bloggers Archives — Thrifty Mommas Tips

London Ontario Lifestyle Bloggers – Local Influencers

Paula — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 12:31:52 +0000

London Ontario Lifestyle Bloggers are actually quite a force of nature. In fact I have seen so many over the years since I began writing on line. As some of you know Thrifty Mommas Tips began in 2009. It was a way to get back into writing after a lengthy absence from my job as a journalist at the London Free Press. Happy to say I am still here and loving what I do. I attended an event in Arva last night and met a new blogger and we got talking. She asked are there many London Ontario Lifestyle bloggers? Well, in fact, yes there are I said. Local London crafty lady Cyn Gagen was also at the Metro Homegrown event held at the historic Arva Flour Mill. The funny thing about London and area bloggers to me is that we end up being invited all over North America and sometimes the globe. But rarely are there local events. So Metro’s event was pretty cool in that regard. So hallelujah I was pretty thrilled when a local event with national scope hosted by Metro Ontario invited London bloggers. Anyways that post is for next week but right now these are my favourites of all the London Ontario Bloggers I know. Obviously I am a London Ontario Blogger at Thrifty Mommas Tips – You can find me here every single day of the week. I write about Travel, Health, Food and Technology. So Lifestyle essentially. You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter as @inkscrblr. Oh and don’t forget to check out my Business Blog. I run a social media consulting and management business called Thrifty Mom Media. Cyn Gagen is over at Creative Cynchronicity CYN writes and posts and shares with her daughter, Samantha @GagenGirls. Check out this post – > 15 Sweet Treats for Canada Day. She’s the lady you need to visit for creative content and crafty ideas for any event or occasion. I can’t keep up with how creative she is. Margarita Ibbott – DownshiftingPro Your Family, Your Home Your Life My good friend Margarita has strong travel content and here’s what you should know – Margarita is a professional home organizer and she is the authority on all organizing topics. She’s the one I talk to and sometimes travel with as well. She taught me this – How To Pack Lightly. This is one of her most recent posts – 150 Links for Canada Day. AND I AM still trying to work on that as a travel blogger. LOL. We also run Linked Moms together. Linked Moms is a local social media consulting and Twitter Party business. Ann Marie Brown – It’s Just My Life She’s definitely more of a Youtuber now but when I met her she was a blogger primarily. Either way you can find great content about budgeting and cooking on her site – It’s Just My Life. Love this lady. She is funny and smart and has a heart of gold. She and I connected many years ago even before we really knew we blogged because she is also an adoptive parent. Catch her on Facebook too. Pam Young – Country Mouse, City Mouse – Pam lives in St Mary’s area just outside London. This lady writes about many different topics and also works with several brands. Also a Mom raising some amazing kids. She’s here on Twitter @CCMouse. Kelly Connor is CityMOM She tends to have a lot of local homes content along with some parenting content too. Check her out also on Twitter @_CityMOM Stephanie Holmes – Sassy Modern Mom as we know her here. Stephanie is a lovely London Mom of two teen girls, who writes a lot of travel content. She was also one of the first London area lifestyle bloggers. She is well connected and has a fun blog with great giveaways too. Her Blog is How To Survive Life in The Suburbs. SHERI McDonald – KIDSUMERS Kidsumers is one that has been live for a long time too. Sheri McDonald is the owner, blogger on this site which has grown wildly since we met years ago. Now she also has a Family Travel site too. St. Mary’s area blogger and Mom of four. She is an honorary member of the London Ontario Lifestyle Bloggers. Shannon Moyer-Szemenyei Sweet Stellas is one that has undergone some changes. When I first started reading Shannon’s story her blog was crafty and also a bit of a personal journal. Now Shannon is a bit of a chameleon and she is very committed to growth and learning. She is a local DOULA who makes me wish that I could have a baby just to use her services. Warning you now she has some incredible resources and stories about becoming a parent, infertility and post part depression too. I love her authenticity. She is a KICKBUTT female and one of my favourite London Ontario Lifestyle Bloggers. Tabitha Pye – Not Quite a Handful Tabitha is a London lifestyle blogger and mother of four. She writes at Not Quite a Handful. She writes a lot of movie reviews right now. Suzanne Toth – Mostly a Mother Mostly a Mother is a new blogger to me. We met just this week and apparently she lives extremely close to me. But I love her Instagram feed. Her style and fashion and parenting blog is lovely. Check it out. Mostly A Mother. I think we will see a lot more of this lady. She has three young children and has a lot of baby information and styles and natural products (she just started a new business selling coconut oil based products like moisturizer.) I am sure there are a few others that are around but I have not met them. Do you know any local London, Ontario Canada bloggers that should be added to this list?

