Well, the site is live, you’ve given me great feedback, and I first of all want to thank everyone for your input and patience as everything gets finalized.
I wanted to share with you some of the highlights of the things I have been working on over the last few weeks:
- Most importantly, I want to let you know about the new “Get Link Love, Give Link Love” campaign:
- The Guest Bloggers project was a huge hit. I’m now going to offer a guest post spot once a week. Ponn Sabra and I landed an interview with a prominent UK small business podcaster because of her post. For post submission guidelines, please check out the Get Link Love page.
- I’ll be adding that Mr. Linky widget to the Monday Motivation meme, to foster more, well, ‘Motivation’ on Mondays… (thanks for the idea, Char!)
- The BlogJolt is still up and running, the weekly meme for mom bloggers in which we pick a person and the whole group sends link love. But more news on that to come!
- The sidebar has been changing, and still needs a little help with the spacing, but you probably noticed the addition of a few new things:
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- Top Commentators, offering up a link to the talkative bunch
- I’ve moved my blogging articles to the section boxes on the main page
- I’ve added links to my favorite monetization tools
- I’ve added a box at the top to highlight companies and products I really believe in. For now, it’s TextLinkAds and WordPressTutorials.com. I’ll also use this spot to let you know about new things I’m offering around here. Yes, it’s advertising. But I’m a choosy blogger, and choosy bloggers chose Jif - I mean, GREAT products to push.
- Under great reader resources, I’ve added a monetization page that puts all of the ad networks in one spot. Well, not all of them, but I’ll be constantly adding to it. I’ll be adding other online marketing resources here in the future as well.
- Also, I’ve put together a page called the Tech Help Desk, with the tech tools I’ve used to build this site, from FeedBurner to a list of the best plugins I’ve been able to find.
Now, for some of my plans to let you in on what’s to come:
- The BlogJolt will get rolled out to other niches. This will be a big project, so if anyone is interested in being a moderator for your particular niche, puh-lease let me know!
- I’m setting up a pay-per-lead affiliate program, paying you to get people to sign up for the free Blogging eCourse. I’ve updated the eCourse as well.
- My first information product, How to Start a Mom Blog, is underway. It’s about half-way done, maybe a little more. MAN, it’s a ton of work! It’s something I will also set up with an affiliate program, so that any of you interested in promoting it to your readers will earn a healthy commission on it.
And HUGE kudos to Sarah Lewis from Blogging Expertise, who has done all the hard work to bring this design to life! 
Now I’d better shut up before I overload you with information - enjoy the new site!
Read more about Business Blogging, eMoms Behind the Scenes
Sparkplugging Founder Wendy Piersall is dang passionate about helping people start & grow a business while maintaining life balance (somehow).
Dawud Miracle has one focus: to help you get it. The it? How your website, and blog, can change the way you do business. You can find out more at 
Just wanted to pop in here and tell you I love your new look! You also appear to be busy busy busy! Keep up the good work!
OK, I’m tired just reading this!
Thnx for this link!
Btw can you tell me how you go about making money with amazon?
Oh I manged to hopscotch over to your blog from Johnchow.com. I haven’t looked through it much yet but I do like what I see as a first impression!
Also love the little blur at the top of page too, the one next to the title.
Seems like do follow comments is the latest trend. Everybody loves free links. It will be interesting to see if it catches on and everyone starts doing it.
Sania, to makes money with Amazon affiliates you need to sign up at Amazon.com, do a search for affiliates and the link will be the first thing you see.
Then (if you use Wordpress) get the Amazon plugin. This makes it incredibly easy to insert affiliate links.
I agree, John - it’s been talked about a lot lately, and definitely contributed to my decision to go with the plugin.
And Sania, John’s right - there’s a link to the Amazon Associates program on my new Monetize page.
id like to use the do follow comments plugin but it clashes with my livejournal x-post plugin and i get all kinds of errors.
but neato site you have. definately wanna keep reading it.
Very nice site (found it from your comments at Problogger). Glad to see more girl power in the blogosphere!
I am so looking forward to what’s coming up for eMoms! I’m grateful to have found your site.
Love the redesign Wendy. You’ve given me some great ideas for my - sometime in the future - redesign.
One comment: The comments seem a bit plain. Maybe some stying on the header would spruce it up a bit.
And finally, I’d love to see you post individual entries about all the great new offerings you mentioned in this post. As you noted, it was a lot of information to absorb, and a lot of it probably went unabsorbed.
Beautiful new design Wendy. Very clean and fresh. It really pops. I especially love the big orange RSS all the way at the top of your blog. Very excellent. Kudos to you!
