Loaded Bow

Once there was a girl who had a best friend who fell madly in love.  I think you know the rest.  The wedding was beyond-words-great, but we have missed our blog and our readers. 

We have fallen hopelessly in love with you and feel the blessing of this blog more and more each day.  With each positive response (and a new BIG positive response to expand in the works) our hearts get bigger, our minds go wild and we make crazy plans like applying for the W Experts Search , making a crazy amounts of business cards for an upcoming networking event and finding the content we need for the upcoming month’s theme of innovation.  (Please submit if you feel that you or someone you know’s business is innovative!)  With all these varied tasks at hand we feel so good to have a place to come to.  A place to write and a partnership that grows stronger and stronger with each meeting. 

Since it’s Workspace month, I want to talk about this workspace.  Since this is where we work, let us share a little about being online.  When I recently met with a friend Claire who is trying to get her website up for her paintings, she had some questions about the function of a website and the “why’s” of why to do it at all.  When I turned the question on her as to why she felt she needed a website, she said she “felt it was time”.  She also wants to “take herself more seriously”. 

I know, for me, this was a big reason to get my site up and running.  ‘It was time’ for me last August.  Everyone wants to find you online and everyone wants to say they have seen your site.  I told Claire the truth and that was that my site did not make me any money or seem to lead to anything remarkable until I stopped promoting the work in person and started to stay within the online communityto promote myself and my paintings.  What does this mean?  Well, I was leading people to the site through word of mouth and business cards, but it was making no/little impact.  There was already an online community created to look at my work that had been added to and worked on for years.  It had been made by curators and artists and art lovers alike…all for the same good cause of promoting fine art.  Not only was I missing the great potential numbers of submitting my work to online publications, magazines, blogs and interior designers, I was also asking people to kindly “take a peek”.  Take a peek they did, but peeking doesn’t pay.  Peeking doesn’t promote you and peeking surly doesn’t ask the peeker to tell their friends.  People like instructions and people who like you or your work will often do what you say.  So, they peeked, just as I had asked them to do. 

Peeking doesn’t pay

I also said to Claire that having a space online did another thing for me in terms of taking myself seriously.  I had to look at the site too, so when I went to show it to a friend or add a title to a piece and saw that “Gasp!  THIS ARTIST HAD MADE NO PROGRESS!” I knew that that artist was me and that there was only one person to plump up that site and fill it with delicious things!  That motivated me.  In a field that often requires many solo hours, this online space became my buddy, my accountability and my space for good things to show the peekers; a true working space.  This space needed attending to, cultivation, editing and love.  A word that is often used amongst loving and avid bloggers is ‘nurture’.  There is nothing as sorry as visiting a hollow, sad, lonely online space where you think, “GOOD GOD, get that thing offline, so it’s not making everyone so depressed!” When we met with web guru Megan Cole, she said you must “just keep nurturing your space.”  You can tell how much a blogger nurtures their space and this nurture tells you how much energy they put into it and how much heart they have for their blog. 

Gen and I have recently been watching the beautifully tended My Marrakesh about an American woman living-lovely in Morocco.  We have fallen in love with her dreamy writing and when I complimented her on her blog via email, she said “My blog, like yours, is a labour of love.” 

People will always respond to love.  Gen did, and look where that got her!  Meeting with all these fabulous lady-workers we have yet to hear someone say, “Oh, I am doing this for the money.”  Or, “I was told this business was a good idea.”  The working ones who are working wonders are working from their hearts.  We try to follow this as closely as possible and watch our content and measure it by concerns about integrity and heart.  We were MIA and looking pretty in dresses, but we are happy to be back full force in a nurtured space.

Photo Credit: www.ampersandmedia.co.uk/images/peeking.jpg

zoe+loadedbow