 Hello, hello. Can you guys hear me all right? Yes, perfect. OK, they told me to project, and I speak loud already. So here we go. So my blog, or my blog, my talk is called Eat Blog Love, How I Stopped Waiting and Started Doing. So warning, this talk might actually make you want to get stuff done. And it might make you hungry, so good thing that lunch is right after this. So we can all go, hopefully, satisfy the food craving photos I'm about to share with you guys today. And all the photos are photos that I have taken myself, so hope you guys enjoy. So who am I? My name is Shada Tarabi. I am a director of marketing for Web Dev Studios, an enterprise WordPress agency in the community, and I run Dine with Shada. So I like to call myself the creative director of it. I've been a WordPress user for over 10 years, and I've been working full time in WordPress for about six of them. I'm born and raised in Austin, Texas, where I live, and my favorite food is Thai food, and fun fact, which you will find out later, is I'm a huge fitness enthusiast, and fitness is extremely important to me. But it wasn't always. So I want to share with you guys my favorite word. My favorite word is intention, and I believe in the power of intention, and part of understanding what that word really means to me is looking at the definition of that word, and through looking at the definition is how I actually put that word into action. And so to kind of start the presentation, while this word is extremely powerful, it wasn't always a tool that I use, and it wasn't always something that I practiced, and so through the tips and tricks that I'm gonna share with you through sharing my story here today, hopefully you'll be able to see just a little bit of the ways that I've been able to master the power of intention. So intention is a determination to act in a certain way. So being intentional with the way in which you act, your actions are intentional. Import or significance. So significance is being of significance, and it is important to you, and so being intentional with things that are important to you. And then what one intends to do or bring about? So again, how are you presenting yourself? What are you bringing to the world? How are you positioning and marketing yourself? Whether it's you as an individual, your personal brand, your business, your project, your hobby, your dreams, your goals, your ideas, whatever it might be, how do you carry that and present that to the world? So intention for me has a few meanings, but actually one action. And so for me, it's something that I try to practice every day of my life. And so to put that into practice, I have to share with you two pivotal kind of experiences that happened to me. In 2015, I started Dine with Shada, and so to reflect back, I've been using WordPress pretty much kind of since the beginning. I happened to stumble upon it when it was a small fledgling kind of blogging platform, obviously. Now it's grown to be this amazing, powerful CMS, and I'm so fortunate to have found it, but blogging was what got me started in WordPress, but blogging is hard. Creating content is hard and challenging, whether you're blogging because you have a hobby, whether you're blogging because it's part of your business. The act of creating any type of content takes practice and it takes intention. And so in 2015, as a lover of food, as a world traveler going to all these word camps, I thought, I'm gonna start a food blog, but that was kind of the ending point for me there, and I wasn't really growing with it. I wasn't doing anything really intentional with it. And then later in that year, an unfortunate accident happened where I was hit by a car as a pedestrian and I fractured my pelvis and my sacrum. I don't say that to make you feel bad for me or sorry. I say it to share a vulnerability about myself of an unfortunate experience that happened that literally brought me to my knees. I became extremely depressed. I wasn't able to work out and at the time I wasn't really working out but I was a former competitive swimmer and so fitness had been a part of my lifestyle. And so it really just brought me to my knees. I kind of had to look at my life and say, what the hell am I doing? How do you grow up from here? How do you bring yourself back up? And so it's because of those two kind of things happening intersecting in my life and by kind of looking at the word intention and realizing I wanted to be more intentional with my life, I had hit rock bottom. And so I love this quote by J.K. Rowling. It's something that quotes are important to me as somebody who is a marketer by trade and kind of by skill. I think the power of words is so important, which is why speaking at conferences is something that I try to practice and get in the rhythm of. It's why we talk about having mantras and quotes that we kind of put on our mirror and we face forward and we try to channel every single day. And so reflecting on this quote, realizing that just because you hit rock bottom doesn't mean that that can't be the foundation for which you restart your life. And so coming out of the accident, feeling super sorry for myself. Again, I had the blog but I wasn't really doing anything with the blog. I kind of looked around and I was like, well, how do you grow from here? Where do you go? And I had to realize that the only person who's going to pick myself up off the ground is myself. And so, yes, there's tools and tricks and people and all these things, but if you take away nothing, it's that you, every single one of you in this audience is an individual with the power to sincerely and completely change your life. That's it. And so I started rebuilding my life. And so part of that was looking at fear head on in the face. And if you guys know me, which I see a lot of my friends in the audience, I'm really grateful for you guys. You'll know that being