September :: 2006 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

One of the risks in working from home is that your work is always within reach, literally. So unless you are a very disciplined, highly organised person, which frankly I am not, you can find yourself working through weekends and not actually taking serious time out from work.

Which is not my idea of the good life. But I often succumb to the temptation to “catch up”.

So this week past, in planning to go to Byron Bay for my presentation on blogging, my partner Suzie suggested we give ourselves a day off, or at least a large part of the day, a suggestion with which I readily acquiesced.

I really enjoyed the seminar – I love sharing with people what blogging might be able to do for their business, or for their community networks, and the audience were very attentive and appreciative.

We then headed off for some breakfast – I’m not good at having breakfast when I’m presenting – and found what was obviously a popular spot at Fresh, just a short walk from the beach.

Here’s what I just wrote on a travel website, as a review:

Excellent breakfast – an omelette which proved that a good chef can make an omelette to delight the senses, coffee properly made. Service from the owner was great, not so good from a couple of the staff, whom the owner explained were new – as in, a very minor point, but you don’t serve from the left (at least, not in this country). Open air cafe, like the best of Bali without the motorbikes and hustlers. Very conducive to relaxed eating and drinking, mercifully free of loud music so you can have a conversation.

It seemed to me an ideal business to have a blog. As I said to the people at the seminar, I’ve discovered from the search engines that there is quite a bit of conversation in the blogosphere about Byron, but local businesses generally do not seem to have tuned in to that conversation. And what’s one of the main things you are interested in when you are travelling, or staying somewhere on holidays? Food, right?

So while paying for our breakfast I asked, as I often do at interesting establishments, and as I was to ask several times that day at various ones, whether Fresh have a blog. The owner was not clued in on blogging but assured me they have a website, although she did not give me a url – never mind, I thought, I’ll google it. But I’ve just been searching and have not found a site, although the restaurant/cafe is listed on various sites, such as the Byron Bay Chamber of Commerce site, which has ‘no listing’ in the space for a website listing.

I’ve noticed on this and a previous visit to Byron that Fresh has been very busy. My hunch is they could be even busier with a more easily findable website – or a blog.

Over the next couple of days I will post about some other interesting establishments from our day at Byron, including a great shoe outlet and the Ducati motorbike shop where I got some interesing pictures and a good story.

Martin Neumann has, to coin a phrase, a way with words.

And it’s good that he’s back.

Martin had an excellent blog on home based business – HomeOfficeVoice. And as I was also writing about home office stuff – not so much now, but back then – we were occupying the same space to some extent. But it never felt crowded to me and we exchanged the odd comment compliment from time to time.

Evidently Martin’s actually been ‘back’ for quite a while, but I hadn’t known about his personal blog, The Blog Columnist, till today.

Anyway, as you can read here, Martin got sick of the home office, small business desk and dreamed dreams of bigger things or at least different things.

He writes very well – as in, he is a *real* journalist. And he writes with panache and flair – which I seem to think he kept somewhat under wraps on the homeoffice beat, but not on Blog Columnist.

This whole blog is my canvas. It’s highly opinionated. It’s about pop culture … that matters to me. It’s about business, blogging, people in blogging, movies, music, books, writing … What. Ever. Catches. My. Fancy.

I like the blog’s name. I have a theory which I can’t substantiate, because it is based largely on a long ago conversation in a bar with a journalist mate who was a gun columnist, that there have always been newspapers people bought more for the opinion/entertainment/currentrant columns than for the ‘news’. The Blog Columnist promises fair to be in that league, if it is not already (I do have *some* work to do today and have torn myself away from reading *all* his posts, but what I read was absorbing and entertaining).

Onya Martin!