4 Things Bloggers Need To Learn/Know For The Industry To Survive

5 Things For Bloggers To Survive

Blogging (in it’s current form) is reaching its early teens, with many of the biggest having been around for nearly 15 years. It’s an industry that has seen very low barriers to entry and increasingly higher returns, resulting in an explosive growth of online bloggers, vloggers, social media influencers, internet personalities and digital trendmakers. It’s contributed to the popularity of social media and drawn many benefits from it, become a key part of the fashion, beauty and tech industries and is currently seen as a legitimate career by many children/teens despite the cynicism of older generations.

However, the blogging/influencer industry is in danger of crashing and doing so in spectacular fashion. Every single market goes through boom and bust periods and ours is no different. The question is, are we willing to evolve, adapt, learn and change to survive? Are we willing to accept some truths and learn the risks? Or will we struggle and fragment, leaving the blogging industry to fade into history as another trend that didn’t go the distance?

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Fizz, Festivities & Friends ft. House of Fraser [AD]

House of Fraser - 2

Note of Disclosure: This post was sponsored by House of Fraser

The Christmas period can often be quite stressful in the run-up to the big day, with crowded diaries, the stress of getting gifts and the office workload beginning to pile up. House of Fraser have kickstarted their new #BringMerryBack campaign, in an effort to keep spirits high during the darker evenings of winter shopping. Last week, they invited a group of bloggers, including myself, to attend a Christmas dinner in Searcy’s Champagne rooms at the top of The Gherkin. Having never been up The Gherkin before, I was more than happy to take them up on the offer and made my way, through bitterly cold wind, into the heart of The City to attend. View Post

Why Instagram is Broken & How It’s Breaking Blogging

Instagram Breaking Blogging

Back in 2014, I joined the blogging arena for the first time and, not long after, I created an Instagram profile as a way of promoting my content and photography as an extension of my blog. At the time, Instagram was enjoying massive consumer engagement with new accounts seeing overnight success through the sharing of inspirational, high quality content. Brands and PR agencies were beginning to pick up on the platform’s influence over its users and started investing in campaigns that were focused on sharing content via social media platforms, rather than solely blog posts. It was an interesting time to be entering the arena, the power and focus fell with users and content producers who elected to share content and ideas to grow their followings.

However, over the past few years there has been a significant power shift from users and content producers to brands and, as a result, the blogging platform has been pushed to breaking point to help fit this commerce-friendly landscape. So why has there been such a huge shift in attitude from Instagram? Why has user engagement stagnated/fallen and what does the future hold for Instagram and the blogging community?

NOTE: I’ve never been that fond of Instagram, I much prefer Twitter. However, I wanted to use my background in digital marketing to explain some of the struggles bloggers are having and why it’s not likely to change in the future… View Post

10 Easy SEO Tips for Bloggers Of All Levels

SEO Tips for Bloggers

A few months ago, I wrote a quick tweet with 10 very easy steps to help bloggers improve their website’s SEO performance. Safe to say it did rather well, with many of you asking me to go into more detail on the various steps as well as cover off some more complex details that require explanation. So, today I want to run through these 10 SEO tips for bloggers with more information and advice included, help translate some of the jargon you may here on a day-to-day basis and what to avoid as you begin to grow your SEO practices for the site.

Note: It’s important to remember that good SEO takes time and is a long-term strategy. It can take months or even years to get right so be patient with it. Your hard work will pay off. View Post

5 Common Suit Mistakes That Ruin Your Outfit

5 Common Suit Mistakes - 1

The suit, for most men, is a key outfit that is timelessly elegant when styled correctly, raising your style game and giving a suave and sophisticated look for any occasion that demands it. However, simply having and putting on a suit is only half the job done with some men (mistakenly) believing this is all they need to do to pull it off. Today, I wanted to run through some of the most common pitfalls and errors men fall into when wearing a suit and how to address them going forward. Follow these simple rules and you’ll step up your suit game from sloppy to sharp. View Post