iFabbo London Conference 2012

An ashamedly long time ago (ok, about a month, but still, faaaar too long in terms of blogging), I headed over to London at a time that shouldn’t really exist on a Saturday for the first iFabbo bloggers conference. For those of you who don’t know, iFabbo is an organisation for beauty, fashion and lifestyle bloggers. They’re a pretty international organisation, which is good to see where other blogger organisations seem to forget that things happen outside of the US. (in much the same way that PR’s seem to forget that theres a whole country outside of Zone 1 in London.) This was their first international, and I think first overall, conference.

This was my first blogger conference as well, since the IFB one last September was cancelled last minute. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, although the schedule was all online, and almost didn’t go, since I wasn’t sure I could justify spending so much money on a ticket and train if I was about to become unemployed. I mentioned this on Twitter, and amazingly, Sinead from iFabbo offered to buy a ticket for me. Yay for random acts of kindness! (I managed to get my train ticket even cheaper too by exchanging some of my Tesco Clubcard vouchers for RedSpottedHanky vouchers, which meant it cost about £15 return when it should have been closer to £40.)

The conference was at Kettners, a beautiful venue that reminded me slightly of Goldbrick House. The room we were in was lovely and dark, but unfortunately, the air con couldn’t quite cope with so many bodies on one of the hottest days of the year!

The talks covered things like how to monetize your blog, with affiliate links making up the biggest part of it. Perhaps this was because of who the main sponsor was, but it was interesting to hear the different ways, like RewardStyle and Skimlinks, that people can use these sort of links. (I’ve blogged here previously about what I think about affiliate links, and at the end, about Skimlinks.)

Other talks included building relationships with PR’s (something I’ve never been keen to do, because I don’t like the pushy side of blogging, but I’ve realised that I need to get the bloggers map more known, and to do that, I need to promote myself. Any tips on that?), how to turn your blog into a full time thing (I’m not sure I’d ever want to do that, even if I could, because I love working in finance! Nerd.), using social media to promote yourself and photography, which unfortunately was a bit too much about Instagram. (to me, Instagram is just for snaps, not promotion or anything else!)

I tried to force myself to talk to people, but I still feel like I should have met more bloggers! I must stop hiding away.

Overall, it was a really useful event. I have a notebook full of ideas and notes, and I’d love to see more events like this, especially around the country next time! Thank you so much Sinead for inviting me :)