Elaine Lau Interview - Founder and Group Editor of Today's Motherhood

Today, I'm very pleased to have an Entrepreneur as well as a Stay-At-Home Mom from Singapore, Elaine Lau here with us.

Elaine is the founder and Group Editor of Today's Motherhood.

Could you describe what you do and how you earn your living?

I run an online parenting magazine, Today's Motherhood, which is a parenting website providing information to parents and parents to be. Other than Today's Motherhood, we do explore affiliate marketing and events, which are areas that we will be looking into in the pipeline.

What's the biggest challenge you have faced in your business and how you overcome it?

My business challenge is TIME. As my mornings are mainly committed to the children, I have only afternoons to work on my websites and attend meetings. So I have to manage my time really well and prioritize my task.

Being a new start up on a tight budget, how did you manage to get noticed?

We are pretty active in the social media platforms and also I am a blogger and blog on my own parenting experiences - The New Age Parents. I still blog now as and when I have the time but not as frequent now. I guess my personal blog has help me bring some awareness to Today's Motherhood in a way or two. Most importantly, in a business, you have to differentiate yourself. For our case, we differentiated ourselves from traditional parenting websites with our online magazine.

You have a huge following, what are your techniques that keep your readers coming back day after day?

Being proactive and sincere when we network with the readers. What's more important is that we provide practical parenting tips and information relating to the young parents. When you bring value to your readers, they will come back for more.

Many stay-at-home moms are looking to start a home-based business to have more time to look after the family. What do you think are main obstacles for them? What's your advice to overcome the obstacles?

In my opinion, here's some obstacles that they might face:

1. Time and focus: They need to juggle between the kids and their businesses. Many times, as a mother of 2 young kids, I know that children do demand alot of attention which requires time. For my case, I try my best to detach myself from the computer whenever I am with the kids so as to give them my focus. My laptop is switched off most Saturdays unless there are some important things that I need to handle.  I reserved my Saturdays for my children and the 3 of us will be out the whole day enjoying ourselves. As for afternoons that I need to work, I arrange for the kids to be taken care of by my mother so that I can focus.

2. Competition: With more and more mothers who aspire to be mompreneur, there might be a certain degree of competition.  More and more blogs or blogshops are emerging which is a very encouraging sight.

However, I see that many moms are doing kids related products. To stand out from the crowd, differentiate yourself on your products or services. However, in the internet era, rather than viewing fellow entrepreneurs as competitors within your fields, it is a better option to form a network of work at home mothers for support. In the journey of my business, I make many like-mind friends who are mompreneurs too and I am happy with that. By the way, Today's Motherhood is planning to roll out our forum next year. I would like to take this opportunity to invite all of you to join us at the forum.

3. Technical Know How: This is another big problem that I faced too. However, if you intend to join the internet marketing crowd, you have treat the part of learning the technical know how as a challenge rather than an obstacle. I do not have the flair for technical knowledge and I learn along the way. I am still learning right now.

4. Traffic: This is the main concern of people in the internet business. If you are really serious in generating income online, you got to learn this skill. There is no short cut. If you really do not have the time to learn traffic generation, advertise to bring awareness to your product and services in a suitable platform.

Thank you very much for the interview, do you have any final words of wisdom that you would like to share with us?

Remember your initial intention when you decide to start out your own venture and don't lose it. Stay focus and determine despite setbacks. Things will work your way. There is a saying, "Do your best and God will do the rest."

I would like to wish all mompreneur all the best to their venture!

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