Collaborating with bloggers

I was recently asked for my views on collaborating with bloggers for a piece on Productive Blogging. 

You can read my thoughts below and read the feature here.

How bloggers can best work with PRs and brands on sponsored posts/collaborations

What do you look for when choosing bloggers

Bloggers contact us for different reasons. To review products, which mean we have to send the clients product to them. Generally this is not returned. Or the blogger may need comment for an article or a regular column. Choosing to work with a blogger can be for many reasons.  

The amount of pages viewed on a blog is essential and one of the first things we look for – there is no point having great content if no one sees it. Great bloggers normally have great stats.

A large social media following is a must. Like anything these days, social media presence is crucial for promotion. From a PR point of view, we provide a blogger with content or a product and we need it to be visible to as many of the correct audience as possible in as many places a possible. The blogger should share the story more than once on their social media pages for us and our client to engage with.

Good content is always crucial. The blogger needs to be able to write engaging copy that’s well written. We would also expect a backlink to the relevant website to be included. It’s the new journalism and we hope that bloggers understand that.

The website has to look appealing with high resolution and quality images. The website also needs to be easy to navigate. Without this, people will drop-off the website without giving the content a chance.

Do you encourage bloggers to contact you directly with a pitch? If so how do you suggest they do that? What would you like to receive from them?

Yes, we’re always interested to hear from bloggers – existing and new.

For us, email is best, or phone, but we need the information to make a considered decision etc. so email can do that.

We would always like to see a media pack, links to example features & their success.

What do you want to see in a media kit from a blogger? And what do you really NOT want/need in a media kit??

Keep it short, visual and factual.

Key information:

·       who you are

• demographic
• page views
• average entries for competitions & third party data permissions
• links to feature example

We don’t want to see the following:

• the bloggers life story or personal information 
• poor images – resolution, lighting etc.
• poor use of language
• poor or no examples

What can a blogger do to make themselves be more likely to be chosen for a paid campaign?

Be higher profile.

We would probably know them already as they would be a key figure in our industry.

Offer as many statistics and data as possible, we like to see proof of deliverables.

Investigate the products/feature their looking to promote so they know what they’re talking about before making contact with PRs.

Offer a thorough review/feature with a minimum word count, number of images and backlink to the relevant website.

Guarantee regular engagement on social media, using the right tags and hashtags.

Be willing to negotiate on price. Smaller clients don’t always have a large budget and product offerings can be pricey for them.

Include engaging imagery in blogs/posts. If it’s a product and you can’t take good photographs, ask to be supplied with imagery to use.  

What advice would you give bloggers in negotiating the best fees for a project?

Know your PR and the clients you want to work with. Generally the fee will be relevant because you know your audience and what you are writing about.

There is an art to negotiating, but the outcome needs to suit both the PR and blogger.

There is often a lot of frustration in the blogging world about lack of fees/low fees. How can we work together to best improve that situation?

Fees in traditional media came from advertising and the two rarely crossed over. Editorial was about a good story.

Everyone wants value for money and the above and below the line has become blurred. A PR knows when they should be paying for something because they will see the value.

PRs get approached several times every day and many bloggers are happy to feature for free if the content is good and will get them good engagement.  This is because in the end it is win win. 

Offer a series of features over 12 months – a long term partnership will have ongoing engagement is the way we like to work.  As its relevant for all.

We get asked for a lot for paid for entries, but the bloggers statistics just aren’t big enough to warrant our clients paying for a feature.

Invest the time, resource and relationships to get a great looking blogs and increase your social media following before asking for paid for activity.

What do you like about working with bloggers?

That they’re open to ideas and features opportunities. It’s great to work together on specific angles.

  

What would you like to see more of in the blogging industry?

Bloggers coming back to PR’s every quarter to see if we have any news to share. We try and keep our contacts updated with all the latest news, but it’s great to touch base and check in every now and then. It also strengthens the relationship.

More thorough features/reviews, not just one or two sentences. It’s very disappointing to see, especially when there has been an investment, either in a fee or by sending a product to the blogger.