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My February That’s So Random Odd Spammy Blog Comments – Third Edition

Paula — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 04:31:44 +0000

Hello there!! February is almost done, which is outrageous really! I mean two months of 2016 are done already. Sometimes the days go way too fast for me here. Anyways, I started this series way back at the end of 2015 because I checked my Spam folder and found a selection of hilarious and odd blog comments. I thought the oddball spammy comments were too comical to let go. And out of that came That’s So Random series. This is the third edition of That’s So Random oddball funny blog comments. Part 1 was here – Oddball Blog Comments and that was a selection of 2015’s best spam comments. January’s strange spam comments post is here. Go Grab a coffee and enjoy! I hope some of these make you chuckle as much as they made me chuckle. Random Funny Blog Comments (That are sometimes spammy too.) Yo. (short and sweet? ) I don’t know. Whatever… I live in Sterling and am interested in the history. Any photo’s that also include buildings are of interest ? I remember your Aunt Francis and Uncle Dugan and Butch, they lived down the road from me when I was growing up. (Habba Wah? Come again? Aunt Francis, Uncle Dugan and Butch are DEFINITELY not related to me. This was a response to my travel post about Vermont.) “Are you lol relaly? Are you that idiotic. Lady Gaga could hardly even talk when Madonna performed this. This goes to show a lot about a lot of Lady Gaga fans.” I assure you I really have never written about Lady Gaga here on this blog or on Facebook or anywhere else for that matter. Also who spells like that???? Are you 6?? What’s up to all, how is the whole thing, I think everyone is getting more from this website, and your views are fastidious for new people. (That is grand. I bequeath you 100 points for using the word FASTIDIOUS in a sentence. ) You made some decent points there. I looked on the net for the issue and located most people will go together with along with your site. (My head is starting to hurt from the weight of poor grammar.) I’m impressed, I must say. Really rarely do I experience a blog that’s both educative and interesting, and I’d like to inform you, you have hit the nail on the head. EDUCATIVE? ACH! Even call it. (IT…as my daughter would say: What even?) Hey how do I write a byline at the start of my blog posts? (Well, first you stop leaving spam comments for a living and then start a blog and then we can talk – no wait, actually people who call me HEY don’t get free advice. That’s my policy and Hay is for horses as my grade five teacher used to say before ordering offending students to drop and do ten squat thrusts. ) These medications have been found to be specially. (OH DEAR! Please always follow your doctor’s advice. That is all and where is the rest of your sentence?) I have been googling for six hours and finally I found this excellent article. (Alright then, let’s just leave it right there because six hours.??!!! I call BS. Obviously you are trying to sell me more SEO optimization crap. I can’t even. ) ARE you a writer or a blogger too? If so, please TELL me what were the weirdest funny blog comments you got this month? Now my head hurts. This month more spam than ever and wow. Just wow. Where does this stuff come from?

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Build a Better Blogger Outreach Program in 2016 – Influencer Marketing and the Changing Landscape