honest and vulnerable is part of who I am and how I carry myself. Walking up to word camp Phoenix this morning, I was nervous, I was intimidated. I, hopefully I'm coming across extremely confident. However, public speaking scares the poop out of me. It's really, it's not fun to be up here. And so I think for me, the act of public speaking is staring my fear straight in the face and saying, okay, let's, let's do it. What do you have to lose? And so I try to channel that literally through every aspect of life. Like it's such a simple concept, but really taking it and breaking it down into actionable things that you can overcome has unlocked so much opportunity in my life. And so I started looking at fear as an opportunity instead of something to be afraid of. So again, to kind of mirror it back for this purpose of this talk, you're starting a business. You want to start a new job. You want to create a new product. You have an idea. Those are all really scary things. In fact, I just started a new job three months ago. That was really scary to leave something that I was so comfortable in to go do something new. But the reality is we don't grow into being the person that we're meant to be unless we go through uncomfortable experiences. And so I started shifting my perspective around fear and looking at fear as something that can empower me and push me forward instead of holding me back and making me feel small. And then again, because I love quotes, this one by Marie Curie, nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less. So really taking a look at what was in front of me and was making me scared and afraid and removing its power over me. Trying to understand what made me afraid. What makes me afraid of public speaking is that you guys are not gonna have the outcome of what you expected when you walked into this room today. So obviously my hope is that you have great experiences and have lots of exciting action items out of what I'm here to share with you. Another fear with starting my food blog was everybody blogs. How do I make mine special and unique? Starting a new company or starting a new job. Are they gonna like me? Am I gonna succeed? Am I gonna actually deliver on the tasks that my employer hired me to do for them? Those are not unique to me. They might be unique in the way that they're manifested in my life, but I'm pretty confident that everybody in this room is experiencing fear on a daily basis. And so how do we break that fear down and understand it better? And so for me, part of that goes back to setting intention. And so I think being honest with yourself about what you want is extremely important. And again, none of my tips and tricks are like, oh my gosh, you have to go to school for a decade and have all this life experience to understand. They're actually really simple, fundamental things that once I started actually realizing how simple they were and how easy it was to put it into action, it made me fear it less. I realized, oh my gosh, I can do that. And if I just say yes to doing it once, well what if I said yes to doing it again? And you start to see yourself making progress in the direction that you want. And so part of that is saying it out loud, saying I'm intimidated right now. This is scary. This is uncomfortable. I feel awkward. I feel weird. You have to breathe life into it, so the good and the bad. And so not just addressing your fears, but also addressing your goals. I want to become the CMO of a major Fortune 500 company one day. I want to own a house in a nice neighborhood and be able to send my kids to a great school. I want to be a respected public speaker that everybody loves and wants to follow and thinks is endearing. Those might be some of my goals, but I think for you guys just remembering, putting it out into the universe, stating it, saying it out loud, the good and the bad allows you to start looking at both what scares you and what excites you in a really unique and special way. And then part of what I do also is visualize it. So visualize yourself achieving that goal, overcoming that fear. If you would have seen me 20 minutes ago, you would have seen me sitting in a room, talking this talk out loud, giving myself a pep talk. Again, a super simple idea, but just by talking to yourself about what it is that's about to happen to you, about what you're about to do is so powerful. It gives you that confidence. And so being able to unlock that is something that not everybody really acknowledges that exists inside of them, but so I'm hopeful that you guys will walk away from this talk feeling like you can actually do that. You can do what you want, you can face those fears by saying it out loud and setting your intention. Another thing I do is focus on the everyday choices. So reflecting back on kind of the visual that I was just showing by walking across the stage, fitness for me is something that I struggle with as a former competitive swimmer. I'm used to putting in hard hours in the pool and on the dry landlifting weights. But after growing up, going into college, life changes happening, fitness becomes less of a priority and more of a like, how do I just keep working off that donut that I want to keep eating? And so as a food blogger, it became even more important. And I see fitness as the exact, a level of importance as running a blog, creating content and doing everything it takes to do my blog. Like literally just if I can wake up and go to the gym every day, that's so important to me because that's how I'm gonna have a healthy life and live my best life. And so for me, looking not at, wow, how do I live the next year to be in the best shape or to be the fittest shape of my life, but can I wake up today and just work out? And so it's funny actually this year for New Year's, I was reflecting with one of my girlfriends at my gym that I do go to every day at six in the