Better quality images. There are no excuses these days. Mobile phones and Instagram filters means that anyone can have great images.

How to get the most out of meetings & make them productive & useful

Organisations, businesses and individuals need to have meetings.  Sometimes face to face is the only technique to build relationships with your peers gets things moving.

Why do you think so many people feel meetings are a waste of time?

• Because they are generally not ran properly, they do not keep to time and nothing really gets actioned. 
• People don’t turn up on time or have to leave early
• Some people don’t respect the other participants which leads to problems
• There are too many of them

              

What are the most common mistakes made in meetings?

• Actions from meetings are not made accountable i.e. people think they can get away with not carrying out their agreed task and wait until the next meeting or a meeting after that to give a reason why.
• Late to meetings.  Participants don’t realise that actions are actually taken and given without them.  If the meeting starts on time and is ran correctly then no one should ever be late.
• Meetings starting late.  This is disrespectful to the participants
• Don’t stay on track and move off the subject being discussed
• Running over
• Travel it takes to get to them not considered

What can be done to make meetings more productive and useful?

• Agenda one week beforehand so people can be prepared
• Minutes from the last meeting attached
• Get things sorted outside the meeting.  Small details can be ironed out and sorted before a meeting so you only confirm what is to be actioned inside the meeting.
• Only discuss a certain amount of points and keep to time and don’t run over
• Only have the necessary people at the meeting

Can you give any personal examples of good and bad practice around meetings?

• I have been involved in hundreds of meetings and one good practice that the late Dame Anita Roddick  had was to lock the meeting room door if people were late.
• She would then proceed to give all the actions to that person.  No one was ever late to a meeting with Anita.  Her time was to precious anyway.
• Where a meeting lasted 4 hours.  No one can sit there for 4 hours and concentrate.

What tips would you give for making meetings productive and relevant?

• The first thing you must always do with a meeting is get someone to chair it/run it and someone to take actions Keep them short and to the point.  The meeting will be well managed  
• Some actions can be taken offline before the meeting ensuring that only the really important things that need a big discussion by the group get air time.
• Use technology to get things sorted quickly outside of meetings – WhatsApp groups, messenger to get group agreement before a meeting
• Don’t have so many so things have to be carried out between meetings – 4 a year
• Get actioned confirmed by email on a regular basis.  Trello is a great PM tool.  My company use it and it’s very effective at getting results

A dynamic journey that is always ahead of the curve

Inspired by the passion for entrepreneurship, ambition and delivering massive returns on investment, redheadPR celebrates 15 award-winning years of media-shaping business in June 2018. 

Voted one of three Best Marketing Agency in Swindon 2018 by Three Best Rated, redheadPR is an independent public relations consultancy. The company, which was established in London 15 year ago and moved back to Swindon in 2010, manages and curates the profiles of blue-chip corporations, products, people, start-ups and not-for-profits. redheadPR blend traditional and contemporary cutting-edge techniques to deliver effective and compelling bespoke campaigns for every valued client. 

Sara Tye, founder and managing director redheadPR, is a business and organisational development expert, an accomplished entrepreneur and acclaimed top 500 international PR who was a finalist in the first Cosmopolitan Women of the Year Awards in 1999.

Sara said: "This incredible journey was inspired by love, as my first mentor was my mother, who transformed the lives of the elderly in a residential home. Always full of energy and ideas, I pursued any opportunity to learn. My tips are to embrace chaos, operate with integrity, and stay calm. Remain focused, give everything 100% and then 100% more. Then you will achieve your dreams, and they will be filled with love."

Sara has won numerous awards and has more than three decades of communications expertise in driving campaigns for brands such as BT, Thames Water and Green & Black's. Sara has achieved numerous milestones in PR, including an internet pioneer by ensuring The Body Shop was one of the first brands to have an international web presence. 

Nik Harta, Founder and MD, Yolo Communications said "I've had the pleasure of working with Sara and redheadPR for ten years and am always amazed at the knowledge and energy they bring to every project. Sara leads by example and her team pull no punches in the advice they give or how far they strive to achieve the best results for their clients. I look forward to many more years of the same."

