Thinking About my Business and my Blog

Do you ever get that thing where someone asks you a question, and you know what you’re going to say… but when your mouth opens, something entirely different comes out?

This week, I had an interview with a judge for my entry in the South Wilts Business of the Year Awards.One of the questions the lady asked me was about the future of my business, where I saw it going. I had expected a question along these lines, and prepared a response… but ended up saying something entirely different! This was the second interview I’d had for the Awards, and for the second time, when asked about my plans for the future I found myself talking about this blog.

I have had this blog for two and a half years, and I’ve been self employed for about eighteen months. I had always thought of the two as entirely separate entities until fairly recently – when it occurred to me that actually, I love this blog and if I could earn enough money to live on, just by doing this – I would jump at the chance. Furthermore, since a large part of my business is writing, I would be stupid not to use this blog as an example of my abilities to prospective clients

I feel like something clicked in my head at the beginning of this year, and since January the blog has become better and better. This month I jumped 69 places in the Tots100 chart to number 35. I had always hoped that maybe one day I would be inside the top 100, but if I’m honest, this month when the Tots rankings came out I was expecting to drop, not to climb! I decided this year to really take the blogging seriously, and so I’ve really stepped up my game. I feel like that might be starting to pay off, with lots of opportunities coming my way lately and even some income.

Another thing that occurs to me is that I would love to do more public speaking, holding talks, seminars and workshops to help others. Earlier this week at the networking group I run with my friends, we were without a speaker and I volunteered to do a short presentation about using Facebook for your business. I put a Powerpoint together, and presented it without actually having run through the talk before – and it actually went really well. I enjoyed myself. I would love to do more of that sort of thing. I already train people on a one to one basis, helping with blogging and social media – but I would like to run group workshops for people who own a business but don’t know how to manage their social media. I just have to figure out how to get going with something like that.

I still don’t have a business plan, but I think if I had written one, I would need to change it now any way. But how do you make a business plan for a blog?