morning. And I was saying, you know what I'm so glad that this year my goal for 2018 isn't to get in shape. But my goal is, is to stay in shape, to keep saying yes to it. And so again, once I started practicing, if I wake up today and I just do that one thing, if I wake up tomorrow and I just do that one thing, I looked at the whole last year and I was like, well damn, look, I did it. I actually did it. And it made it so much easier for me. And so putting that same mentality into starting a business or choosing to put yourself out there, maybe you're looking to date. I mean, full disclosure, I am a single girl, not that I'm looking for people, but saying like, that is something, that is something that for me is a part of my life that I have to be a little bit more intentional about. You know what I mean? Like, you wanna look back on your life, you wanna see that you're making the right choices to get yourself there, but you forget that it's those little choices every day that is really actually pushing you in that direction to achieve what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And so for me with fitness in particular, I started thinking about, you know, I have a fitness trainer, I go to a gym, I pay for it monthly, I've got a nutritionist, she's like helping keep me on track. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much money and how many people are in my corner, it's me. If I don't wake up, I'm the only one who loses out. And so when you start realizing that is that you are the one in control, it's both exciting and also slightly scary because you're like, well crap, if I don't wake up and work out, I could eat the healthiest things in the world, but I'm still not actually fueling my body by taking care of it. And so I think putting it in that perspective of making sure that I am reminding myself that I really truly am the person in control of everything that's happening to me is liberating and makes it a little bit less scary. And so accountability is the third thing that's really important. So understanding your why and your how is really key but then setting goals for how you're gonna achieve it. And so you should absolutely look at a year plan, a three year plan, a five year plan, no matter what the actual, what's the word, you know, like for me, it might be my food blog, it might be living a fit and healthy life, it might be like running a marketing business, but for you, your goals are different, right? And so I can't say that what I'm sharing on the screen is gonna actually mirror what's going on in your life, but I think that there are aspects of what I'm sharing that do apply to the unique things that you guys are experiencing. So setting those goals is really important and then tracking those goals and like following up with them. So just like it's important to state out loud kind of your intention and your goals, find a buddy who can keep you accountable. For me, I'm really fortunate, my little sister is my counterpart, she's my best friend and she's someone who has pushed me to be the best person that I can be and I'm lucky to have her because that keeps me accountable, having somebody who's in your corner who reminds you that you can do it because we all need that, you know? You need someone who wakes up next to you and says you can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And the more people that you have in your corner helping remind you of that is just so powerful and those people can't help you until you verbalize it. So it's okay to ask for help, it's okay to state your intention, it's okay to share your goals and your fears with other people because we're a community after all, especially being in WordPress. These people seriously and sincerely wanna lift you up, help make you better whether you came here because you're like, I heard about WordPress, this thing is supposed to help make me run my business a little bit better online or you're a seasoned WordPress user and you're here because you actually wanna give back to the community through maybe public speaking or participating in the happiness bar or volunteering. This is a community, so take advantage of it. One of the things I will share as a food blogger, so I use Instagram as my primary social media in addition to having a WordPress blog and if you're familiar with Snapchat or Instastories, you can make a little video of yourself doing something and project it out and share with all your followers. I'm super fortunate now that my blog has grown to the status that my blog has. I actually have people who I have never met, so very similar to people you might've met online through the WordPress community and haven't actually met yet, they support you and they like what you're doing. I literally this morning, I took a little video and I was like, you guys, I'm about to public speak and I'm really scared. This is gonna freak me out and I wanted to share it with you because part of me building my brand is being authentic and vulnerable with the people that I'm engaging with. Oh my gosh, I just had the messages start pouring and reminding me like, you can do it, you're gonna kill it, you're gonna be great, like you have a purpose to share and it's gonna be received, right? And so I think realizing that you're not alone, that you don't have to do it alone, that there are people who wanna support you and make you live your true best life is really, really special and so I hope that you guys, if you haven't found it, realize that it does exist and you can find it. And so the two minute rule, have you guys heard of the two minute rule? Yes, we're kind of nodding a little bit. So the two minute rule is again, a simple rule, two minutes. You can do anything in two minutes. So I will share what my two minute rule fail looks like because I know this rule exists and I still sometimes avoid this rule but breaking it down, sometimes