George Stothard, founder and chief copywriter The Writing Shop has worked with Sara for many years. He said "Working with Sara was instrumental in learning so many of the basic parts of communications that increasing numbers of the current generation get wrong. Namely, brevity, proof points, reading, researching and most importantly taking an interest in the world around us. It wasn't always easy - like most successful entrepreneurs, she put her whole heart and soul in to the business and it was hard work. However, when you learn from somebody like Sara, you learn from the best. I wish her every success for the next 15 years - she deserves it!"

Originally from Swindon, Sara studied management in Wiltshire and "soaked up everything". From there she lived and learned at a hundred miles an hour, whether driving for hours to see a Mac launch at Harvey Nicholls or attain fearsome levels of organisation at the Royal Military College of Science. Constantly expanding her comfort zone, she worked for huge utilities to experience their methods, and by the age of 21 was running a community stakeholder communications programme for a £2 billion investment programme.

redheadPR client and friend, Mark Noble, managing director of Castles Residential Sales and Lettings said, "Castles have been working very closely with Sara and her team at redheadPR for a number of years now and their contribution to our social media and brand awareness has been second to none."

Inspired by the legendary Anita Roddick, Sara worked with The Body Shop and at 27 moved on to guide Yellow Pages - and a £3.5 million budget - through its greatest transition in becoming Yell. Triumphing in challenges like these, Sara realised she could tackle big jobs and make a significant difference. Pushing herself through various personal barriers, Sara built a successful business, only to see it almost destroyed in the crash of 2008. Refusing defeat, she regrouped, returned to Swindon and set about mustering her strength and relentless drive to see redheadPR voted Best Marketing Agency in Swindon.

Follow redheadPR on Twitter, Instagram and like them on Facebook

#Aheadofthecurve #sweet15

15 Years and still #Aheadofthecurve

We will be celebrating 15 years at redheadPR in June and I wanted to celebrate by explaining my journey. It might even help you!  I presented this at a recent event and it was received very well.    Like so many things in life, a business takes passion, patience, planning, respect and – ultimately – love, and everyone knows, I love business and entrepreneurialism and in a way, ‘love being in love’.

What drove me

Looking back at my own journey, ‘love’ is what inspired me.   From the junior school age, I lived with my parents in a residential home for the elderly in Wiltshire and so the concept of ‘business’ and customers were all around me from the start of my life.   My mother started it from a start-up.  

I was surrounded by love, care, incontinence, schizophrenia, dementia and sometimes death – it was complicated and lovely all at the same time.

It was incredibly, rewarding and humbling. I got to hear the most vivid memories first hand from extraordinary people. I saw them improve, develop and grow.  Many came to us in awful conditions of neglect and illness. 

So, in a way, my journey – my aspirations – were built upon seeing people at the end stage of life and my mother’s work with them. And, whilst that may sound sad – it gave stark reality check and inspiration from my first mentor – My Mother.

I understood only too well that to retire well and enjoy those generous last years of life, we have to work hard and plan ahead.  Something we need to help the current and future generations to understand.

Now, having said all that, I didn’t go through school as a goody two-shoes.

I was restless and disruptive at school – I had energy, ideas and a mouth to articulate them. And, I did. So, whilst I was academically good, I was obviously bound to fail.

I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t concentrate. Nowadays I would have been told I was suffering from an illness. I knew I would have to try and do something different and extraordinary.  In fact, my motto was – ‘I wanted and extraordinary life’ 

I was into everything not knowing where I was going and what I was doing. 

Making things and selling them, mountaineering, classical guitar, pottery it goes on and on.  And I did all this, all at the same time.

My one major objective was to be in London.

My two other adolescent goals were to make lots of money and retire early – just like all of those glamourous, flaming red haired sirens from the golden age. I saw no reason why my future riches wouldn’t lead to me being on the front page of Vogue.

