blogging....

Are you thinking about blogging?

Blogging is not going away. I often read in the techie news that blogs are 'old' and not of interest to readers. I find that blogs are great social networking.
News blogs have more or less taken the place of journalistic editorials, techie blogs can save your lost files, the internet is littered with health blogs - anything you want or don't want to know. There are blogs in any field of interest, including the horse world.

Many blogs, like my own (Nina's Story), are more or less diaries of a project, often a project horse. But many professionals in the horse industry are finding blogs a great way to keep in touch with their clients, potential clients and other businesses.

Consider these blogs;

• ECOGOLD is building a following of readers by blogging about products and what is going on in the world of show horses.

• Boyd and Silva Martin keep their fans, students, owners and sponsors up to date on their competitions and training schedules.

• Eventing Nation is a sport specific blog that takes the place of a news report on the ins and outs around the sport of eventing. They also review products and promote their sponsors.
  

• Badminton Horse Trials is keeping the international community interested in their competition and making traveling to GB to see it yourself attainable.

• Jane Savoie is promoting her DVDs, books and clinics while offering detailed training advice and answering questions from readers.
  

• Many many amateur riders blog, sharing their training stories and their favorite products and professionals. Some do product reviews. Some bloggers have thousands of other bloggers that regularly visit their page and see these links.
  

If blogging could help your business you should consider it. Sites like Blogger and WordPress make setting up an attractive blog take only a matter of minutes.

In order to make your blog work for your business you need to interact with other bloggers and here are some of my pet peeves about which blogs I follow and which ones I don't.

• Blog on some sort of schedule. Daily, weekly, monthly. The time between posts is not as important as having some sort of schedule, you will develop regular readers who will look for your posts on your schedule.
  

• Follow other blogs, all that you can find that might be interested in your product, your farm or your sport. That is how other blogs will find you.
  

• Blog about your horses, your goals, your life (with limits). Do not promote your business on a non stop basis.
  

• Turn on the comments, feeds and any forms of sharing. If you don't want to hear what other people have to say about your posts then keep it on a website. Blogs are interactive.
  

• Don't pontificate. If you have the only training method, product or life view that could possible work, soft pedal it. I have several barefoot bloggers in my list of horse blogs but none of the ones who make shoeing horses a moral fault.
  

• Don't be afraid to put advertising in your sidebars. Ads, links and promos of your products belong on the page, just not overwhelmingly in the posts.

• Put a link to your blog on your website, feed it to Facebook and Twitter, make it easy to find.
  

Have fun with your blogging, but because it is a face of your business, read it, edit it, review it and make sure you are not going to regret saying, sharing or speaking out.

stepping outside the box

The recession has a lot of people thinking about what they do for a living. Many people have never felt so vulnerable. There is a lot of press about the demise of the middle class and the power of corporations.

There is a way for some people to gain freedom from some of the worries of our economy. We are all affected by the ups and downs but we don't all have to feel like the end of a whiplash.

Many of us can become self employed. If your idea of self employed is get rich quick, create a giant corporation overnight or take part in one of those fly-by-night schemes that quick talking salesmen hawk on TV, then you should quit reading right here because that is not what I am talking about.

Many people have skills and interests that can be marketed to generate a living.
I work with entrepreneurs; people who had an idea, developed it and brought it to market. These are people with a physical product to sell, but there are other ways to market yourself, your knowledge, your service, what you have to offer.

There are many people online offering information, ideas and even a cheering section to help others become successful.
Facebook, blogs and other forms of social networking are good sources of information; like any other source you have to separate the salesmen selling charm from people who actually have good advice to offer.

Marketing yourself as a second job can let you figure out exactly what you want to do, keep the security of your current income and use the freedom to experiment to find a niche where you can be self employed.