acknowledging it together, maybe we'll all get better at it. So my fail is I know that I should respond to my Dine with Shada emails. I definitely respond to my web Dev stuff because I'm employed by this employer. They hired me, I'm gonna be accountable but Dine with Shada, I'm the boss and so sometimes I like that because no one has to tell me what to do but no one tells me what to do. Nobody is sitting there saying like, hey, why don't you write a blog today? Hey, why don't you respond to that publicist who invited you to this restaurant? Hey, why don't you go plan that thing that you were trying to build or do or insert whatever it is and that's liberating and also super scary experience and so I started implementing the two minute rule and I'm not very good at it but I'm practicing. If I can take two minutes, if I read an email for example and I usually think about, oh, I'm gonna respond to that email later because it's overwhelming, I don't wanna deal with it but what I'm trying to do is look at that email, say, okay, it's gonna take me less than two minutes to do it and then just do it. I started seeing a little bit of progress in that particular aspect of my life and so it was motivating to want to do it more but again it's hard, you all like implementing it on a daily basis does take practice and so that is the reality. You can do some of these things, we have to actually implement them in your life over time. The two minute rule also, I've seen some of the research reflected that, for example, let's say with fitness, like fitness might be hard for you. Take two minutes to lay your workout clothes out the night before so that way in the morning you don't have to think about that, that's not an obstacle in your way, it's not a hurdle, you can get over it and that way hopefully you go to the gym. Another one was just start reading for two minutes. If reading more books is important to you, don't think about oh my gosh I've gotta finish that book or for me personally I have a friend who wants to read 365 books, that means a book a day. I'm like I don't even know why you have time to read a book a day, what kind of life is that? I don't know but for me, for me I am maybe I'm trying to read like a book a month or a quarter and so I was reading that when I was doing some research and I was like oh that's interesting, it said if you just read for two minutes you might find yourself reading the whole chapter, the whole book and so it really just started breaking it down for me again if I can just start. We all have that kind of good intention, right? We want to make progress, we want to make change, we want to do what we say we're gonna do. So why don't we just start doing it? Let's just say yes to two minutes, let's commit to two minutes, that seems like really low commitment and then you'd be surprised what you actually achieve after it. So this is the question I ask myself a lot, what kind of life do you want to lead and I'm extremely humble but also privileged to say that I'm living the life that I want to live. Two years ago, three years ago I wasn't, I thought I was, I thought that I had it all, I got a really great job out of college, I live in a great town that I love, I grew up in, I have great family and friends but I didn't really know what life I was living. I don't think I was living with intention, I mean I know I wasn't living with intention and so the unfortunate experience of having an accident happen to me that brought me to that realization was a bad thing but it brought me to the point in my life where I could remind myself that I have the power to choose what that kind of life was that I wanted to live and so I don't want you all to necessarily share it right now in this instance but think about it, what kind of life do you want to lead? Why are you here, why did you show up to this room to want to listen to me tell you that you can do it? Like what is that thing that you're on the tip of that you're like I should do it, I maybe can do it, you can do it, choose that life. And so all that good stuff is how I applied to be able to dine with Shata 2.0 I guess I should say. So the kind of the inception story was I was going to a lot of word camps, I was traveling with a really great hosting company as I would say at the time, they're still a great hosting company, I just no longer work for them and I was exposed to the greatness of kind of the community and all the excitement around WordPress and creating content and that wasn't kind of enough but what was enough was that someone had challenged me they said you know every time you go to a word camp you always have like the coolest restaurants to go eat at and I was like oh well I just like eating food so when I'm in Phoenix I want to go eat the best Phoenix restaurants and when I'm in Los Angeles I want to eat at the best Los Angeles restaurants and it kind of took someone else acknowledging that about me for me to go like huh I could start a blog. So I started the blog and like I said I did it for a couple months and it was good and it was fun and it was built on WordPress and I was like ooh look at me I'm actually like tinkering on my own side and it was like so great but actually user experience. But after the accident was when I started realizing like I love this. I love this as an outlet for me to be creative. I love this because it's created a community of friends who are similar like minded individuals to me who I can rally around. I like it because it's created really cool opportunities like I'm not saying you guys should all maybe you don't want to all be food bloggers but like for me I've got to do some really cool stuff like I got media at Austin Food and Wine Fest which is like a huge food festival and I got to be media at it. Like I'm just a girl who likes to eat and like now I'm here taking pictures of like amazing talented like talented