do this. But, honestly, maybe you can, by shifting your schedule an hour ahead or training coworkers on when to expect responses. Organization writer Julie Morgenstern titled an entire book on this idea, the basic premise of which is that that first hour, the one where nobody can pull you in different directions, is when you can crank on an important task, the first thing to get done today, the thing you know everyone’s going to pull you away from later on. Try it out for a day or two—don’t let what happened overnight in your inbox dictate your entire day. Photo by trekkyandy.

4. Create a Fake Constraint

It’s something of a companion piece to the “dash,” or perhaps a 300-level class for graduates of Fooling Yourself Into Producing 101. But putting creative constraints on your work or personal projects—500 words, 140 characters, 24 hours, 10 people, three colors—makes you stretch your brain a bit further, and get more creative, than just plodding and plodding until you feel “done.” I found particular inspiration in how Beck gives himself and his friends just 24 hours to record entire cover albums. Entrepreneur and blogger Guy Kawasaki stands by the success of presentations that use 30-point fonts, 20 minutes, and just 10 slides (the 10/20/30 rule) for less soul-deadening effect. Whatever fence you set up, you’ll likely feel paradoxically more free inside of it. (Original post: 10/20/30).

3. Move Quickly on New Skills and Great Ideas

“If only I knew” is a dangerous tool to give your own mind. It’s easy to convince yourself that you can’t act on your ideas until you’ve learned everything about them, or researched every possible alternative, or read the entire programming book before writing your “Hello World” app. Video blogger Ze Frank calls these stashed-away thoughts brain crack, because it’s addictive to think you’ve always got an idea in the can that just needs one more thing. Adam built his first webappfrom what was basically scratch, and was all the happier for not holding out. Programmer Matt Nowack described what’s called for best—”hustle.” (Original posts: brain crack, hustle).

2. Have a Status Board (of Some Kind)

Just look at how the team at Panic software keeps track of their big-picture goals, small successes, and organizational progress. It’s neat, and it’s made their team more productive, but you’ll never get one. You can, however, analyze and panic-button your life with personal graphing tools, fitness monitors, goal-oriented webapps, or by taking inspiration (and caution) from the subjects of Gary Wolf’s NYT Magazine piece on The Data-Driven Life. Of course, people have been keeping personal status trackers for hundreds of years—they just called them journals.

1. Understand and Overcome Your Fear of Failure

The part of your brain that was forged in caveman times doesn’t want you to risk doing something great on your next project, to jump to a new career, to start writing on the side. It wants you to stay fed, remain quiet, and simply survive. Author Seth Godin and productivity writer Merlin Mann dug into the facets of this tendency—the “lizard brain,” the “puppy brain,” and beyond—in an interview conversation well worth listening to. Even if you take the step toward actually working on the project, your brain can start getting ahead on excuses for your failure, and they’ll affect the outcome all along the way. You can’t entirely stop your mind from wanting you to stay safe, but you can know what it’s trying to do and strive to work past it. Photo by Tiagø Ribeiro.(Original posts: fear of failure, excuses).

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When you’ve felt completely defeated, or can’t seem to focus, how have you snapped yourself out of it? Was it a thinking exercise, a change of scene, or something else? We want to hear about what really worked in the comments.

Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at kevin@lifehacker.com.

Home-based business moms have to keep in contact with not only their clients but also other moms in business for support, advice and general info. What better way to do that than blogging? Communicating through a blog spreads news like a spider web with tendrils going in all directions.

Reading another mom’s blog may help you break through or get around a wall that’s interfered with your success. If that’s true, leave a comment telling her how she helped you and upload a link to your own blog.

Mom bloggers always welcome comments because they let those moms communicate with other work at home moms, and maybe learn a little something about improving their own businesses. Blogs can be all give and all take, a win-win situation.

Maybe you can post some bullet-pointed tips for success on another mom’s site that will help her readers and maybe even help her to achieve or set a new goal. At the same time she can post some tips to your site. This way you both reach innumerable other moms, who can continue the postings so that your outreach is extensive.

Remember networking isn’t just face to face; it’s online interaction too. And moms helping moms never goes out of style.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and family and friends are wondering what to get a busy work at home mom. Well, you can put your mind to it and come up with some creative gifts you can suggest for you and your business. Here are some gifts to consider.

First, there are gifts just for you. A busy working mom is ripe for those “you’re extra special” gifts such as a day of beauty, a nice long massage at a spa or a mani/pedi. These give some much-needed me time and help to rejuvenate you for your business and family.

Then, there are gifts for the home-based business. Maybe you want some new brochures, so suggest to your loved ones to get the graphic artist to design new fresh ones detailing everything, whether services or goods, and then have them printed. How about a gift certificate to an office supply store such as Staples or Office Depot? Sometimes a new advanced mouse or some super new speakers or even a printer upgrade will make your heart go pitty-pat. Or, if you’ve reached the point in your business where you need legal advice on taxes or incorporating, put that on your list.

The most important thing to do to assess what kind of gift you, the mom who balances it all, would like is be honest about what you want and don’t expect people to read your mind. Put everything you want on the list and hand it out like candy.

When you do a Google search, have you seen those ads in the right-hand column? You can have one of those ads for your Web site, for a product or service you’re selling, whatever you want, really. The program is called Adwords. The ads that come up in that column depend on what was searched for. For instance, if the person searched for “life coach,” and you’re a life coach, then your ad would pop up in that right-hand column.

Google has all the necessary info on getting started. Go to www.adwords.google.com. The ads usually are text, but there are other options, such as animation and video. It also has different payment plans, and edit and updates are available on demand.

The trick to getting maximum exposure is your keywords. If you need help in finding the right keywords, go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You can enter either your Web site or some words or phrases about your product or services, and Google will do the rest. There are two ways to use this tool. First, you can enter one or more keywords or phrases, and it will show you a kazillion possibilities. From these you can download all of them or just some of them into your campaign. The other way is to enter your Web site, and Google will search your Web site and cull different words and phrases that relate, and like the first option you can download all or some of these phrases into your ad campaign.

How’s that for direct advertising on a national basis?

Once the home-based mom has her Web site set up, that’s not the end. Web sites need nurturing and updating, and that means all the pages not just the home page.

Take the About Us page. Is the bio current? If not, this is the place to list new accomplishments and new skills. Also, update the headshot and any other photos on the page. You don’t need to be stuck in the last decade just because your home-based business Web site was started then.

Speaking of photos. Update all the photos. If you provide services, add the new ones. If you’re a public speaker and have just written a book, get a picture of that book on the landing page. Also, if it’s an e-book, consider adding a shopping cart or some other way for the viewer to buy the book. If you sell products, refresh the old ones and add the new ones. This is the time to fix any picture that may be out of focus.

Put new accomplishments and skills on the landing page and the pages they apply to, not just the About Us page. Some bullet points work well here. If you no longer offer a skill or product, take it out now. Also, if you make public appearances, keep the schedule current. What will viewers think if they see a schedule from last year?

Of course, if you have a blog, keep it updated with at least weekly entries. No one is interested in a blog entry that’s dated three months ago.

Remember, Web pages are not static; they must flow and adjust to what you offer, so that you generate real business. Revisit every page of your home-based business Web site quarterly or more often to give it a cold hard look to ensure it’s a viable representation of what you do and who you are.