How She Does It: Marie Teather

This post is the third in the "How They Do It" series, where I will be featuring entrepreneurs and the solutions they are using to launch and run their businesses.

In this edition, I’m chatting with Marie Teather. Marie Teather, founder of Worldette and lifestyle design mentor, helps women get out in to the world, travel more, and enjoy life — wherever home may be! She has emigrated around the world three times in the last 11 years and traveled to over 30 countries. Her mission is to ignite women’s adventures and to change the way women’s’ world news is presented. To learn more see worldette.com/about.

[Nikole] You have a team of writers that help you with stories all over the world. How do you find and manage these guest writers?

[Marie] I recruited an initial team of in-house writers before the Worldette was even live using Odesk and by directly contacting travel bloggers I thought would be a good fit for the team. Some of these are still with me today.

These days however I mostly feature guest writers who contact me after landing on the site. I have a write for us page that explains clearly which articles suit and inspire our readers and then a contact form that filters the pitch efficiently for me. I receive a lot of guest post enquires every day, so I need to have a filter in place!

[Nikole] You have said you rely on the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin to manage your posting schedule. Can you let the readers know a little about that and how you use it?

[Marie] My in-house team of writers uploads their own articles to the site and set them to draft. WordPress Editorial Calendar allows me to look at the upcoming calendar and then drag and drop the drafts into the relevant date. It’s much easier to schedule and move articles around when looking at a calendar rather than having to go into each blog post and schedule a date.

[Nikole] Your new site uses a theme called Loook by Blooming. What went into that decision?

[Marie] With this theme I feel I’ve created an experience for readers when they land at Worldette. There’s a lot content on my site and readers can either explore the blog content and resources or shop around my products and freebies pages.

Worldette has always had a very Pinterest-inspired design with an emphasis on blocks of images and Loook theme allowed me to continue with this branding. It optimizes really well for iPad and mobile devices too — there’s no excuse not to have this in 2013!

Most importantly I like how easily it separates the community blog posts from me and my products — this was important to me. I am able to filter people back to my products but still let readers explore the blog content.

[Nikole] I love the little images you created for your front-page landing to announce your various programs and services. How did you create those?

[Marie] I used PicMonkey. I usually Indesign but I’m actually really happy with the results I got on PicMonkey. I have a tendency to spend too long when using Indesign but with PicMonkey each image took under 5 minutes!

Another tip I have for designing is to create a Brand ID board on Pinterest such as this one. Add all images, fonts, colours and "feelings" that suit your brand. Your brand id will become apparent. Then when you need design inspiration simply look to your board and create something that would look at home here. If it doesn’t suit the other images you are going off course!

Wow, what a great post from Marie! If you want to learn more about Marie’s course — which is about transforming your worries, fears, and boundaries into wild adventures — go here now before it starts April 22nd!

If you have any questions about the topics discussed here, please feel free to ask in the comments below!