Since moving to Gloucestershire a few months ago my blogging has been a bit sporadic. Commuting everyday to Bristol and getting to know a new area knocked all the motivation out of me but thankfully a couple of events have put me back on track.

Last week, I spent the day at BlogConf. It was a full day packed with speakers, discussions and networking and was based at Racks in Clifton, a lovely bar with a great menu. Our speakers were:

• Joe Stutter from Webpal did a great talk about improving your presence with SEO, design and social media. I took copious notes and am really fired up to give this a go.
• Lottie from Oyster and Pearl and Lara, the editor of Mollies Makes were there to chat about freelancing and working with magazines. It turns out that many magazines, like Mollie Makes, are dead keen to work with bloggers and their advice was to be bold and make contact with people you want to work with.
• Photographer Danny T gave us lots of tips about making the most of lighting and composition to create images that tell a story, and that the narrative and ‘the moment’ were king. The best advice was: practice, practice, practice and I’m certainly going to be sticking to this!
• Next up was Gemma from HelloIt’sGemma and Mel from Trunki who led an open discussion about working with brands and it was great to hear the opinions of the rest of the bloggers there. Mel works extensively with bloggers reviewing Trunki products and she strongly recommended approaching brands you want to work with with a specific angle or story idea.
• Olivia from Just Olivia TV was there to share her vlogging experience and spoke about having the confidence to put yourself out there on YouTube.  I also loved her advice to start with what you have – any camera, free editing software, a window for lighting – you can then figure out what you need from there.
• Will, the PR Manager for Instagram Europe popped in to talk all things Insta. He stressed the importance of community in the Instagram world and told us about the worldwide IntsaMeets that will happen on the 21st and 22nd March. Will was also very happy to take lots of question and to feedback to the development team what us bloggers would like to see which was fab.
• Lastly, Sophie from That Pale Girl closed the day with her blogging story. Her blog has gone through several incarnations so she had some good advice on finding your own style and reflecting it in your blog. And most importantly, blogging because you love it.

So yeah, a pretty good day! I felt it was a really worthwhile event to attend for me because, as well as meeting some lovely people, it has reignited my interest in and passion for blogging. It was a really well organised and successful day. We were lucky to be given a goody bag at the end, here’s a sneaky peek at it if you’re interested, I know I always am!

Then, during the week I went to BlogClub, run by Bonjour Blogger. BlogClub is open to anyone and is aimed at getting bloggers together to get to know each other and learn. Blogging is quite and isolated hobby/job (whichever way you view it) so I was really happy to find this in Bristol.

This month’s get together was hosted by True Digital who gave us a very detailed and extremely useful demonstration of how to get the most out of Google Analytics. I’m very much a beginner in this field so this was very helpful. And everyone at the event was extremely friendly. It’s great to meet so many people who ‘get’ the whole blogging thing and to meet some new folk down here in Bristol.

I can’t wait to make some changes to this blog and to keep improving it. I’m also super happy to have found such a vibrant blog scene here and I can’t wait to get more involved with more events, more connections and more friends.