I failed at school and college and went off to study management the Old Regent Circus Swindon College which was part of Wiltshire Management college. I did this for six years while I worked.  A teacher contacted me recently and said I had made him very very proud. 

I soaked up everything.   

If I was taught about an entrepreneur then I wanted to be one, if technology was on the syllabus then I wanted to be in it.  That was how I felt and to be honest, it’s still how I feel. 

But as I grew, I knew that I wanted a future of success, financial independence and meaning. Nearly everything I did was geared towards achieving that and I set my own objectives.

What I did to make it happen

As a young adult, I had the energy and attitude to live life at a hundred miles an hour. Some people called me manic and an enigma. 

I did everything I could to open my eyes to the grown-up world around me. And I never lost sight of my end-game. I put myself daily out of my comfort zone.  I don’t know why.  Adrenaline? 

Some Saturdays I drove from Swindon to Harvey Nicholls in my 950 Fiesta. Just to see the latest fashions and trends – I was there to see the launch of Mac make-up.

Then I went to work with at the Royal Military College of Science – mainly because I knew it would be a good grounding.  There is a protocol in the military and organisational structure is driven by the leadership theorist John Adair, which makes the military a very good learning organisation.

I then deliberately went to work for a huge utilities because I wanted the experience of post privatisation, regulation and a commodity  - water.

They had a mainframe computer and we didn’t use computers like that where I currently worked so I needed to get involved in one or else I would be left behind.

But in many ways, it took my career – and my life - to a new level. I ran its community stakeholder communications programme for a £2 billion investment programme.

Stakeholder communications and relations at the most sophisticated level at the age of 21.  I was involved in some of the largest public consultations ever.

Then studying The Body Shop at College, I knew I wanted to work for Anita Roddick. Anita was extraordinary – talented, passionate, real, authentic. I may never be as successful as her, but I recognised the drive and the ‘real-ness’. She was a communications expert. Originally a human rights activist and English teacher. 

And so, I worked with her and her team.

She was - and always will be – my second inspiration.

After working with Anita, it had to be a super brand that I worked with – Yellow Pages – again deliberate at 27.

And I helped it move through its greatest period of change as it moved towards the ‘Yell’ brand. I took control of a £3.5 million budget.

Those jobs equipped me with the balls to realise that I was more than capable. And, that I could succeed and make an impact.

By jumping in at the deep end with big jobs like that, I quickly cut my teeth – I recognised that I was on the right track.

But the biggest things I had to deal with are the barriers.

The things that delayed me, made me cry and feel lonely, that led to depression and – at times – despair.   The things we all deal with.

By the turn of the Millennium I was about to launch my own business in the centre of London. I was divorced. I was utterly focused on the long-term and not living for now: money in the bank, investing for retirement. 

I had no children, my social life outside work was non-existent, I rarely went on holidays. I didn’t even buy lovely things for the house so that I could enjoy being at home. It was business – and nothing else.

My life was – on the surface – glamourous (which was what I always wanted) – swish London parties, events, launches, working with the great and the good. Money, cars, houses. But was I happy?

The business grew, but like so many single career-driven women in London, I was lonely.

And then – the 2008 global crash.  

I honestly never thought I would come back from that.  I nearly lost everything - including my motivation. After years of working for the business rather than for me, I ended up suffering a devastating defeat when that recession happened.  I thought for a long time it was my fault.  But I hung on by the skin of my teeth and found the strength to get through it. 

I nearly lost all my property, I lost relationships, employees, savings. That’s extremely difficult to deal with and I was doing it on my own.

That’s when I came back to Swindon.

But, what saved me was me. 

The things that make you succeed during the good times are the same things that help you survive during the bad times.

I cut back, downsized and cut my cloth accordingly. But more than anything I just knew I had to get out of bed in the morning and make it happen.

Because the alternative was defeat.

I managed my own expectations. And perhaps the greatest thing about that awful recession was the way it made me take stock.

I leant on my faith and that continues to sustain me. I also have two amazing daughter now.

But, that burning desire for success did not and will not leave me.  I built my business again here in Swindon.

