Let’s get something off the ground!

I WAS interviewed by Glynis German this week on her show, The Happiness Café, for Sunshine Radio 106.1FM.

It’s a bit strange to be interviewed when you are normally the interviewer, but thankfully she asked me questions about my family, Mallorca and blogging – why I had started my blog www.familymattersmallorca.com back in 2006.

I realised it was because of my need to make sense of events that had happened to me since moving to the island. My husband, then boyfriend, and I moved here in 2004. We set up a business, he got reactive arthritis, we got married, we had a baby, I was run over by a car, the business went bust, and then we struggled with debts and then the crisis.

Through it all I’ve written my blog and found a lot of kindred spirits and travelling companions through Facebook and Twitter. When you blog you enjoy the freedom of speech that not everyone around the world enjoys, so I think you should exercise your rights and sign up for a free blog at WordPress or Blogger or Tumblr. If you want some help organising your blog then there are courses online that you can do, or you can come to one of my courses, the next beginners’ course will be in February, or you can just learn as you go.

Blogs aren’t just for sharing funny pictures, you can also help to build your business up by writing articles about what you do. But we’ll examine those ideas a bit more in next week’s column.

It was when we set up our photography and PR business www.phoenixmedia mallorca.com in 2008 that we really started to learn what it took to be successful in business in Mallorca: grit, determination, a sense of humour, flexibility, an understanding bank manager, a good gestor and a wide network of people.  This year I’m hoping to expand that network of people to include more and more residents of our lovely island, because together we are stronger.

To facilitate this I’m going to start going to a new social and business networking group on the island. Not just for women, or just for men, it’s not just at lunchtime or dinnertime or just drinks, or at 6am in the morning when I am tucked up in bed. You don’t have to pay a grand a year to be a member, and you won’t be excluded because there’s already someone with the same profession so you can’t join.

It meets at places around the island at different times on different days so there’s a chance to meet new people. Sounds really good, doesn’t it? Well, at least I would like to go to that group if it existed. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t. So, let’s form one ourselves.

If you want to attend a new networking group then let me know by emailing me phoenixmediamallorca@gmail.com and judging from the responses we can take it from there. You can also tweet me on @phoenixmediamlr