As small work at home businesses it’s easy to fall into the same routine day after day. It’s great that we get to work in our pjs if we choose and can laze around working on our own schedule. The downside is it is also easy to fall into a routine that starts to drain us down! It is time to get motivated!

“I don’t HAVE to get dressed, why should I?” Ever tell yourself this? One of my favorite things about being a work at home mom! Duh! My creative mojo starts to dwindle and I start to get cranky. It’s time to get motivated and refreshed! My challenge this week is to change up your schedule and find something that get your juices flowing again.

Now that the weather is turning nicer you’ll find me outside far more often. Gotta love that wireless internet! I grab my laptop and work in the yard with the kids. I sit at the patio table or lounge in the hammock. The fresh air is great! I love to start my mornings off with a outting as well. I load my youngest into a jogging stroller and strap on the rollerblades. We wheel around town doing our morning errands and it’s a great way to kick start my body for a day of work. Yeah, sometimes I don’t want to come back in to my office, but I have a lot more energy when I do!

You don’t have to devote half your day to spicing things up. We’re work at home moms! But take 10-20 minutes to do something different each day. Go for a spontaneous walk. Swing with the kids. Or simply take your work outside. Just break that routine for a bit and see if it helps you feel refreshed!

Technorati Tags: businesses, motivated, work at home mom

I get asked a lot of SEO questions from work at home moms and small business clients. It’s time for me to do a series on SEO to get some of these questions answered! Many people ask me “Do you *do* SEO?”. My answer is simply “No”. There are a lot of things you can do to an existing site to help with SEO but we’ll get to that later. The simple answer of “No” is because good SEO on a web site really needs to start in the planning stages of your web design! I focus on creating websites that are SEO friendly right from the start!

Let’s start out with the basics! SEO? What’s that? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. When people are talking about SEO they are referring to search engines and how you are indexed. The optimization part comes into play when we talk about how you get your site prepared to be listed, how you manage your site to maintain listings and how to increase your ranking. You are optimizing your search engine experience. The next terms that comes up are spiders and robots. Spiders and robots are parts of the search engine software that actually scour the internet reading web sites and collecting the data. These spiders go out and read websites looking for information that it can bring back to the main database (search engine) to be indexed. We want to make it easy for the spiders to find data to bring back to the main database so we’ll start with that. Read More…

Technorati Tags: SEO, web design, Search Engine Optimization, spiders, robots

Web Savvy Mama and the Web Mama Blog have a new look. I love change and decided it was time for more color and a new layout.

You’ll probably notice that the main website and the blog now have the same look and navigation. I hope this helps my visitors get around my site and find what they need. Watch the chat bubble at the top of my website for updates and any specials I am running.

I am currently accepting new blog topic ideas to post here. I’ve been terribly busy and very slow at putting out posts here. I apologize! If you have a topic you’d like to see covered here just ask! If I choose your topic I will include a link back to your website… a bit of free publicity!

Recently I chatted with Michelle Waters on Product Seller’s Radio about working with a web designer.

You can hear the interview online here: top 3 tips to building a productive relationship with a web designer

Picking a designer that suits your needs.
- Look at sites that you like and see who designed them.
- Get references from others in your field if possible. Ask the designer for client references if needed.
- Look at the designer’s portfolio to see if their style meshes with your own.
- Also look at time frame and prices, but realize you may have to pay more or wait longer to get what you want. But don’t let that deter you! Read More…

Technorati Tags: Michelle Waters, working with a web designer, web design