Yesterday morning, I met some of my fellow participants in “SENG” (Self Employment Networking Group) at a workshop by Kelly Craft about social media.  There was a wide array of ventures, including visual arts, expressive arts, life coaching, digital assistance, HR consulting, and bookkeeping.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to do website work for some of these people.  I gave a brief introduction to my previous business idea (OurMus.Net), to the website development projects I’ve done since then (for the Grand Philharmonic Choir and Malcolm Gladwell), and to what I’m doing now (Bowman’s Websites).  I handed out business cards to most of them and also got some of theirs.

Kelly’s presentation was useful.  However, I’m struggling with how to make use of my existing networks on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. (which include hundreds of academic and/or music people) while separating my business activities from my numerous posts about other topics.  I decided to make my website’s main page show only three posts, sticking the one introducing my business at the top and otherwise showing the two most recent ones.  That should keep the site reasonably well-organized, but also somewhat dynamic and changing.  However, I might change the underlying WordPress code so that the main page will only show posts categorized as “Bowman’s Websites.”  I also need to find a good WordPress plugin for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), to add a YouTube channel with things related to Bowman’s Websites, and to get people who visit this website and/or like the Facebook page (etc.) to give me some business and/or share the information with others.

I can choose to send every new post to my public Facebook page for Bowman’s Websites (my other Facebook posts are for “Friends” only), to my Twitter page (which will probably come to include a combination of business and non-business posts — thus more “freewheeling”), and/or to my LinkedIn profile (which I’ve refocused to be mostly about the business).  I changed my existing sidebar Facebook widget item to go the new business page and added one for LinkedIn.

On Thursday, I’ll be attending an Employment Ontario “job club,” so hopefully I’ll be able to do some more networking there, even though it mostly won’t involve self-employed people.