Get Your Business Seen Online: Five Ideas For Mumpreneurs

More and more mums are quitting their day jobs to start businesses. Six years ago, I started running "Mumpreneurs" workshops for mums with a business idea, and the term was a novelty! Now, the phrase "mumpreneur" is commonplace, with a plethora of events, awards and resources specifically for mums running their own businesses. With this explosion of business mums comes more opportunities for your business, especially in the "virtual" online world of business. Exciting times indeed!

It wasn't so long ago that people who work from home were vilified to a certain extent. People couldn't conceive how it could be possible to earn real, usable money in this way. But times they are a-changin'! Now, if you have the imagination and the drive, you can turn practically any hobby or interest into a profitable home-based business.

No longer do you have to worry about how you'll find the time to travel to and spend time at Chambers of Commerce and face to face networking meetings. You can harness the power of the virtual world and get your business noticed relatively quickly and easily.

1.First of all, simply set up a profile at a professional networking site such as Ecademy or LinkedIn. This is where professionals go to meet other professionals and you can set up a profile so that others in your specific line of business become aware of you.

2. The growth of social media is phenomenal. Not only is it a way to interact socially with friends, acquaintances and "soon-to-be" friends, but it can be a very powerful business marketing tool as well. Consider Facebook. You can set up a business page as part of your Facebook account and by unveiling your creation to all your friends and contacts; you can create "fans" of your business.

3. Use Twitter as a social media "mini-blog" to send highly targeted messages to your followers. Setting up Twitter can be done in five minutes flat. Set up your Twitter account using your business name, write a profile that outlines your business and you can start interacting with people immediately. As you may know, Twitter messages are very short - 140 characters or less, but they can be very specific and can begin to show that you are an expert in your niche and know exactly what you're talking about.

4. WordPress seems to be the most popular and flexible platform for bloggers and with it you can easily create professional and attractive blogs. Make no mistake about it, if you're going to service a blog creatively and well, you need to do some work on it every day. Your blog is a perfect way for you to "show your wares" - use it to demonstrate your expertise and set yourself a goal to write one short blog post each day of your working week. It's rather easy to do.

5. There are many, many ways that you can promote your business using social media. Once you have your blog set up and have your Facebook and Twitter accounts established, you can start visiting other "authority" blogs and begin interacting.

The power of blogging is in the two-way interaction created when commenting on the blog posts. As you proceed, others will see your comments and start visiting your blog and commenting themselves. Remember social media can become quite viral rather quickly.

Consider professional coaching advice to help you create your social media presence as a mumpreneur. You can spend some of your online time engaging with online life coaching experts, particularly those who are specialists in coaching for women in business.