Paula — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 07:09:04 +0000

You cannot stand still in the world of social media, or influencer marketing. Smart blogger outreach coordinators and businesses are at once, business people, marketers, and cool hunters too. They are always on the lookout for new trends, ideas, people, events, tools, and content that resonates. This is one of the things I love the most about the field I work in. It is ever evolving and dynamic. This is not a post about me gazing into a crystal ball and telling you what’s the hottest trend for 2016. I’m not interested in that right now and in fact I have seen a few too many of those social media prediction posts this December and January. Rather than speculate, I wanted to reflect on what has changed this past year. What are we missing out on and what should we be doing together as a best practice for influencer marketing? As I start 2016, I have a vision at Thrifty Mom Media, that builds out a bigger, bolder, partnership in 2016 and beyond. That’s what this post is about – best practice for influencer marketing in the year to come. The job starts when you engage someone like me and evolves IF and when you hire the right influencers. In 2015 this social media marketing field has grown and come a fairly long way. Many social and digital media marketing organizations are understanding and building influencer marketing right into their daily marketing outreach. Some are building budget into that too, which is crucial to the success of current marketing plans in 2016. But we still have a way to go. I know this. I see both sides of this equation because I blog here and connect with brands multiple times a day. I also build strategy and hire the right influencers for brands, non profits and businesses. I find the right influencers at the right time for the right brands and I build their programs on the right channels for them. Traditional advertising is no longer the smartest way to advertise, nor is it the wisest spend. Print circulation consistently keeps declining. Digital ad revenue climbs, while print ad revenue falls. It’s as simple as that. Read the Pew Report for more on that. Traditional media has seen a dramatic decrease in revenue drive by audience fleeing traditional media. TV is even not doing what it once was. It’s as simple as this – fewer people read the papers and watch TV and connect with magazines so ad money spent there is sometimes misplaced. Consider content and influencer marketing like art. Traditional media is a Jackson Pollock painting. Stand back and shoot the paint at the canvas and hope that it connects and that the right eye balls land on it. It buys a broad canvas. Content marketing, influencer marketing, is like standing right in front of the painting and drawing a specific picture intended to be given to a very focused audience. So imagine a picture of a mother with child reading together, that is created for a library. That resonates emotionally with almost everyone entering the building. It reminds people of all the happy feelings they have when they read to younger children, and all the warm fuzzies they had as a child when they were read to. Now imagine that you can click on the child with book picture and buy the book they are reading, and buy a poster of the picture, and maybe even the same shirt the mom is wearing, and have it delivered stat right to your home, tablet or e-reader. Your traditional Jackson Pollock is cool and sometimes really interesting to look at. But more than half the people you display that in front of are going to think UGH and walk right by. It’s a missed opportunity. The painting of the child is memorable and resonates, plus it’s in the right place. Influencer marketing is about the right message resonating at the right time in front of the right audience. So now that you all understand that…what’s missing? Well, some brands are doing influencer marketing or content marketing or blogger outreach now when in fact they were not doing it before. That’s progress. Some public relations companies are even doing bits of this so much better than they were in 2013 and 2014. But they are often still stuck playing catchup. When you spend too much time playing catchup you miss the next softball being lobbed at you. Where am I going with this? We are sometimes now connecting the right reader with the right influencer at the right time. But we are still not focused enough. This field still needs improvement. Here’s what you are not doing well enough yet. Dedicating budget to influencer and social media marketing. I’m not sure why this is still such a hurdle for some companies. Carve out a budget for social media marketing and influencers. It’s simple and necessary. This is your new media marketing budget. You might need to fight for it and pull from traditional media but it NEEDS to be a dedicated fund. Ads and sponsored posts are not free. Influencers have a very unique market and they are well worth the investment. Influencers are people who blog, VLOG, or have an on line magazine with an established audience and social channels. Some generate millions of impressions weekly. They drive traffic to your site or your business. They bring people in the door. They create happy feelings about your brand. They amplify emotions and messages. HIRE The BEST INFLUENCERS for the job. What does that look like? This is not always the influencer, or influencers, with the highest number of readers or impressions. This might like a 40 year old Mom of two school aged kids, who specifically has one child with autism, being contracted to tell her story about why she chooses X brand of cotton clothing for her son. It is the product that