Small businesses, start-ups and charities can book in for one-to-one mentoring sessions with Digital Garage technicians who will help improve their website, their social media presence, the way they use Adwords and much, much more.

The two training seminars are:

• Tell your story online – creating a good website, making it mobile-friendly, using insights gained from data to improve your site and using social media to boost your digital presence
• Reach new customers online – understanding how search works, being more findable in both regular (organic) and paid search

It’s all free, but it won’t be there for ever.   The Garage will pop up for a few months in the Library of Birmingham and then pop up in another city, so get your Google goodies while you can.

• Register for Free Training at the Birmingham Garage

That’s it, I’ve said it.

I was leading a workshop for Birmingham Book Festival last weekend called Finding Your Blogging Voice. One of the first things we did was brainstorm our reasons for blogging. Between us we said:

• to have a voice
• to showcase work
• to create an archive of material
• to explain a business
• to connect with people
• to improve SEO.

I was leading the workshop and so I forgot to say that, though I do indeed get all those benefits from blogging, my number one reason for going tap, tap, tap is because I enjoy it.

There are all sorts of different pleasures, of course.

Blogging isn’t like sex

The pleasure of blogging isn’t like that of sex or swimming or lying on the sofa with a glass of wine. It’s  more like the pleasure of making a photo album – but using word-pictures rather than images.

And, as I said when I created this website, it’s like the pleasure of having my own room and getting it just how I want – my own little bit of cyberpace where I can play and muse and hang out with my friends.

In her seminal post What We’re Doing When We Blog, Meg Hourian talks about the anatomy of a post and the communication evolution etc.  It’s all good stuff.

But she doesn’t say: “Having fun.”  That’s what I’m doing when I blog and the day it stops being enjoyable, is the day I’ll stop blogging.