One thought for improvement…Perhaps you would want to make a printer friendly version of your posts?
It’s cool that this is catching on. Nice blog, btw. Please keep the great posts coming.
Want to tell everyone that you’ve turned off the nofollow in your comments? Check out my new “ifollow†logos- grab one for your sidebar!
http://randaclay.com/archives/the-i-follow-movement
Wow, excellent blog. I’ll tell my wifey about this one:)
Keep up the good work!
I’m so glad I found you through the dofollow list. There’s so much to read here that I’m definitely coming back - too much for one visit!
won’t this plugin force google to put blogs only in their blog search and not in the main search anymore?
Wendy,
I just installed Dofollow by Semiologic this week. I’m glad to see that word is getting out about this.
All the best,
JoLynn
Wendy,
Just joined your eMoms Home community on MyBlogLog. I got here from Randa’s website and have to say I am impressed. Keep up the good work!
First blog on Randa’s dofollow list, thats bound to pushing alot of traffic your way
I’m on the list as well but a bit further down..I have noticed though that since I got placed on his list and made the fact that my blog follows links I get more comments but many seem to contain little to no actual content.
Have you noticed anything similar? I’m starting to get worried that people are commenting just to get link love and not to contribute to the discussion!
Aaron - yeah, it definitely happens now, whereas it didn’t happen so much before.
I have to really screen these kinds of comments now, and it ends up hurting more than just the spammer in the process. If I don’t know the commenter, I visit their site and check it out:
–Does it have an Alexa or Google Page Rank?
–Is it a blog with a real person writing it, or is it an ecommerce site (or worse, a made for AdSense site)?
–Did they actually add to the conversation at all, even a little bit?
–Did they leave keywords in the ‘Name’ field? (Usually a dead giveaway)!
I’m sure that sometimes I delete legit comments sometimes, but my comment policy is pretty strict - if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. then it’s gone.
The obvious ones I flag as spam to teach Akismet for future comments. But if I’m in doubt and still don’t want it on the site, at least I just delete it.
If they are real people with something real to say, they will be back.
At the moment I normally fall on the cautious side of the fence, unless its a high pr post.
If I’m not sure if the comment is a genuine thanks but the page is low pr (so no link love benefit to the poster) then I usually give them the benefit of the doubt. But I am constantly reviewing how I manage it.
My tech blog is fairly low traffic at the moment only being a few months old, so my process may change in the future but for now its fairly easily for me to manually make a judgement call on each comment.
All of this rhetoric on do-follow links is really encouraging. Continue the campaign! Can’t go wrong free links.
Hi Wendy,
I’ve just jumped over here from David Airey’s blog. I really just getting started in the whole blogging/networking world so will be taking my time over your posts and trying to absorb as much info as possible. From the first section I’ve read though, you sound incredibly busy! And, as I someone has already said, I feel tired just reading what you’ve been up to, but it’s all so exciting!
Good luck with all the improvements you’ve made so far and all those to come.
TrishA
LOVE the new look! I am glad I found this blog! Keep up the good work! Oh, where did you get the little “Join my Community and MyBlogLog” button? It is too cute!
I removed my nofollow tags today. I can’t believe I didn’t know about it until this week… I’ve just drawn a comic to go with a post about it the sunday after next so that my readers can participate in this discussion too.
Wow, great job organizing all that information. Just looking at your sidebar gives me shaky hands.
It takes strong minds like yours to lead the way for the rest of us monotaskers. Hehehe!
@Sania Wyatt:
“Btw can you tell me how you go about making money with amazon?”
I’ve been posting articles on just this subject at my site - have a look at this post particularly:
http://blogsformoney.com/post/Making-Money-from-Adwords-and-Amazon-Associates-without-a-Website.aspx
Do-follow comments are the latest trend for sure with dofollow plug ins being popular, I do-follow links now on my Aussie housewife blog. After a long time procrastinating I have seen the importance of dofollow and using the “do follow” principal to help keep the Internet better connected.
Regards Bree.
http://www.reallyreally.net
I’m a new blocker with not a lot of time to study up on all of the intricacies regarding a successful (read by more than two people a month) baby blog but I have gotten into it deeply enough that I have made my blog dofollow.
I was looking for directories and lists of other dofollow blogs and ways to connect with other “mommy bloggers” and found your site! Lots of good info here and I plan to visit often! Thanks! Claire
Thanks for this. I will be implementing Dofollow on my new blog as well.
I found your site through the do-follow movement list, but your links show as no-follow to me. (Firefox plugin)
I need to do the same!