is the softest with no abrasive tags or seams. She is he right person for this influential partnership. AUTHENTICITY: Hire the best influencers for the job AND also don’t forget about authenticity. You can’t find the most authentic people on a list that you bought from someone. The authentic influencers are to be found by reading blogs and watching social media channels and being there involved paying attention to conversations. I know 8-10 adoptive parents in Ontario with blogs. Every year Wendy’s fast food restaurant runs a few different seasonal campaigns to raise money for Wendy’s Wonderful Kids and for foster care and adoption. Have I ever seen any of the contacts I know who are adoptive parent bloggers, or adoptees who blog, involved on those campaigns telling real adoption stories that connect with an emotion? NO. Never. I always shake my head every year at that one. Don’t google 20 Ontario bloggers and send a press release, then ask for rates, and wait for someone to rewrite a press release and post it. As an adoptive parent I can tell you this approach has the opposite effect intended. It actually makes me want to disengage because the happy charitable giving back feeling is lost when I start to think that was wasted money. Hire the best influencer for the job and then maintain them as an asset and a partner. Once you have the perfect fit, what comes next? You’ve found, connected and are happy with the start of the relationship with this particular influencer Mom with son as in example above. The clothing brand loves her. She has a very specific community and she writes about special needs and parenting and she extends that into real life talking to other moms naturally throughout the course of each month. She does that naturally all the time without being told to insert message here in each conversation that comes up…Now you work at getting her to take this job on longer. How will you do that? The brand should work with this influencer to ask her what it would take to make this into a one year relationship. Communicate regularly with her. Nurture the relationship and contract her for a certain time. Don’t lose sight of the individual touch. THINK Longterm. COMMIT. My buzzword that I, as a blogger, started hearing a lot about in the final quarter of 2015, was exclusivity. I was asked many times at end of 2015 to quote what I might charge to be involved in an exclusive relationship with Brand X or Brand Y. If anything, I think this might be a trend to watch in 2016. I know I said this was not that post – but I am tossing in one trend to watch. Exclusivity. ( for the record if you want to read about digital marketing trends in 2016 I recommend this read from Cision.) I would love to see this trend play out over the next two years digitally. I think authenticity is important and once you find the right authentic blogger that fits and is willing to have a longterm relationship and also is professional then you should potentially look at building a contract that asks for her to be an exclusive blog ambassador for 4-5 months for your brand and ask that she specifically doesn’t write or discuss any other soft kid’s clothing brands for that timeframe. In example above with the blogger mom who has a child with unique needs and fits the soft clothing brand image perfectly – you should provide her with constant fresh product for her child or children. Ask her if she also wants to feature a guest post from your expert on sensory processing and the effect of clothing on a child with autism. Maybe she’d like to also offer her readers a giveaway of some of the products she likes best from the line. Ask her if she might also run an interview with the person who created the brand. Give her concrete specifics for during that timeframe and then also add budget to the contract. Be prepared to negotiate and double or triple what you would allot for a post. If you want exclusivity in an influencer relationship you should understand that it costs more. For instance this same blogger might write a post about your clothing and then be asked next month to write something similar about soft hats for a competitor. She loses the opportunity to draw income from that other post so you need to make this contract and relationship worth it to her. This is still authentic and real and a relationship. It’s clearly not a one night stand. This is a business, so treat it as one. If you hire the best influencers, then you should be able to maintain and build these relationships. Don’t get hung up on allotting more money to one blogger for exclusivity because it can be very worthwhile. [tweetthis]If you don’t have time to do it then you contract social media out. Luckily Thrifty Mom Media does that. https://ca.linkedin.com/in/inkscrblr[/tweetthis] And one last thought. YOU NEED to LOVE social media marketing and influencer marketing in order to do this well and hire the best influencers. If you don’t believe in what you are selling then the campaign is never going to work. If you also use social media and read blogs and enjoy spending time reading and connecting and gathering news from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram bloggers and influencers can tell. It’s all part of building the best relationships and delivering results for your clients. Start with the idea that you need to hire the best influencers for the job and then build on that with some of the points above and your new media marketing efforts should begin to improve and resonate in 2016. By the way this is also what I do at Thrifty Mom Media. Contact me at inkscrblr@rogers.com for information or a quote. Connect with me Paula Schuck on LinkedIn. Hire the best influencers for the job.

