BlogCamp UK 2014

Yesterday myself and 150 fellow bloggers attended the Tots100 BlogCamp UK in Birmingham. I had never been to one of the Tots days before and was nervously looking forward to the day. I travelled down on the train from Manchester with Pippa, Jen and Catherine and we all had a good natter, whilst giving our top questions for Pippa, who was running the Blogger session.

A big thanks to the lovely Catherine who made me smile all day!

When we arrived I was a bit overwhelmed - I could barely spot anyone I knew. I believe there were quite a number of Foodie bloggers there, who I had not previously interacted with, however after spotting a few familiar faces such as Emma, Fi, Hannah, Bex and Laura I felt more at ease.

Sally Whittle led the introduction, along with a brief hello from Content Click, who will be working with the Tots bloggers in the future and were there to tell us all about what that was going to involve, as well as offering yummy cakes - always a success at a blogger conference!

Photo thanks to My Mummys Pennies

After the introduction we stayed in our seats for the freelance writing session. I really enjoyed this one and found journalists and writers Molly Forbes and Alison Perry really knowledgeable to full of great advice on getting paid to write, pitching ideas and ensuring your format suits whichever media you are writing for. One great tip was to check the NUJ website to source the appropriate fees to expect for a piece. Fi Star-Stone and Rachael Lucas also spoke about their experiences as published authors, which definitely gave me something to aspire to.

After a break for a much-needed tea and a sneaky cupcake we then went to the Working With Brands session. I wasn't too sure about this one as we were told it was for newer bloggers, but I'm really glad I went as Becky and Sally gave some fantastic advice and there were some great tips that came from the audience too.

We had a lovely lunch and the sun graced us with its presence so we sat outside and enjoyed the fresh air and had a natter. After chatting with the guys from Content Click and stealing being offered another cupcake, we made our way into the blogger session run by Pippa and Carol. I have used Blogger from the very beginning so consider myself pretty familiar with how to use it, however there were some tips I picked up on so safe to say it was a great session. I wasn't aware that you could change your permalink to make it more keyword friendly and I learnt about Add This as a great tool for adding share buttons to the bottom of blog posts.

The final session was one I was eagerly anticipating - the Video session run by Ruth at Geek Mummy. I set up my Youtube page a few months ago and did upload a few videos quite regularly. Of late though, this has fallen by the wayside, but I know Youtube is huge and really want to get back into them. Much of the session was for those who have yet to give it a try, however when Ruth highlighted the best features of a Youtube homepage (using the fantastic My Two Mums as her example), I realised this was definitely something I needed to work on. Sally was also there to impart her Mac wisdom and told us how to create a trailer in two minutes for your homepage and discussed using picture in picture and greenscreen options, which is something I need to have a look at.

All in all I had a great day at BlogCamp. It is always nice to socialise with fellow bloggers as you just know they understand a part of you that 'real life' friends don't really get. I also love that it is one of the few places it is acceptable to be sat in a room full of people on your phone. If nothing else, these conferences give me motivation to keep blogging and creating good content (which I hopefully do).

A big thanks to the Tots team, as well as Talk Talk for sponsoring the event. I took away a lot from the day, and had some much needed laugh along the way.