Hey, it’s unexpected side benefit of inventing my own career number 133: This afternoon I’ll be interviewed for Purse Strings, a Webmaster Radio show. I’m pretty jazzed about it; I love talking about money, and marketing, and later today I’ll be doing both.

The part that blows my mind is that I was approached about this because… well, because I’m female, I guess, and because I blog, and because people read me. I am not any sort of “expert” in the conventional sense of the word. I’m just someone who likes to talk, really. Um, don’t tell. Maybe they’ll realize they invited the wrong person.

There are a lot of things that have happened since I began writing which have surprised me, but recently I’ve been astonished at how often I’m being asked to step outside of my blogs. And it’s not just me—I mean, yes, I can be rather self-centered (but let’s talk more about me…)—because I wouldn’t even bring this up if it was just me. More and more, folks who used to “just” be writers are being brought forward to talk about what they do and what they’ve learned.

That’s pretty exciting, actually.

On the other hand, it’s verrrrrry easy to get used to the relative safety and anonymity of working in my home office and never having to put a face or a voice on my work, necessarily.

Somewhere out there, someone is thinking, “Um, Mir? You sort of gave up that whole ’stay in the cave’ thing when you went on The Today Show,” and I know, I know that maybe this seems like a weird thing to be talking about, now. It’s just that I’ve realized that various invitations to do things are no longer explained away as flukes, isolated incidents, and/or the media’s attempt to pretend to be hip to “that whole blogging thing.”

Later today I’ll be chatting about spending and budgeting and marketing, largely as a result of a little website I started a couple of years ago. I don’t have any special training. I’m not certified with a piece of paper (perhaps a degree from Tightwad University?). I just started the site because it was something I was passionate about and thought I sort of had a knack for doing.

I’m going to resist breaking out into song here, or anything, but if this right here isn’t enough to convince you that “If you build it, they will come” is more than just a corny line from a movie, you may just have a piece of coal in the place where your heart should be.

When you do what you love, and you do it for the right reasons, in the right ways, people notice.