It’s been a while since I posted here and I’d usually apologise but as a new mum, an entrepreneur and a world traveller, I hope most of you will understand why this blog has had to take a backseat for a while.

However, I’m back with this (rather long) post and hopefully in the new year a few more with a bit of an experiment to come…

But for now, this post is for friends out there who (like I was) are on the fence about having kids…and no it’s not going to be one of those “kids are the best thing that could happen to you” type posts but a realistic view from someone who’s been on both sides of that fence…

So, the Munchkin is now 5 months old and we’re back on the road, currently in Thailand.

How’s parenthood treating us?

It’s wonderful, amazing, spectacular and all those things you hear uttered by parents everywhere about their precious little darlings. Mali is the light of our lives, truly.

Every cliché holds true about parenthood – it makes you see things in a different light, it gives you a new sense of purpose in life and you understand now why even the tiniest of developments makes you glow with joy and want to tell the whole world. But it is not all roses and chocolate…I’m coming to the other side in a bit!

For now though, here is a short list of “things I realise now that I’m a mother”:

1. Why new parents bore the pants off everyone else with their “Guess what baby Jo did today? He rolled on to his side & sprayed drool all over himself”-type conversations.
   - Watching the development of this tiny little thing as they learn more and more about their own bodies and the world around them is a privilege. It is fascinating and I will never grow tired of it.
2. Why you see babies with bits of sleep in their eyes, snot on their faces and other bits of stuff which hasn’t been wiped off. Are their parents just lazy?
   - When you know your baby will have a meltdown if you go within 1cm of their nose, you can live with the dried snot stuck there! And have you tried getting something out of the corner of a tiny eye without poking it & again, making the baby cry?!
3. Why there’s an endless fascination with baby’s bowel movements & nappy habits. Surely there’s something more interesting to focus on?
   - It’s a really good sign of health & that everything’s working when your baby is “regular”. Yup, we even charted every poo & wee for the first few weeks of Mali’s life and still do now that we’re weaning her on to solids.

So have I now “turned” into one of those doting, “this is the best thing that has ever happened to me” type people?

Um. No. Definitely not. While Mali is the light of my life, I remember talking to a friend of mine (a mother herself) a few months before we found out I was pregnant and I totally agree with her assessment of motherhood… she said:

Now I know my child I’d never want to be without them, but if I knew then what I know now about being a parent and raising a child, I might not have chosen this.

And I have to say that I know *exactly* what she means. I would NEVER want to be without Mali now we have her, and it’s not like she was planned either – but knowing what I do now about what it is to be a parent (and we were pretty realistic to begin with – which is why we’d practically decided we didn’t want to have children!) I’d have to think very hard about doing it again, if I had to do it all over again.

Parenthood is hard.

It’s not so much the recovery from an unexpected c-section, the sleepless nights or the additional costs. It’s about the responsibility, the umpteen choices & options and the decision-making.

I distinctly remember saying to Jonathan about a week after Mali was born “I want my old life back”. It’s a huge adjustment – one that so many people underestimate and the responsibility you have is huge.

As you might expect, we’ve chosen to go a different path on a number of things with Mali. A good example is her vaccination schedule – we’re not following the NHS route but instead have researched an alternative path & schedule. Have we done the best thing for her? We think (hope) so but you just never know. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Running a business & parenthood is really hard.

We knew that having a baby was going to be tiring. But we’d (naively) hoped that we’d have the kind of baby who would nap for hours on end, go to sleep without fuss and that we’d have a few hours every day to run our business.

Hmmm, it didn’t exactly work out like that. Mali has never been a great napper (she still only naps for 30m at a time) and while she’s now in a pretty good sleep routine, until she was about 14 weeks, it was a nightmare.

The only time we had to work on our business was when Mali went to sleep – and that wouldn’t often happen till about 10.30/11pm. These days, at a more sensible 7pm, we still get a good few hours to work and get to bed at a reasonable hour. But it’s still not ideal.

Travelling, running a business & parenthood is really, really hard.

We don’t do things by halves and we’ve now resumed our nomadic lifestyle. We honestly weren’t sure how we’d feel about this and whether we’d even want to once Mali came along but we’re back on the road, baby in tow and having a ball.

But again it’s hard. There are so many more things to consider, so many more things to research and so much more to fit in. We’ve got a pretty good schedule going these days where we spend the day with Mali, get her to bed then work in the evenings. It’s going well but we’re still chasing our tails at the moment. That’ll change soon. I hope.

So, would I recommend parenthood?

In a heartbeat if that’s what you know you want. I’ve always believed parenthood these days is an inherently selfish thing – nobody thinks “I’m going to bring a child into this world because the world needs it”. People have children because they want them. We’d decided we didn’t but then we had one. And we feel privileged and blessed to have been able to do so.

But if you have a choice and you’re on the fence about it, take it from me – it’s fantastic but if your life feels complete without children (like mine did), don’t let anyone pressure you into having them with their “it’s the best thing that’ll ever happen to you” spiel.