chefs all because of something that I you know kind of started with this like passion in me and so when I was coming out of the accident I acknowledged like that was something that was important to me I want to breathe life into it and so I started just taking it part little by little again looking at it not as oh my gosh how do you go build this huge media empire but how do I build something that makes me proud? How do I build something that's gonna want to make me get out of bed and actually choose to do something for two minutes or 10 minutes or three years or five years like how do you get there and so I think for you guys it might not be starting a blog again it might be starting a business it might be changing jobs it might be moving across the country it might be asking that cute girl out or that nice guy to dance like whatever it is that's in front of you you're like I just want to do it just do it and so this is a really good reminder to me again as someone who really fears public speaking and putting herself out there and being vulnerable Chris Lemma is here and I have shared this with him Chris Lemma's amazing you guys like the way that he carries himself and communicates to an audience is something that I aspire to resonate with you know and so I've always looked at him as someone like man I just want to like be like liked and known and loved just like him and again the truth is like you can we can but the reminder is Chris Lemma once was a nobody I once was a nobody you guys once were nobodies and on your way to becoming somebody on your way to becoming your true identity on your way to becoming who you were meant to become that's really powerful but to remind yourself that we all started from zero so I don't want you to be sitting in the audience thinking like wow this girl she knows so much I know nothing I really don't I struggle through everything I do I am just extremely determined to prove myself wrong to show myself that I can do it in fact the other day I was at the gym and I accidentally and you'll kind of maybe laugh because maybe I accidentally did a double workout do y'all know what that means where you stay to the next I do like group fitness I accidentally did a second class because my little sister was there who's a fitness instructor it's the fun fact I get to live with her but she was like hey you came to this first class and it wasn't the class I wanted to be in it was like over capacity so I didn't get in and then I ended up taking this other class that was going on at the same time which is a little bit harder because usually I deselect myself out of the hard stuff I'm like oh that's too hard for me I can't do that so again I might look like I have it all together but I really don't it's a work in progress always but having good people motivate you reminding you that you actually can and maybe I'm not just a work in progress I'm actually extremely powerful and capable it's just what you need and just what I needed and she said hey take that really hard class and then when you're done I challenge you to maybe stay for the second class the class that you actually wanted to be in and so I did it and that was the first time I've ever done a double workout and I stepped out of the workout and I remember sitting in my car sweaty kind of acknowledging how sore I was and like could I do that again could I do more doubles should I do more doubles story for another day right like about doing that stuff but in that moment I did it and I felt really good about it and I felt like that thing that was scary and hard to me wasn't actually that scary and hard and so reminding ourselves that you can literally do anything you can rewrite your life you can rewrite your story you can reinvent yourself it's on the table the power exists within you and so for me I guess content is something that I manifest through my blog through how I present myself and that was a point that I really wanted to emphasize for Dine with Shada food is very visual when you're like looking at where you want to go eat for dinner or you're looking through content of like content that you want to engage with you want something extremely visual right if somebody takes a photo of food in the dark can you even see the food are you going to be enticed to eat it probably not and so while content for me digitally is really important think of your life as content how you carry yourself how you present yourself to the world how you communicate can people get you when they see you what do you radiate what are you being what is your personification to the public and so I was thinking about that when I was putting the slide together of like I'm just going to talk to them about like how I take really pretty food photos and like here are some examples of them but so much about what I do and how I feel like I'm achieving that success in my life is like thinking about like the whole picture of my life it's not just one aspect like your life is your life so the things that are important to you that matter to you are important and you should want to share that in a way that is meaningful to you and unique to you I'm not saying everybody needs to go choose to wear only all black which I've been doing now for almost three years exclusively because that's a personal choice that I made for the brand that I want to project but that is the brand that I want to project when people see me they say that's shade of Trabi that's shade of Trabi that's my brand you see my brand you see me you understand who I am and so being able to create that content of your life understanding you and then giving that back out to the world is hopefully what we all walk away here being able to master a little bit better and so now here's the fun stuff here's my tips and tricks on how I kind of you know create my content these are some universal stuff you know I've been having some