Our Brisbane bloggers group met again on Thursday morning at River Bend Café and Bookshop. Nine people attended. The group has really taken on some momentum since I started attending and took over facilitation about, I think just towards the end of last year.

What was exciting about our meeting on Thursday was that I finally got to meet BillHarper whom I have known through social media for I think four or five years. I met him somehow through Valarie Khoo’s Community. Bill is a copywriter / editor and is a great example of the diverse group of people who come to the blogging meeting.

 

 

Here are the links to some work Bill has edited if you want to check it out;

http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/a-practical-guide-to-information-architecture

and

http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/a-practical-guide-to-designing-the-invisible

The great thing about virtual work is as long as it is English, he can edit it. This group is based in the UK.

As well as bloggers and copywriters we are fortunate enough to have two people, two WordPress web designers attend the meeting; Sofia Woods and Andy Henderson. Andy Henderson has offered to give the group a free two hour demonstration, introduction to WordPress and Q&A session at his offices, so we’ve decided to run that on the 28th of June and that is up on the meet-up right now:-

http://www.meetup.com/Queensland-Bloggers/events/68288702/

You can book in to attend. Everyone is welcome and I think Andy says he has about 20 spots available.

Here are three tips I picked up from the bloggers meeting;

Bill Harper shared with me an iPhone app (and I love my iPhone apps!) called “Dragon Diction” which can be used for transcribing dictation. However Dragon has never worked for me. My voice must be unusual or something?!? So, I tried it. It does seem good but it just doesn’t seem to recognise my voice.

Bill Harper also recommended to me a website called http://Booko.com.au which is a price comparison website for books, so you can see the cheapest price of a book inclusive of posting. If you are addicted to books, it is a site worth checking out. Of course I always try and support our local bookstores like River Bends Café and Bookshop because it would be a sad world if we did not have bookshops to rummage through. I think sites like Booko are great if you are buying books for yourself. But if you are buying books as a present, it is far nicer to buy them from a lovely shop like River Bends. I ended up buying several books my grandfather Ashley Smith wrote from Booko.

The third tip that I picked up, this time from Andy Henderson was if you are looking for blog topics to write on, set up a Google alert on a particular theme and use that to suggest topical ideas that maybe you can use within your own blog post. Sometimes that can be a good thing, I know I recently wrote a post on venture capitalists and suddenly at about 10 o’clock at night I had hundreds of people visit me from America.

A ‘business’ aspect worth mentioning about the meet up is, we are, on average with pretty minimal effort on my behalf, getting ten people to attend these free meetings.  For a quiet cold Thursday morning having 10 additional patrons attend a café who otherwise would not have come to the café is really quite a significant outcome for the cafe, I would have thought? I wonder how well cafés can actually use the concept of meet-up and if they could facilitate meetings every morning at their café on a different subject group. Using meet-up they would know the numbers of RSVP’d and they don’t even need to facilitate the group cause people, once they meet one another pretty much are there simply to have a discussion on the topic at hand and the groups are self-led. When you come to one of our bloggers meetings, we follow no set structure. This allows for free discussion and possibly the only thing I really instigate is that we don’t have one person dominating the entire conversation. We break up into smaller groups and have one-on-one or one-on-a-few discussions on a particular area led whatever way you need to go.

One of the lingering discussions I had was with Sofie Woods who is a WordPress designer and interestingly shared with us that in her past life she was a circus performer – which stunned me because, again, she is someone I have known on social media through the WordPress Google groups for several years and all of a sudden she is a circus performer! I asked her why she why she did not leverage off that because as far as I was concerned it was actually quite an attractive feature of a business associate.

  •  Creatively juggle designs!
  • Perform acrobatics around your templates!
  • Tame the lions!

It just does seem like a really interesting concept to set yourself apart from other designers.

So what do you think?

I have this belief that you will achieve more success the more you allow yourself to be yourself. That may well polarise people – not everyone wants a business person who in their past life was a circus performer – but, for some people that would be an immense attraction to them.

Do you think you should be yourself or project a typical, “normal” business person image to achieve success in the business world?

The Brisbane bloggers group meets next on Thursday 5th July

http://www.meetup.com/Queensland-Bloggers/events/63989432/?a=ed1_l6

We are a free group everyone is welcome, all level of bloggers are welcome and hopefully if you come along you can find some inspiration, share some learnings, and like myself pick up some tips from the group.

I look forward to seeing you either at the free WordPress information session in June or the bloggers session in July.

 

Heather