It’s rewarding, it’s thrilling, it’s fascinating. It’s hard work. It can be an uphill struggle and it’s exhausting. But then so is travel or charity work or running your own business.

One thing I’m really aware of however – and have become even more so recently – is just how reliant I (and many others) seem to have become on Twitter as a primary communication channel and promotional tool for our projects.

Side note: Almost anyone who says they’re on Twitter purely for the social aspect and not for promotional purposes is lying…I can think of only a handful of people I’m connected with, who truly & genuinely don’t seem to have anything to promote and are there purely for the conversation – and even then you could say, it is still all about personal branding.

As those of you who are on Twitter know, when there are down times you might find yourself feeling a bit lost, disconnected and perhaps even at a loss for what to do with yourself online. If you’re lucky, you’re one of those people who actually finds they’re way more productive. Or you may be so obsessed about checking whether Twitter is back up yet or not, you get nothing else done at all.

But like many social media and social networking platforms, the return on investment, when it comes to the value it brings to your business, is difficult to measure. That new client you recently signed may not have found you directly on Twitter but being able to follow you on Twitter sure helped convince them you know what you’re doing. And sales of that new ebook you released 6 months ago may not have increased directly because you tweeted about it but it sure helped spread the word and drove more eyeballs to your site and possibly therefore your sales page.

Twitter has become such a crucial connection and communication tool for many micro-businesses and solopreneurs that I suspect many would notice a significant (and very likely negative) impact on their business, if Twitter went down and never came back up. Yup…never came back up, as unlikely as that may sound.

So the question is this: What are you doing to ensure your business has a contingency plan, if Twitter ever goes down and never comes back up?

You can’t and shouldn’t ever rely on just one form of advertising, promotion and communication to market your business – and the same is true for Twitter. If you’ve noticed you are relying mostly on Twitter and your promotional activities have slackened off in other areas, then here’s what we’re doing and what I suggest you might want to do too:

• Be very clear about what Twitter does for you/your business and the way you use it – this is an important first step so you know how to replace/replicate it with tools which perform the same/similar function.
• Create other channels to give contacts, customers, clients & prospects multiple ways to connect and communicate with you.
• Build a presence on the other (relevant) platforms for branding purposes and again, to give people another way to connect with you.
• Connect with your Twitter friends in other ways – on the phone, in person etc. – and solidify and strengthen your relationships.

People keep trying to predict the longevity and death of Twitter; I have no idea when it will die a death and no longer be the channel of choice for so many of us – but when it does, I don’t intend to be caught short and stuck for ways to connect with people. Do you?

Mali Hope Woodward born on 4th July 2009 by emergency C-section after 2 days of pre-labour and a 12 hour active labour – at a whopping 8lbs 110z.

Whilst this may seem like a random occurrence, it is not.

It’s the result of a strategic plan, sparked by a genius idea and implemented with military-like precision (ha – that last one is *so* not true)…

You may know that at the beginning of this year, I made the decision to take the Location Independent project to “the next level”. In my mind, that meant treating it more like a business rather than a hobby and making it pay its way.

The Strategy

Outreach Teams

There are a number of parts to the strategy in doing this – but one of the core ones that I’ve been implementing to date is the concept of the Community Outreach Teams (inspired by Skellie’s idea of street teams to help promote a blog).

The goal of this strategy is to spread the word about the concept of location independence by harnessing the passion and interest of people already part of the community and creating “brand advocates” – or Team Leaders – whose role is to help us spread the concept and help promote the site/products/services we’re building.

Whilst the income from this business is not yet at a level which means we can afford to permanently hire people and pay them to do this, we do currently offer incentives such as free access to all our Location Independent products and free business coaching every month.

At the same time, we also hope that by aligning themselves to a growing ‘movement’ and community there are numerous non-monetary benefits to their own brands, reputations and businesses – which certainly seems to be the case so far.

Community Services

In tandem with the above, we’ve been working really hard in the background to provide a greater range of services and forums for the community by opening up the blog with various new features, starting up a Ning-based forum and adding to the range of resources we offer – both free and paid-for.

The Benefits

Brand Awareness

The obvious benefit the Location Independent business gains is brand awareness. A growing number of people are becoming ever more aware of the concept, our website and the services/products we offer – and at the same time, we’re spreading more than just a brand – we’re helping people to create the lifestyles they want.

Increasing Sales

One of the core goals of any business is usually to increase sales of the products/services on offer – by increasing the number of people aware of location independence, driving more traffic to our site, promoting the products & services on offer and partnering with people who can help us do this, we’re obviously seeing an increase in sales of all our products.

The Challenges

Brand Management

Whilst “location independent” is the brand for the business we’re building and is a term we coined, created a visual identity for and own the domain name for – it is also a phrase to describe a concept which anyone can use.

In having more people associated with the term, using it and promoting it, we’re opening up the brand in a way that at times, makes me uncomfortable (control freak that I am) and that could become hard to manage in the future.

