*Collaborative Post
Unless you already run a business and so start a blog as part of your marketing and promotional activities, most bloggers start from home. Probably in their spare time.
Blogging, however, can turn into a serious business proposition. What starts out as a bit of a hobby can become a full-time, lucrative, occupation. When you reach that stage with a blog, it’s very likely your home setup won’t be enough and you might need to think about choosing a business space for professional blogging. However, when you first start out and are working from home you need to make sure you’ve got a good internet connection. Take a look around and see what is provided in your location, for instance, EarthLink internet is available in all 50 states, so could very well be available near you.
Reasons for Change
There are various reasons why you could become dissatisfied with your current working space:
- You’re spending hours at the computer and the armchair no longer offers the creative freedom it once did.
- You share space with the family, you can’t always get a long enough stretch of uninterrupted work time.
- Vital bits of information or tools get ‘borrowed’ so you have to go hunting for them.
- You need to meet with clients or business partners and prefer not to use your home.
- Your blogging journey now demands a more professional space than you can provide. Professional standard photography or video production, for instance, may require a studio set-up or more computing power for editing.
- You might need to hire help, so need space to work together, hold meetings, etc.
- Maybe your blog supports an online retail business. With a rapidly growing sales base, you need more storage space for stock.
Each blog is individual, with its own brand, purpose, and audience, so only you can figure out what your next move should be to keep up the growth momentum. If you’re struggling, for time, space, or motivation, take some thinking time to work out what’s going wrong and how to fix it.
Types of Business Space
Having brainstormed the type of space you need to nurture your blog to the next level, you’re in a position to crunch some numbers and make decisions on what you could afford. You need to make sure the space is safe for you to use with business spaces that have passed all the correct health and safety regulations, including making sure the doorways have an illuminated fire exit sign so you know where your fire exit is in all light conditions.
There are a couple of options that won’t break the bank:
- If your main problem is stock storage, with your home office (maybe a spare bedroom or your dining room) being slowly taken over by the items you sell, a simple solution is to keep your stock elsewhere. Self-storage units, for instance, welcome business users and offer a wide range of room sizes as well as rigid security. Moving your stock out of your home office would create a more restful and creative space for computer work, and potentially pave the way to a more professional home office you’d be proud to invite clients to.
- On the other hand, maybe your problem is the lack of space or privacy that’s often an issue when working from home, especially if you need to keep regular office hours. Or maybe constantly setting up and dismantling your photography equipment and studio space is a burden, and a barrier to progress. A possible solution here is a flexi-office. This offers all the security and professionalism of traditional rented office space, but without the long-term tie-in and complex paperwork. Your risk is minimal, but the gains can be huge. There’s also the advantage of nearby self-storage, so a flexible office might even solve all your business problems.
Raising Efficiency
Having identified the problems and considered all the options, you might decide that your current set-up is ideal, but you need a more streamlined working process.
When your time is limited, or even if it’s not, automating as much of your working process as possible can release you from a lot of the mundane business tasks.
Consider:
- Installing booking software on your blog if part of your business involves face-to-face client services. Clients no longer need to phone you, so you spend less time answering queries.
- Create email auto-responses so you don’t need to monitor incoming emails quite so often. Senders will know their message has arrived and will be dealt with shortly.
- Set up Word macros for repetitive typing tasks that eat into productivity. You can make macros for dozens of word processing tasks, from inserting letterheads to aligning text.
- If you do your own accounts, link your bank account to your accounting software so transactions are automatically recorded.
- If you don’t already have one, create a blog template that also serves as a memory jogger so you don’t forget important information. Examples might be checking your keywords or anchor text for links.
- Schedule your social media updates for timely publication without your personal attention.
- If you spend too much time running between computer and stock room, run the entire physical side of your blog business from a self-storage room, packing for dispatch right there in the unit. All you need is a desk or table to work at, with no need to transport stock home before posting.
There are many options when it comes to finding and using the right space for your blogging business, whether that means finding external premises or ways to use existing space more efficiently. If you’re fighting with your working space, take some time today to figure out what’s wrong so you can start to make it right.