Blogger Spotlight: Rosemary Mac Cabe

Dublin-based journalist and TV panellist turned blogger Rosemary Mac Cabe created her self-titled blog as an outlet to share her personal style, rants, weight loss journey and general lifestyle updates. The personal tone and inspirational articles throughout the blog keep readers coming back for more, focussing on a variety of subjects and sensitive issues. In this spotlight, Rosemary chats to us about why blogging has given her a voice, the challenges of balancing the connection with her audience and creating copy for brands, working with brands who know how to work with influencers and how she likes to be approached by brands. 

What inspired you to create your blog? I’ve always loved writing, and so blogging has always made sense to me. I’ve had a presence online, in one form or another – a personal blog, The Irish Times’ (now-defunct) fashion blog, then back to my own blog, for about a decade now. It’s a space for me to express myself and to write about topics that interest me without, I guess, being bound to someone else’s editorial line.

What is your unique selling point? What makes your blog different to your competitors? I mean, I guess one of the most “unique” things about RosemaryMacCabe.com is that it’s not a fashion or beauty blog. There’s such a wealth of incredible fashion and beauty blogs right now, but really my site and my blog are about me and my voice. I have strong opinions and I enjoy stoking debate, whether or not people agree with me.

Where do you see blogging leading you in the future? What is your ultimate goal? I’d like to be writing for the rest of my life, and making a comfortable living from that writing. What form that will take I can’t really be sure, but I’d like to think that I will be writing for my site – and being read – for years to come. Ultimately, I’d like to be doing one branded collaboration per month – essentially, working with brands on projects I love – and writing 20-odd entirely independent blog posts for everyone collaboration. That, to me, would be the ideal balance.

How do you maintain the balance between the connection with your audience and creating copy for brands? For me, the first question has to be: do I like this product? The second is: will my audience be interested in this? There’s no point in my working with a brand to write a blog post and produce content for any of my channels if my audience is going to be baffled by why I’m doing it.

I’ve been asked to do things before where I’ve realised, there’s no value in this for my followers. There’s no merit in showing them something they’re not interested in or will never be able to afford.

I hate the idea that I’d be parading something in front of people. I guess, too, I ask: would I buy this? I would never promote something to people if I wouldn’t spend my own money on it. If I wouldn’t, why should they?

What has been the most exciting campaign you have worked on to date? What made it stand out from the others? I’ve worked on a few really nice campaigns with Let’s Get Checked, a personal health testing service that essentially empowers people to take their health into their own hands.

It was one of the first companies I’ve worked with, and one of my favourites because they really trusted me to create content that my followers would engage with. They really got how this whole “influencer” sphere worked.

It’s not about advertising your brand; it’s about advertising the influencer, really. Because that’s what people are buying nowadays: they’re buying into personalities, and people, not brands or products.

Do you have any PR horror stories? To be honest, I think it’s a really tough time to be a PR. Ten years ago, your job was to get coverage for free – and it was a job that was relatively straightforward. You sent product to journalists, you gave them a call – and if the product was strong enough and the idea was smart, they’d find a place to put it. Now you have a whole host of different directions you can go in, from bloggers to vloggers, influencers to journalists, and a lot of people expect to get paid for something you used to get for free. So my PR horror stories are mostly about PRs who think that I’m going to do their jobs for them, and not want to get paid for it, but I totally get where they’re coming from. We’re all trying to figure out how to navigate this new world together!

Is there any advice that you would like to give to any PRs or marketers who would like to work with you? I would just love if everyone could cut to the chase. I don’t need to be wooed; I don’t need to be taken to lunch (although that’s nice, too!); I don’t need freebies.

In fact, I’d love to get to a point where I was sending every single free item back, because I can afford to buy my own stuff! I just want to know what it is you’re trying to do, why my followers would be interested in it and whether you have any budget to put behind it. Budget isn’t always a dealbreaker, which is why that comes last! But I would love it if things were a little more straightforward. It feels like there’s a lot of beating around the bush when it comes to collaborations, which is a waste of everyone’s time.

Are there any trends that you predict will happen during this year, in regards to technology and blogging? I think we’re actually going to see a few new, very young bloggers come out of what we think is nowhere – and take over. (Well, I hope not quite take over!) It’s easy to get a little distracted by the familiar names and feel like there are four or five “top” bloggers whose names everyone knows when, in fact, there are some incredible young women who have massive followings and will soon be ruling the roost. Take Madison Cawley aka Just Maddie Things, a young Irish woman who has 94,000 Instagram followers; or Lucy Fitzgibbon @lucyfitzmakeup, who has 25,000 on Insta and gets massive engagement.

How much planning, research and preparation do you need to execute your content marketing plan? To be honest, I don’t do a lot of planning when it comes to my social media promotion – except for when I’m doing collaborations. In those cases, I usually do up a plan for clients to let them know when to expect posts, so that they can share them. Otherwise, I kind of like to do things “live”. This is my full-time job, so I’m at my desk most of the time – and I like to be able to respond to things in real time, share news stories as they happen. I try to get back to most of my comments and interaction, and if I schedule things too far ahead it’s too difficult to remember what’s going up when who I’m responding to.

How do you define the success of your blog? I guess it’s a combination of different things – but most of it comes down to engagement and feedback. Sure, numbers are important, but it’s more important to me to know if people liked the content, or engaged with it. So comments, messages, shares are all a pretty good measure of “success” to me.