Thursday mornings have recently seen me racing to 'The Hive' in Carrick on Shannon to enjoy the 'Social Media Marketing' course facilitated by Leitrim Local Enterprise Office. Last week I arrived (only) 10 mins late carrying a peppa pig plate with my breakfast of bread & jam. After making my way to the back and sitting at a desk, I looked down to see the right leg of my jeans was in fact rolled hafway to my knee. Realising there was no chance now of being taken seriously as a local business woman, I sighed, pulled out my fine tipped pencil and started taking notes. For all of you who won't get chance to attend such a course (I highly recommend it) I have whittled down the blogging info to give you some handy tips I plan to put into practice myself.

1. Start your blog

Johnny Beirne (instructing the course and C.E.O of Digital Business Institute) gave a great illustration. A website is like having a 'high street' shop. If footfall in the high street is down you need to take a 'pop up' shop to where the footfall is & give people a reason to go back to the main shop. Social media and in particular a blog is the pop up shop- its where people are and can help increase the numbers to your website. Schedule time each week to do it. Keep a notebook handy to write down subjects when you think about them. (music to my ears- i lurve notebooks).

2. Keep it regular

Blogs are so effective as they are very google search friendly. But google loves fresh information so keep your blog regular, weekly if possible.

3. A key blog title

Google will pick up the blog title. Look at mine for this post. I could have called it many things ("Tell me why I don't like mornings...?" "Exactly how did my jeans end up like that?") but when anyone googles blogging (and many people are setting up blogs) my chances of google picking up this post and therefore directing people to my website are increased. Use key search words for your blog title

4. Be Local

Every so often mention local things in your blog title. Then when people do a search for anything in your area up you'll pop up to give them a little wave and a "Hello, I'm here".

5. Link Love

Johnny talks about 'Link Love'. Your blog set up will give you the ability to create a link that people can click on and be directed to someone/something you are talking about. Google loves this and again you will whizz up the search results. If they give you link love back well then everyone is very happy and loved up. I will now attempt some link love to Johnny Beirne (some very handy tutorials here).

So 5 things I found very useful to know as a complete new girl to this, hope you find it useful too!

Love Lucy x

p.s I really have no idea how I didn't notice my jeans were like that........worrying isn't it ................