It’s a balance between letting it grow organically and ensuring that it is not compromised nor damaged by anyone closely associated with it – hard to do in a community that’s as open as this and for a term that has essentially become popular to describe a lifestyle concept.

Managing Time & Effort

I can honestly say that the effort I was previously putting into the location independent project is nothing compared with what I’m doing now! The combination of strategising, planning, implementing, co-ordinating, organising and supporting is almost a full-time job – which I’m pretty much managing to cram into about 2-3 hours a day at the moment, given my energy levels.

It’s been fantastic working with the Team Leaders and other members of the community but boy, is it hard work responding to requests, answering questions and all the other admin-type stuff which I haven’t yet managed to outsource!

Measuring ROI

Again I have to be honest and say that whilst sales of our products have increased, it has not yet increased *enough* to compensate for the additional time & effort I feel I’m putting into the business.

Whilst increasing brand awareness is great, it’s one of those things that is hard to define & quantify – unless you obsess about blog subscriber stats, website traffic, twitter followers etc. which we do measure but tracking conversions and where exactly these have come from remains a challenge.

Of course, the bottom line for any business measurement of success has to be profit. But aside from a couple of successful joint ventures and promotions which had been organised prior to much of the above, many of the other activities haven’t yet generated a noticeable increase in sales.

Fortunately, in monetary terms, it’s not costing us any more financially but the cost of my time is currently more than I’d like it to be – and measuring (and maximising) the return on investment of the time I’m spending doing community building, enablement and support is something I’ve still got to figure out.

In Conclusion…

I’m really, really pleased that the concept of location independence as a lifestyle is having its time – and that we’re really focusing on our mission to help others create this lifestyle – but at the end of the day, we’re also running a business.

Which means that I need this to be commercially viable if this is what I’m going to spend the majority of my time doing – and the bottom line for me, means that the increased effort I’m putting in must result in a comparable increase in the income generated from this business.

Whilst I suspect (and hope) that the location independent community itself will continue to grow organically, as a business it’s vital that we review our strategy and activities – and measure the ROI from these on an ongoing basis and then adjust our course if necessary.

If you’re not doing this yet in your business, maybe it’s something you need to do too?

But as somebody who is none of these things and sometimes really wishes she were, it can be frustrating to feel so boring, normal and run-of-the-mill…

And when I look at some of these guys and see the strong brands and personalities they’re creating around themselves, it’s useful to remind myself of the following:

• You can’t be what you’re not
• If everyone were quirky, offbeat & weird then no-one would be
• You can still be successful without being like that

Here’s how you can achieve the same effect & business success as some of the cool kids you see online whilst still being boring (like me):

Polarise your audience

One of the reasons why people like Naomi & Havi do so well is not because they’re insanely popular with absolutely everyone but because they polarise people. Naomi especially is great at this – you either love her or you hate her (I love her, well maybe not “love” but I do think she’s fabulous).

This is a brilliant strategy because the people who hate you clearly aren’t the people you’d want to work with anyway and the people who love you, really do love & rave about you.

There’s no wishy-washy, happy medium here – there are strong, passionate feelings involved which is quite something to achieve in any business evironment (another example of this is Marmite – you either love it or hate it).

Here are a couple of ways you can achieve a similar effect if your personality isn’t up to scratch:

• Focus on making your product or service 200% suitable for a very specific group of people only – don’t try and make it appeal to everyone, in fact it may even turn some people off but that’s ok. If you can build loyal, raving fans of the product/service you do offer, that’s enough.
• Tweak your marketing messages to be more exclusive – by this I mean don’t try and appeal to everyone with vague, generic phrases on your marketing literature but be specific, state very clearly who your ideal customers are and behave in a way that they’ll be turned on by but perhaps others wouldn’t.

Make what you do, not who you are interesting

If you’re not a “personality”, then there are plenty of other ways to pique & keep people’s interest. What you’re basically looking for is some sort of hook – something which makes you more memorable to people and if that’s not through your personality then find something else.

It might be something you do, something you know or something you have which gives you a hook.

Our personal example is obviously the fact that we’re location independent. The business we’ve been running (which, once again is going through yet another reincarnation!) wasn’t particularly spectacular or different from many others but the fact that we did it whilst travelling the world, living in exotic places gave us a hook, a story which made us stand out from the crowd.

Keep your branding & core message consistent

[Please note, this is very much a case of do what we say and not what we do - even though it's not turned out too badly for us!!!]

To become and remain memorable (and in the forefront of people’s minds), keep your branding and your core messages consistent. In practice, this means:

• Decide on a message (your USP – the thing that tells customers why they should buy from you and no-one else) and stick to it.
• Keep your offline and online branding consistent – use the same logo, colour scheme and tagline on all your materials.
• Use the same avatar/profile picture for all your online profiles, here’s what Seth has to say about choosing one.

It can be hard when you look around and see the cool kids clubbing together and being quirky, offbeat and cool whilst you sit there wondering how you can make it too, but here’s another secret to being successful if you’re not part of that club…find a club you do fit into or better yet, create your own.