2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.  I am so pleased with how well my blog has worked for me in 2015.

I have recruited 6 new team members this year as a direct result of them finding me through my blog.  They are from Northampton, Nigeria, Tyne and Wear, Glasgow, Ipswich and Oldham. That spread would never have been possible without my readers, so thank you for reading and sharing my words.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 230,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 10 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Now let’s see what 2016 brings !

Guest Blog Posts

How time flies when you are having fun!

Alison at her desk.

The Silicon Bullet Blog is now one month old, and what a month it has been! I have found creating my new blog both interesting and quite addictive. I have to see how many people have looked at the posts every day, and the Google searches used to find it are absolutely fascinating (to me anyway – you are probably yawning already!).

I feel my biggest achievement to date has been being invited by Cath, who looks after the @sageuk twitter account, to do a guest post on the Sage Blog.  I was so pleased to be approached, having only written a handful of my own posts, as Sage has been a big part of my working life for 16 years now – it is good to get the recognition.

So, Cath gave me a subject to work with – “the added value that Business Partners bring to Sage customers; how close you are to your customers, what are the key challenges facing your customers, etc.” and my first guest post was born.

I was then given some hints and tips by Maxine, a moderator on the Uk business forums, for guest posting:

• Be ready to answer comments and keep checking frequently throughout the day so that the blogger doesn’t have to keep asking you to answer.
• Don’t leave the promotion of the article up to them alone – see what you can do with sharing in places such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and of course on the business forum.

So if you fancy reading my Sage Guest Blog Post, you can find it here. And please do leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Learning to be a good blogger – phase 2!

Today I went on another course to help me improve my knowledge about blogging, this time run by the East Midlands eBusiness Club.  The Club is a virtual support network which was created to help companies make the best use of our Information Communication Technologies (so that is what ICT stands for!) in order to boost business performance.

The events are run all over the region; the one I attended today was in a very nice hotel on the outskirts of Daventry, and topics range from Blogging for business (the one I attended today) to Google analytics and conversion, developing a mobile marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO – took me a while to twig that acronym too!), Pay per Click  and Email marketing and Facebook and LinkedIn courses.

I found the course to be very interesting, it didn’t tell me much that I did not know already, but the trainer, Liam Lally of Transformational ICT, made it easy to follow and amusing in places, and I was pleased I went, even just to know that I am going along the right track with this blog.

The biggest value was in chatting to other attendees and networking before the meeting, and the bacon sandwiches were quite tasty too.

So what was the cost of this 2 hour breakfast seminar?  It was FREE!  The event was hosted by Northamptonshire Chamber and they don’t charge attendees.

These events are only available until March 2012, funded by the East Midlands Development Agency, so click on the links above and see if your business can take advantage of the seminars on offer too.

For my other posts about blogging then follow this link.

Learning to be a good blogger

Being new to this blogging lark, I have been looking for hints and tips to try and help me to be a good blogger. I was really pleased to find that a good friend of mine, Alison Neale, was running a free webinar today called “7 Tips to Blogging Success”.

I have known Alison through my hobby of bookcrossing since I first joined the book sharing website in 2003.  Alison runs her own proof reading and copywriting business called The Proof Fairy, and amongst other things she offers WordPress installation and hosting and blogging and article writing services.

Webinar Screenshot

This Webinar was Alison’s first, as although she had presented the same talk at networking meetings, running a webinar with no face-to-face contact and feedback is completely different.  I must say though, I could not tell that this was Alison’s debut at running a Webinar.  She took the attendees through her clear and concise slides, making her points and expanding on the content in a very professional manner. I now have some more hints and tips on becoming a good blogger, including ideas for content to make this blog more interesting.

Now it is just up to you, my readers, to decide if I am doing a good job! To contact Alison Neale and see if she can help you with your blogging too then visit her website – www.theprooffairy.com