Blogger Spotlight: Leti Ghaffar, Inside Edit

London-based husband and wife blogger duo Leti and Zac are on a mission to prove that becoming parents does not mean your personal lives and interests disappear. Their blog, Inside Edit chronicles their lives as the parents of two young children who are both three and four, showing how parenting in the capital can be made more fun. In this spotlight, Leti chats to us about how they measure the success of their blog, why they are selective when it comes to working with PRs, and the challenges of promoting their content through social media. 

Tell us a bit about your blog and yourself? Zac and I are a husband and wife duo blogging about life in London and the search for all things inspirational. We write, we make short stories with videos and we love taking photos! We happen to be parents to two little munchkins so it covers parenting stuff too. Our blog gives you both perspectives, sometimes in the same blog piece and even in some of our answers here. Sometimes it’s peachy and at other times it’s full on mum vs dad.

I come from a background in fashion having worked for Net-A-Porter.com and Zac from property in central London. After becoming parents we decided to work together in trying to make lives for parents like us easier with top100babyproducts.com. People wanted to know more about us, and in doing so we created The Inside Edit. So we’ve kinda done it the other way round with having a business then becoming bloggers.

How do you measure the success of your website? We don’t really make any money from our blog, although we work with brands we’re very selective as it’s not necessarily about that for us. We just put our good vibes out there and hope people will enjoy it! All the obsessing over the metrics and analytics we save for our projects. One can get very consumed by all this, and we feel it shouldn’t necessarily be about that. For us, success is really about getting people inspired and enthused.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? Just start! As Woody Allen said; 90% of success is showing up. Start writing about things you care about, connect with people who are of a similar mindset, and soon enough you’ll find your narrative flow and an audience. You never know how you might be helping or inspiring someone with sharing something about your life. I say go for it!

How do you work with marketers and PRs? Like with anything in life, there needs to be an understanding of where the other side is coming from. If you have a mutual interest in one another and everyone gets on then for us it’s about coming up with creative ways to tell stories. We have to feel excited basically.

How do you use social media to promote and share content? What are the challenges? We use each of our channels in very different ways. Twitter is more light-hearted and we can use it in broader ways to include random gifs, topical stuff and far shorter and snappier messages. Instagram is very lifestyle and probably our most cherished channel, You Tube is used to mainly upload our videos and Facebook is a combination of them all (although we focus least on this).

The challenge is with the changing nature of these platforms, you must keep informed on the algorithms, what updates are impacting the experience and how audiences are basically using them. An example is LIVE – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have aggressively pursued this in light of Snapchat growth. There is of course, the possibility of a shiny new platform that everyone decides is the next thing to be on too. It can happen overnight, just imagine yourself running around after the kids with VR glasses narrating your story to a live audience.

What can PRs do in working better with you? We are very selective with who we work with and it depends greatly on whether it’s via our blog The Inside Edit or platform Top 100 Baby Products.com.

We enjoy sharing insights and inspiration, we love Instagram takeovers and always like a good guest blogger or guest blogging opportunity. We also speak at events, offer our own insights, opinions and life hacks where possible.

What has been your blogging highlight? I recently had a bizarre day appearing on Sky News, ITV and Channel 5 – all on the same day. I was invited to talk about ‘sharenting’ – on whether parents are sharing too much online. It was a good example of taking the debate about such trends to the mainstream media and highlighted to me how important it is for bloggers to share their truths.

However I think a highlight for us has to be Latitude Festival, it was so much fun creating the content for this. We wanted to show how these kinds of experiences offer so much to such a broad set of people. We did an Instagram takeover for Cybex and covered the experience with a vlog that took an insane amount of time to edit.

What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? We are very excited about some collaborations which will involve travel. We absolutely love doing things with our kids, as much as they annoy us. We are re-launching top100babyproducts.com in March which we are very excited about and for now though we just want to have as much fun as possible.