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A Tale of Two Pitches: Dos and Dont’s of Pitching Bloggers #blogging #business

Paula — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 02:16:12 +0000

I had a peculiar and wonderful week and I wanted to share why. As I write this I am about to board a plane with my family to fly to Tremblant. A public relations company reached out beautifully to connect with me and start what I hope will be a lasting relationship. They did everything right from the moment we first connected. But more about that in a minute. This week I also had a pitch that was so far off the mark it left me shaking my head, so I wanted to take this post to share this story: a tale of two pitches to examine what went right and what went wrong. Two pitches: First pitch. A publishing brand. First point of contact: email. Second pitch. A travel brand. First point of contact: twitter. What worked and what didn’t? Both modes of contact are fine and I will likely connect with you either way. But I am faster on twitter so the second pitch hints to me that they might be more familiar with my habits on line. Email pitches occasionally fall into the email graveyard. I currently have 24,000 emails that are waiting for me to read. I get roughly 5,000 emails a week. My in box is often flooded. A twitter pitch has the potential to be seen by someone else and intercepted, but this one wasn’t and it worked well for me and I hope the PR company was happy as well. Twitter pitch was unique and eye catching. The second point of contact: First pitch: ( publishing) is for a publishing company that approached me via impersonal email. They asked would I like to be involved in offering a giveaway, mentioning their new program. They are seeking some publicity for books they want mentioned as a Keep Kids Reading During school breaks campaign. I am a big reader and I promote literacy so I give this a second chance. Second pitch – (travel) Via Twitter Hello @inkscrblr we are really wanting to connect with you regarding an upcoming weekend opportunity. Are you available? I am always on twitter and I am seldom pitched on twitter ( unless through a DM ) so this one gets my eye. I scope out the Twitter user and realize he is a legitimate PR person and this pitch starts to get exciting. I connect next by email and suggest we talk by phone also. He follows through beautifully and fast. What worked and what didn’t? First pitch: the publishing brand – impersonal approaches rarely work but I keep the conversation going sometimes anyways and I can occasionally overlook that. I occasionally do giveaways so I keep on talking…just in case there is anything here. Second pitch: the travel brand – You caught my eye immediately finding me on twitter because that is where I live. The pitch is unique, personal and it shows they know me. We take the conversation off line to email and then to a phone call. I am interested and excited. They address me by name and they always know my on line handles etc. This public relations company is familiar with the audience (me). They compliment my activity, are knowledgeable about me and my on line influence. YOU did your homework. Nice. Third point of contact: First pitch: the publishing brand – We never leave email at any point, it should be noted. Which sometimes works for me BUT also I am never addressed by name. There is no familiar observation or commentary about my topic matter, blog or social assets. This is extremely impersonal. I am not even confident they have ever read my blog. They want me to give away a gift bag. This compensation with strictly product is sometimes a tactic that PR agencies use. Sometimes if it meets a certain amount then that’s okay. Occasionally if it is a great prize for a reader then this might be okay. I ask is it a gift bag full of books for readers? No, it’s a gift bag, as in a $2 cloth bag with a name on it. I am dumbfounded. Second pitch: the travel brand – We are already planning a weekend getaway. I am told they like my content and they are familiar with it. They ask that my entire family attend the weekend getaway and tweet or write about it or both. It is really important that we have your whole family there. You will be the only blogger there with their family. They talk in detail about the event and all the exciting things planned for our entire family. They also describe and sell their venue..then the kicker… also we will fly you all there so you don’t need to drive. I am met at the airport and made to feel really important to them in the scheme of this outreach. What worked and what didn’t? First pitch: the publishing brand – Sorry no budget. You can have a $2 cloth bag for your readers and then after you craft and write and publish a post about the giveaway you can have your own $2 cloth bag too. How many people go to work each day and fulfill a day’s worth of tasks and then accept a gift bag worth $2 the next day as payment. NO. This is completely wrong from start to finish. By the end of the day this is on my list of worst pitches ever and I am asking the contact to lose my email and please don’t contact me again. Second pitch: travel brand – you know that saying that you might not recall the words a person says or the day you met, but you always remember how they made you feel? This new person and public relations company made me feel great. They made me feel valuable. They treat me as a valuable partner in the business of building stories and experiences. In fact at one point as we are talking they indicate – we don’t want sponsored stories and press releases. We hope to give you the real experience of our travel brand so you can share that with your readers. They also repeatedly mention that I am under no obligation to post but they clearly lay out what they hope to achieve. We are communicating clearly immediately. This is one of the best pitches I have ever had. Fourth Point of contact: First pitch: the publishing brand. There is nothing more here. No sharing. No relationship. In fact this is the story we tell in influencer circles when we compare the worst pitches we have each ever received. This outreach person has actually damaged their brand with a really poor outreach. Second pitch: The travel brand: They meet me at the airport. They recognize me instantly even though we have never met. They politely introduce themselves to my entire family and they engage everyone. We are made to feel special and we are whisked away to the destination. During the flight they ask twice if we are okay. Do we need anything? This continues throughout the entire trip. They are proactive and they solve all issues fast. They react and interact fast if there is anything at all that is not going smoothly. They connect fast on all the social channels with each of the influencers. They comment and retweet and engage and like and share. They support the influencers on line and off. They provide a hashtag quickly and they are available 24/7 on email, or by phone. Perfect. What went right and what went wrong? First pitch: the publishing brand: Assumed that they didn’t need to know anything about me to pitch and they didn’t do their homework. They had a poor pitch and no budget. Second pitch: the travel brand: Flawless and artful. Perfect. As a result of how they made us feel and the experience we had I have a great number of stories and experiences to share and I also feel more likely to share and work hard to continue the relationship and build positive stories and tweets and photos. In addition to this blog, I also run a consulting business Thrifty Mom Media. If you want a quote on a blogger outreach program or if you need someone to help you build a digital campaign, I can help with that. inkscrblr@rogers.com

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