I have rebuilt my life by listening to myself.  And I am now back at the top of my game, better than ever before. I have a great company, a home full of love and two wonderful children. I have regained what I lost – but this time it’s real. 

My top tips

If I were able to travel back in time to that flame-headed eight-year-old, who sat drinking tea with old people, and give her some advice, I would say this:

Be relentless – it always pays off. The day you can’t get up – fight it. Just get up – because trust me it will feel different in an hour or so.

Read, read, read listening and watch. I read everything - and it gives me inspiration. It gives me ideas. Never stop reading.

Build a support team – you will not be able to do what you want without great friends, partners, suppliers, wives, husbands, dog walkers, cleaners, brothers and sisters, your children.

Writing and maths – if you can’t do them learn.  Learn what you need to.  Maths is quickly forgotten – so even when you leave school, try to ditch the calculator at work and use your head.

Do 100% then add on another 100% - at that will make you successful – there’s the x10 theory: something and then 10 times more.

Pray. You may or may not believe…and some people call it mediation or affirmation. But take the time, to be calm. To say thank you. To be at ease. To reflect.

Be an ethically good business person – you can sleep well every night if you do the RIGHT thing.

Chaos, embrace it – being out of control is OK.  It’s normal and it WILL happen, especially when you are really successful – just sail through it as if you are surfing a wave.

Always be fit and healthy – It’s worth it.

Focus – don’t get distracted, do not come up with too many ideas – whatever route you take you will get there.

If you do all of that – and never forget about loving those around you – then like a hard-earned marriage – you will end up being a very happy.

As my business turns 15 years old, with the benefit of age and pain and reflection – I know that I what I set out to achieve I have.  I have all the things I dreamt of. 

Not, as it happens, to be on the front page of Vogue…but to grow old comfortably and surrounded of course surround by love.

Sara Tye presents Business of the Year Award and Key Note Speaks at The Whitewed Awards 2018

Creative wedding photographer Elizabeth Donovan was presented with the Business of the Year award in The Whitewed Directory Awards from industry expert, and keynote speaker of the evening, Sara Tye.

Elizabeth Donovan’s entry was chosen as the winner by an independent judging panel, made up of three highly respected industry professionals, including Sara Tye. She received her award on 1 February 2018 at the Doubletree by Hilton Swindon.

Sara Tye is an award-winning business and organisational development expert, a top 500 international PR, and serial entrepreneur. She is the founder and managing director of redheadPR, chair of Swindon Triathlon Club and a top business development mentor.

The Whitewed Directory is a definitive directory of recommended and trusted wedding suppliers designed to help customers plan and organise their wedding day. The Whitewed Directory Awards were launched in June 2017 to highlight and support the best wedding service suppliers working in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.

As keynote speaker of the evening, Sara shared her own experiences and her "life long journey". Sara spoke of her inspiration and drive from 15 years old until now, her ups and downs and how she manages her life and achievements.

Sara explained: "I was most impressed by Elizabeth's entry. She single-handedly runs every aspect of her business. Not only is she running a successful business, she is also a mum.  I know the difficultly of juggling all this and the discipline needed to remain focused and grow a business. Elizabeth has demonstrated that she always goes the extra mile and has an exceptional eye for attention to detail."

Elizabeth Donovan’s approach during her six years of trading has been photographing weddings in a natural way. She initially built her customers from wedding fayres but now gets around half her bookings simply through her fantastic reputation among past couples and suppliers she has worked with over the years.

Elizabeth has been fully booked for the past four years. Her bookings are boosted by enquiries from online channels and referrals from her professional and information-paked website. This reflects her creative and open approach, including regularly updated blog pieces, supplier connections and search engine optimisation.

Elizabeth Donovan’s award was one of four to be presented on the night. Winners were announced for Business Person of the Year 2017, as well as recognition for the Most Inspiring Business Person of the Year 2017 and the region's Start-up Business of the Year 2017.

To find out more visit http://www.whitewed.directory/ww-awards.html