Essex Mums Updates

Good morning everyone,

I hope this glum sunday morning finds you all tucked up in bed or home in the warm! I just wanted to give you an update of a few things that have been happening on Essex Mums recently, as well as things to come.

Parents' Guide
I've been asked to write an Essex Mums column in the quarterly magazine Parents' Guide. The Parent's Guide is a free magazine, given out in schools, clinics etc. and covering topics that are of interest to parents in Essex, and offering unrivalled information, advice and articles of direct relevance to them and their families such as education, health and lifestyle.

It's an amazing opportunity for me to have to be involved with such a fantastic magazine and promote the site and I really hope I can do it justice. I plan to discuss things that have come up on here that I think will be of interest to other parents such as hot topics, things that have caught our attention etc. If any of you have something you'd like to say, let me know and I'll see if I can include it! It might be nice to have a little bit from other people too.

I also thought it would be great to include some of what's being posted on the blog, so get writing! I'm still offering a £20 voucher for the best blog post each month.

The Parents' Guide website is here: http://www.theparentsguideuk.com/index.html take a look.

The winter edition comes out on 14th December so keep an eye out for it and for me!


Alternative Christmas Gift Guide/Shopping Guide
The Alternative Christmas Gift Guide has been a great success, with over 60 great ideas for places to shop online, offering something a bit different and an opportunity to avoid the High Street this Christmas! Many are also offering discounts, so make sure you take a look: www.essexmums.org/christmas.html

I've decided to make the Shopping Guide a permanent feature following a few requests from users/advertisers, so keep an eye out for a new page in January! If you're interested in advertising your own product, please contact me for a great introductory rate!

Places to Go
I've recently started work on a detailed 'Places to Go' section: www.essexmums.org/places.html. This is big undertaking and a gradual process, but offers in-depth information about places to go in Essex, as well as the opportunity for you to leave comments on places you have been to. If you are the manager of an attraction and would like to be listed, please let me know.

Competitions/discounts
I've recently had a lot of companies asking me if they could feature competitions on the Essex Mums site and offering discounts to our members, so I've decided to create a dedicated page for this which will start in January, so watch out for it! If you have something you'd like to offer our Mums, get in touch!

Monthly features
Make sure you check in on the homepage www.essexmums.org for new features every month. As well as seasonal information about what's on, the new year will bring some interesting features, including a Health and Fitness special in January, a cloth nappy special and a young parents special. If you would like to get involved in any of these, I would love for you to be! Also, if you are have a product or services related to these categories, I would love you to advertise with the site during the feature and would happily offer a 10% discount on any ads you decide to get.

For you
Finally, please remember that the goal of Essex Mums is to make your life better, easier, happier and fuller. If there is a way in which you think the site can be improved, or something that would benefit you, no matter how big or small, please contact me and I'll see what I can do. I'm especially keen on getting the site more involved in community activities, charity campaigns etc. so get in touch if there is anything you think it can help with, whether it's promotion on the site or something more active.

Thanks for reading and a big thank you to you all for making the site such a success. We recently broke our page view record with over 65,000 page views, 8000 visits and more than 2000 unique visitors in November, and have stormed into the Alexa rankings as the (approximately) 20,000th most viewed site in the UK! For those of you who haven't posted in the forum recently please come and say hello. So many of us have become great friends, so I know sometimes it might seem intimidating for newcomers, but I can honestly say I have never met a more welcoming group of Mums as our very own Essex Mums. I'm genuinely proud to call them friends and hope you will become one too!

Kind regards
Louise
www.essexmums.org

PS. If you haven't already, please follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EssexMums and become a fan on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Essex-Mums/120425092939

Twittering Mums

Are you one of the many who joined twitter, tweet away and have no idea what you are doing? You want the 'right' kind of followers? You have no idea what to do with the ones you have?

Then read on...

Twitter is excellent targeted marketing you can reach your customer base and inform them of offers and other tidbits about you and your company. In the case of Essex Mums, it's meeting other local mums.

What happens if you look at who is following you and find it's not your target market?

The first thing to do is look at your twitter strategy, your overall plan on how you are going to make it work for you. If you don't have a plan then perhaps now is the time to make one. Even if it's one or two goals on the back of a bib.

Getting the followers you want....
I live in front of a golf course, my dog escapes onto the golf course and I have tweeted this, I now have a stream of golfers following me, nice but they are not potential customers to me, they are not likely to call me and ask me to deliver a new set of tees to the 9th hole now are they?!!!

They find me because they search for golf. When was the last time you did a tweet search? When did you last do a search on twitter home page for your keyphrases? Go and do one now, do you come up in the search on the first few pages?

If you do then there is a good chance potential customers will find you. Don't panic if you didn't, it's not the end of the world but remember there is a fine line between being found for your keywords / phrases and spamming twitter. Yep. There are some people who tweet the same link over and over and instead of gaining followers, they lose them as they are not building a relationship, they are just broadcasting.

Make a point of tweeting once a day a link to your blog, so you are known for what you do and who you are. It can be articles or posts you wrote some time ago, fresh content is good but again it's not the end of the world if you don't have it - you can establish that you have been doing what you doing for a long time and are very experienced. If you have the time you can freshen up those articles and entice your current readers to revisit your older material.

If you don't have your own blog then post your articles here on the Essex Mums forum and then tweet the link. Easy.

Right back to getting the followers you want...
There is a lot of emphasis on 'local' and 'local' is very important. You are more likely to meet a fellow twitterer if they are local. If you meet them and you 'click' you are more likely to get recommended. So that golfer who plays golf behind my house and follows me on twitter has a purpose after all!

Do a local search for twitter users in your local area, make contact with them, follow them and promote local tweetups (yep, they are really called that). Check out the events page if you want to see what's happening in your area in the next few weeks. From local toddler groups, preschool classes, you can bet someone is looking for that information and when they find it, they find you.

Build relationships, retweet something someone interesting has said. Tweet an interesting non work related link, start a conversation. More importantly every now and then ask your followers who they would recommend you connect with who are looking for your services. Connect with their suggestions and start building a relationship there too.

Sounds like hard work? well no one said it was easy but it can pay dividends. Try it for twenty minutes a day for 6 weeks and see what a difference it makes to your business.

And if you are a busy working mum, twitter can allow you to build the relationships you want, in your own time.


by Sarah Arrow
Sarah is a member of Essex Mums and writes the blog 'What's On in Essex'.