Blogging Advice from the Blogger Brand Workshop

Recently I attended an event which was so helpful in terms of blogging. It was a #bloggerbrandworkshop by Joe Blogs, One Roof Social and Currys PC World, with Anna Hart from South Molton Style speaking for the main portion of the event.

I arrived a little unsure of what to expect as I was attending alone and I’m a little awkward. But the people that worked the event were very friendly and so were the girls I ended up sitting with on my table. The hosts were wonderful and kept my prosecco topped up, you dolls.

Enough waffle Chels, let’s get to the point. The talk was so helpful, and there was a little booklet provided that had somethings I wanted to share with you. These bits of advice are all from the lovely Anna so I take no credit other than picking out the key points for you blogger babes.

Did you know that the UK accounts for 7% of the world’s influencers while the US holds 30%?

There are so many posts out there offering advice about blogging and one of the main points is your brand, your niche and I mean that is important but reading through so many different articles can be time consuming. The two main points I took away from this part of the talk were these two:

1. Think of your blog content and compare it to different types of publication. Think about other bloggers you know, this whole blogosphere and imagine it as a newspaper stand (the fancy kind with loads of fashion mags)
   There are quarterlies, beautifully curated pieces that are the perfect mag for your flat lay but how much does it actually influence you to purchase. Then think about weekly magazines and the immediate influence they can have.  Use this to help think about what your target audience is and what impact you want to have. Of course blogs aren’t magazines but it was helpful to think of my blog as something printed and who I’d want to be buying it.
2. Unique Selling Point (USP) being the second, this should be linked to why you started your blog and what you enjoy – not what you think will do well as you’ll end up getting lost. The activity we were asked to do really helped. We had to describe our brand, our USP with the person next to us and they had to think of brands that they thought we’d love to work with. Listening to what other people thought I was going for based on my explanation and what I thought my unique selling point was. Try it with someone you know that maybe doesn’t read your blog or try it out on a blogger next time you meet at an event.

You must use Google Analytics, if you don’t have it, get it now. Use YouTube to help you understand your analytics, there are tonnes of tutorials. Then when you have the data, use it to your advantage. When talking to brands, don’t tell them you have 10,000 followers. Instead tell them that 80% of your readers are based in the UK, tell them the age. If you use affiliate schemes already, like RewardStyle, use that data too. You could contact a brand you have made money from through affiliate links because you are already making sales for them, tell them the conversion and why you’d love to work with them in a different capacity. Have a media kit with clear stats available and send along with an email anyway to be helpful.

Now to very briefly talk SEO – there were 3 main points Anna had about SEO:

1. Always name your image files (not IMG_01 but “high waist floral trousers”)
2. Title your content logically (clearly relating to the content of the post)
3. Link Correctly  (Make your anchor text relevant)

A quick google of these key points will lead you to lots of helpful websites on SEO :) I would highly recommend signing up to the One Roof Social emails to keep up to date with their blog content!

The little booklet we were given had a few helpful websites if you’ve not heard of them, check them out.

Planoly,   // Hootsuite   //  Canva   //   Picmonkey.

We were also spoken to by Curry PCWorld and we were shown some of the updates to Microsoft products. So you will all be familiar with PowerPoint but they have gone all fancy and now have these amazing templates designed by Microsoft. It's smart and takes in the number of images on a page and will sort it into a design for you, and you can play around adding and removing images or changing designs.I think you could use it to design one single page and use it for a business card or a graphic on your media kit for sure!

The other part that I found interesting is that they have researcher now, which means you can search for a webpage, quote it and the document adds a reference for you in an appendix. Imagine having that while at University!! It would have saved me hours.

Finally the Ink feature which allows you to draw on documents is perfect because you can actually replay the drawing. It can be sent to someone and when they press replay they can see what you drew on the document in the correct order. It would be helpful for so many different work places.

They are using subtle artificial intelligence for some of these new features so you techy people check it out! You can also find some useful articles on the Tech Talk blog by Currys PC World which has different sections on topics like the latest laptops and tablet, software and apps, windows 10 etc for you to browse. 

I hope you have found some of the things I’ve shared helpful! If you have any questions feel free to message me and I can try to elaborate. In the meantime, check out One Roof Social for more advice from Anna.

Finally a thank you to Kim and the Greenlight team for letting me use photos taken at the event as I didn’t take my camera with me on this occasion.

Chelsea Jade

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