conversations here just casually kind of talking with people like oh you're the food blogging girl oh yeah oh we saw your blog we saw your Instagram how did you do that where did you blah blah blah so this is a little bit of it if you want to go into more detail I'm happy to go into more detail after we're in the Q&A section but these are just some of the things that I take advantage of so SOGROW is essentially a platform that allows you to take in particular your Instagram and engage with like-minded users so some people you might hear by followers or by engagement this is kind of like borderline on that level however what I do think the difference is with this is this is a marketing tool don't you want your business to be shown to people who might want to engage with your business yes you want to market your business to people who might want to purchase and engage with your product and so for me SOGROW has been a solution that allows me to essentially go in and plug in details about the type of content that I'm creating blog accounts that I like that are interesting to me and then it goes and it engages with them on my behalf it's a service I pay for Planoli is another one again visually to kind of go back to this Planoli helps me plan my feedouts so I'm again usually an Instagram user but I think there are similar kind of services that exist out there for other things looking at how your content is displayed you know I don't think again everybody needs to have the same type of manifestation depending on what your project or goal is but for me trying to grow this the visual display of that is really important it helps people want to engage with that content better so I'm really mindful of not putting you know this is a bad example double me on top of me that's bad but making sure that there's an overhead and a me picture and a side picture and Planoli essentially lets me restructure my feed to see how those photos are going to be displayed and so again treating your brand as something that you're extremely proud of I want brands that I engage with to see this and be like I trust her with my business I actually just got a deal to work with Vanity Fair in Atkins and I get to go to a singles event so I get paid to go mingle with single men which is nice but I want to work with bigger brands like that my little sister is a fitness blogger she just got a paid gig with Downey they look at your content and they choose you know I want to engage with this person this girl is going to tell my brand story in a unique way and so for me it's extremely important to present myself while I'm not you know a multi-billion dollar business I take my brand and my product really seriously and so how I present that to the world is really important so I use Planoli to do that Lumen 5 is actually really cool I just found out about it it takes your blog content so let's say you hate creating videos but you heard videoist king which we all have heard so many times and I still fail at it Lumen 5 will take your blog post and it will actually turn it into a little like one minute, two minute video and it'll pull your photos that you take and your little blog words that you're writing and it'll create a little video for you and it's actually kind of amazing and something that I'm hoping to use more just because video is so important so more to come on that and then Canva I actually built this deck in Canva Canva helps me make Instagram pieces of content YouTube pieces of content Facebook it has like templates for like a media kit so if you're a blogger you wanna put a media kit together so you can give it to a brand and say hire me and give me money to represent you it's just a wealth of kind of tools that exist and there's a paid version but there's also a free version that's extremely robust and I love it and it's literally my favorite tool on the planet and then editing so because I do a lot of food photography fun fact about me all my photos are edited on my iPhone because I'm not professional I use Lightroom which is a Adobe product but it's for my iPhone I also use Afterlight oh my gosh I also forgot my number one that I love it's called Facetune in my photos you'll see it's very white based Facetune essentially lets me pull out the white it like erases like dark tones and so for me I can further emphasize how unique I want my brand to look and so I really like Facetune and I forgot to include it Color Story and Snapseed and Afterlight they're all kind of photo editing you can bring up the saturation, the brightness I personally use Afterlight that's my preference but I know a lot of people in my community like to use these other two and so I wanted to kind of put them out there for you guys to explore and again just like reflecting back on content whether you're creating a blog or trying to market your business or market yourself I think whatever you're creating content you wanna make sure that it's the best version of it so using those tools is important and then general tips make it really easy for people to learn your story I originally had that bullet point as business cards because I'm a really big believer in business cards I think when people meet you and wanna interact with you having not only a digital way for them to find you it's like having a website like I met somebody the other day and they were like I have an Instagram and I was like we gonna have a website? You need a website you have like how do you have social media and not somewhere to actually drive those people too so maybe if you're new here and you're like I do need a website that's why I'm here you're in a good place you need a website but further than that make it easy for people to find you get in contact with you second thing do what you say you're gonna do again no one's gonna tell you to do something but you should always make sure that you're putting your best foot