Shoe Phone Friday: You’re giving me a headache

Today’s Shoe Phone Friday is of yours truly. This picture was taken in the Summer on a camping trip with friends. I was having a really good day but as soon as the shoe phone is put into my hands my inner little actress appears and I have to create a character. This character is on the phone to someone that is really annoying them and they can’t get them off the phone. You know, one of those conversations that goes round and round with no resolution and leaves you exhausted!

I wanted to start adding music to Shoe Phone Friday and today I have chosen Shake it out by Florence and the Machine. There is something that I love about the line: “And it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back, So shake him off.”

Happy Friday Fe-liners, don’t forget to tweet your shoe phone pictures using the hash tag #shoephone.

Love and Shoe Phones,

One woman’s blogging adventure

Last night The Port Mahon in East Oxford was buzzing! Why? Well because the Fe-line Women of Oxford got together for Word of Mouth, that is why!! We were very lucky to be joined by Hero Brown, who writes the blog Muddy Stilettos. Hero came to tell us all about the blogging adventure she has been on for the last year.

Hero took to the floor and told us that she wasn’t much of a public speaker, this was very self effacing. Personally I thought she was a natural, she spoke from the heart, she was funny, warm and even did impressions. I have to say that I throughly enjoyed her French accent.

It is so impressive what she has done with Muddy Stilettos in just over a year, 30,000 hits a month. But she kept her talk very real and shared with us her achievements, her fears, her failures and her hopes and dreams. I am not going to go into the details of Hero’s blog, as you can read it for yourself here, what I want to share with you are the best parts of her talk and some of the advice she gave the group.

The first thing that I loved about Hero’s talk was when she described how she felt when she found blogging and started Muddy Stilettos: “I felt like running down the beach with no clothes on.” I thought this was a great way to describe that moment when you realise that you are doing what you should be doing or a Eureka moment as Hero put it.

This leads on nicely to her next funny anecdote about when her husband gave her a much needed “kick up the butt.” He really pushed Hero to turn her blog from ‘lovely creative nice have’ to money making business. This spurred her on to contact potential advertisers and look at what her blog has to offer compared to a local newspaper. A blog has a much more targeted audience and advertisers can track exactly how much traffic they are getting from Hero’s site.

Her next piece of advice was to have a big ambition and a clear idea of what you want to achieve. To do this you might have to be brutal at times but it will be worth it. Hero is proof that if you put your mind to something you can achieve it.

A piece of advice that comes up time and time again from the speakers at Word of Mouth is: be prepared to make mistakes. Hero described how she’d had a really difficult time with her new blog design. But this is all part of running a business, if you spend too long thinking about what might go wrong then you probably will never do it. Things will go wrong, it is how you deal with a problem that is more important. This also links with Hero’s point: Don’t be afraid of trying something different. So basically leave your fears at the door!

Unfortunately non of this comes easily and to make it in the blogging world you really have to put in the milage, as Hero says you have to post regularly. Watching Hero talk about her blog it was really obvious why she is good as what she does, because she loves it and it is her natural state. We all need that Eureka moment, because when you love something it doesn’t feel like a chore to put the milage in.

Another one of the things that Hero said whilst she was speaking was that you have to let your voice come through on your blog. So this is my voice and I wanted to say how unbelievably happy last night made me. The audience was packed with ambitious and courageous women, who are doing amazing things. Looking around the room, I just thought “Wow, what a group of amazing, inspiring people”. And I felt really really proud. Proud that there are so many women out there who are strong, powerful, courageous and ambitious and proud of myself for bringing these women together. I think you might call this a Eureka moment!!

Word of Mouth will be back on Tuesday 26th March, when we will be joined by another inspirational women, Lisa Cherry. As soon as I met Lisa, I knew she was Fe-line, as she writes about other women. Lisa will be telling us about her journey through adversity and how she came out the other side and is now a successful writer, speaker and business woman.

Until next time my lovely Fe-liners,