How I ended up sharing my love for strawberries
Hi,
My name is Marion and strawberries have always been my favorite fruits. There's just nothing more delicious than a sun-bathed, shining red, ripe strawberry freshly picked from the plant and taken directly to the mouth!
Picking and eating strawberries in all variations has been part of the summers of my childhood. I'd pass by our garden every morning before school to get my first treat of the day and directly after lunch to have my dessert.
After finishing high school I wanted to "get to know the world" and applied for a student summer job. You don't know where you will be sent to and what you'll have to do... big adventure was waiting for me!
I even worked 3 months on a strawberry farm many years ago
I was sent to Finland, to work and live on a Strawberry Farm!
For the next three months I would be part of a farmers family and live virtually in the middle of nowhere. Our "village" called Istunmaeki consisted of only three houses!
The big house of the grandparents, the modern family house and my small and tiny house. :-)
During this summer job my life was everything strawberries: planting, caring for them, picking, selling, cooking and eating strawberries.
It was a really hot summer and we had to work a lot during day (everyone in agriculture knows how to work hard!), but we also had a lot of fun. The oldest son of the family was roughly my age and I soon made friends with him and his school mates.
Most of them worked at our farm during July to pick strawberries and earn some money. It was a fun time and I learned a lot (except Finish, which is a really difficult language).
University and work keeps me busy with other things...
During university and my working life I got so tied up in day-to-day routine that I completely forgot about my strawberry addiction...till the moment when I spotted a strawberry field right next to my inline skating route.
... but a coincidence brings me back to strawberries
Do you know these moments, when you suddenly realize that your whole life consists only of work and you're missing out on so many other things? Things you used to enjoy?
Seeing this strawberry field felt like going back to my happy childhood and those fun days in Finland, lacking all the hassles a challenging job brings with it.
The next Sunday I visited the strawberry farm and picked about 20 pounds of strawberries. After eating as much as I could, freezing, making drinks, inviting friends over, I still had quite a few strawberries left.
I had run out of ideas what to cook with the berries!
That was the time when I called my mom to get her phenomenal strawberry jam recipes that I had enjoyed for so many years. With two strawberry-devouring kids and a hungry husband, she had been changing, re-inventing and keeping the best strawberry recipes for the last decades :-)
My story could end here, but in live opportunities often present themselves disguised. So read on to see what happened next.
A Website about Strawberries?
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This was the first day of the rest of my life:-)
Around the time I found the strawberry field (back in 2000), the internet started soaring and like many other people I was fascinated by the new possibilities, the ease to communicate with persons from all over the world, to find and share information.
I soon decided I wanted to make a website, but never could figure out about what topic. Then somehow, I don't even remember how, I stumbled across SBI, which would soon turn out to be the solution to my problem.
Following my passion
I bought their book Make Your Content Presell (which is now free) and read it in one day.
Wow! Now ideas started spinning in my head: the topic of my website should be something I knew and liked and that many people would find useful. I definitely didn't want to build another website that nobody ever visits.
When I searched frantically for strawberry recipes, I knew, many other people must do the same. This would be the perfect website: to write about my favorite fruit and make a great variety of delicious strawberry recipes available to people like you all over the world.
But how to make a website?
Even though I consider myself quite technologically capable, I did't have a clue about how to build a website. Nothing. Nada.
What I was searching for, was an easy step-by-step recipe on how to build a website. I needed to find a web host that would take care of all the technical stuff and let me concentrate on the content.
I researched many offers, and again, Site Built It! convinced me like no other one did. The Action Guide explains the whole process step by step, just like a recipe.
Even though I got stuck many times in the beginning (especially because English is not my mother tongue), I could resort to the support team for more technical related help. And, even more important, to the forum with hundreds of other users, to bounce around ideas, get new inspiration and also useful tips from more experienced webmasters.
Now Building a Website is Almost Like Cooking :-)
... and it gets even better!
Apart from the personal benefits of doing what I enjoy, a nice side effect is some extra income that my website started generating after a while :-)
If you're interested in building your own web business, you need at least to have a look at SBI!