forward and so for me I work with a lot of big brands and when those brands ask me to do something I should do what they say that I'm gonna do for them and so it's about accountability not only to myself but to that client that I'm working with and then personal branding kind of on off the table depending on what your kind of manifestation is of what you're trying to achieve or do but for me carrying myself in a way that people would wanna do business with me people would wanna interact with me people would want to purchase my product you are very much selling yourself when you are selling your service and so that is just as important and then the last one just do it because you can so last I will share with you it is perseverance that's the key it's persevering for long enough to achieve your potential we're all in the same race we're all on kind of like different levels of the race but we all have the same ending it's like how are you gonna get there how are you gonna tell your story how are you gonna let your true self live and thrive and be the best version of yourself because life is short and you only have one life and my favorite motto is to just do it and to live your best life so with that, thank you guys so much I'm Shada Trawby and that's it so I rambled a little bit I think I have like one minute I have two minutes I see a hand yes what am I using to take my photos I use a basic Nikon camera that I purchased from Costco the basic version and my iPhone honest to God you don't need a fancy camera you don't even need a camera as long as you have a cell phone just use my phone I will say with food photography when I work with brands they invite me and like come to their restaurant if they invite me past like five it's not even worth my time because the photos are gonna be really grainy and bad so with food photography I always wanna do it in natural lighting so that's where the iPhone is doable because natural lighting is heavenly yeah, there's another hand yes, how long do I spend on each blog this is a great question honestly editing is the longest part I think writing content is a little bit easier and take me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour I would say let's say I'm posting on Instagram post to my Instagram feed to edit and pick and plan probably takes me an hour to get one post up on Instagram and so when you start thinking about how much time it takes that's another thing when you're actually selling your services what's your value so how much time does it go and it's not just me coming in and taking a picture of your food and then putting it on my Instagram feed it's the time that goes into editing it so brands ask me how much it's gonna cost for me to put my hamburger on your feed think about your actual time that goes into it yes, and then yes thank you so much let's talk about he says it's a struggle to choose your theme template let's talk about that offline because yes, I made the mistake in choosing the wrong theme and now I'm kind of paying for it I actually just redid my site three, two months ago over the Christmas break and I'm proud of it I love it because I used a theme and then everything else I tweaked and did myself so I like to actually practice what I preach and you be a WordPress user and use WordPress but yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about themes actually so let's talk and then yes is it a hobby or a business? for me it's a business I treat it like a business it doesn't pay my phone bill it doesn't turn my lights on I haven't fully even monetized it yet but those are absolutely goals that I have and so working with brands is one way to do that and the way that I work with brands is by producing really good content that they would want their product to be featured in yeah last one great question he said do I have a certain like length or kind of temple that I'm creating the blog post in? no, and here's why I think minimum they say to do like 300 words to be like SEO ranked just get content out there again another like personal fail of my little sister is like I challenge you to write a blog post every day and I was like that's really hard and I did it for like the first week of January and then I kind of failed at it but the way that I was doing it was instead of writing like really lengthy blog posts I was just kind of getting content out there I think don't focus on perfection focus on consistency and just getting content out there and so that is something that I'm struggling through but also trying to work towards getting better at is just getting content out there so don't get hung up on how long it is or how many photos you need to include just do it okay last one now till she tells me no I'll keep answering questions I'm like does mother say it's okay? okay great yes sorry go ahead yeah so he's asking if I use a lot more images maybe because it's like a food blog versus like text space like copy sharing honestly it fluctuates for me so depending on the content that I'm creating so for example I did a dinner a couple nights ago with a brand and it was photos and just like a little bit of text I'm okay to submit that as a blog post versus sometimes when I'm actually being like hired out to go review a restaurant I will be a little bit more wordy with my content but again photos to me I don't really have a limit maybe minimum is three I mean I take a lot of photos and I write a lot of words in fact if you go to my Instagram someone confronted me the other day they said your Instagram comments are like micro blogs and I was like aha it's a micro blog for me I'm using the tools that I have in front of me I don't expect anybody else to also do as much content creation but again just getting it out there creating content taking pictures writing words getting yourself ranked working with other brands grow so thank you guys again I appreciate it