SOHO Solo West Cork

Calvin October 3rd, 2008

Part of the reason the SOHO Solo West Cork blog exists is to encourage and promote social media engagement by Small Office Home Office (SOHO) workers and Solo entrepreneurs in the region.

To that end we’ve decided to launch a brand new competition for the best blog post and best blog comment of the month by a SOHO Solo member. (Hat tip to Trevor Kingston of Lasertech Southwest Cork, who suggested this idea in a discussion over on our LinkedIn group).

To kick things off I’m offering two professionally written press releases to the SOHO Solo who contributes the best blog post in October, and Trevor is offering a €50 Lasertech voucher for printer consumables for the best blog comment by a SOHO Solo member.

So… if you’re a SOHO Solo member, sign up and join the conversation. If you’re a home based worker or solo entrepreneur in Cork or Kerry who hasn’t joined SOHO Solo yet – add your profile on the SOHO Solo Ireland site and get involved.

Unfortunately I’m not eligible… which means that David Hollingworth of CTS West Cork is currently in the driving seat as the only other contributor. So come on, how about giving David a run for his money?

I’m looking forward to reading all your posts.

Competition Rules

Pretty simple really:

1. The competition is open to ALL SOHO Solo Ireland members, regardless of which network chapter they belong to

2. Only entries from SOHO Solo members with current active profiles on the SOHO Solo Ireland members directory at the time of judging can be considered for this competition

3. The decision of the judges (Network Coordinators Jackie Gowran and Calvin Jones) is final

Winners of the October competition will be announced at the SOHO Solo West Cork meeting in November, and afterwards on this blog.

If you would like to sponsor this competition by contributing one of the monthly prizes please drop us a line using the contact form.

Our thanks to this month’s sponsors:

Tags: Blogging, competition, Membership, sohosolo

• Blogging , Competitions , Soho Solo
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Calvin September 24th, 2008

If you were in any doubt at all about the power of blogs to help your search engine rankings here’s a fairly compelling piece of evidence to convince you that they really can make a difference.

This domain was registered, and the blog was created and launched in August of this year. That’s just last month… and very little time to see any real results in terms of organic search engine rankings.

When we launched, the search results on Google.ie for the term “Small business West Cork” were dominated, unsurprisingly, by the West Cork Enterprise Board – the regional Irish Government agency charged with fostering local enterprise.

Just a month-and-a-half or so later, from a standing start, our embryonic SOHO Solo West Cork blog has surged into the top two slots on Google.ie for that same keyword phrase, and five of the 10 page 1 results relate to this site.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a fairly impressive and unequivocal affirmation, if one were needed, of  the power blogs have to hit the right “buttons” with the search engines.

Tags: Blogging, Google, Networking, Search, SEO, West Cork

• Blogging , Networking , Social Media , Soho Solo , West Cork
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Calvin September 16th, 2008

Quick post to mention that although things have been a bit slow over the past week or two (other work pressures, and the fact that at the moment I’m all on my lonesome writing here… sniff :-() they should pick up some momentum over the coming weeks as we start encouraging more SOHO Solo members to sign up and start contributing.

The whole point of this blog is as a resource for SOHO Solo’s – members and non-members – but for members it also offers an opportunity to get their feet wet in the blogosphere, and to get some guidance and support on posting here before they set up their own blog. Once they’ve tried commenting and posting to the blog, we’ll also be encouraging members to try other social media resources like Twitter, LinkedIn and others to see how they might apply to their particular business.

SOHO Solo West Cork Group on LinkedIn

As more members contribute articles about their SOHO experiences and share their expertise the blog should evolve into a valuable repository of information for Small Office / Home Office workers not just in South West Ireland, but around the world.

So, things might be plodding along at the moment, but stick around… because it’s about to get interesting!

Tags: Blogging, Social Media, Soho Solo, Twitter

• Blogging , Soho Solo , Twitter , internet
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Calvin August 23rd, 2008

Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase

Zemanta is a great plugin for your browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer), your blogging platform (WordPress, Movable Type or Drupal) and the Windows Live Writer desktop blogging client that automatically suggests creative commons licensed images, links to content related articles relevant to your blog post content as you type.

No more struggling to find images you can use to make your blog posts more visually appealing: Zemanta makes finding and including images in your blog posts both quick and easy. Just place the cursor where you want the image to appear in your post, scroll through the suggested images, then click the one you want and hey presto, it’s added to the post complete with the relevant attribution links. No hassle, no fuss.

But, as mentioned above, Zemanta is about more than just images, it also suggests articles and links to relevant content that you can add to your post with just a mouse click.

I’ve only just started playing with the Windows Live Writer version of the Zemanta Plugin, this is the first post I’ve used it with, and so far I have to say it rocks!

If you have a blog, give Zemanta a try… from what I’ve seen so far you’ll be very glad that you did.

Tags: Blog, Blogging, Drupal, Internet Explorer, Movable Type, Windows Live Writer, WordPress, Zemanta

• Blogging , internet , tools
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