Blogger Spotlight: Samantha Rickelton, North East Family Fun

North East Family Fun is an award-winning blog that features the lives and adventures of the Rickelton family as they travel around the North East of England, Europe and occasionally across the globe to places including Africa and the USA. In this spotlight Samantha Rickelton chats to us about working on campaigns with PRs, delivering a seminar to different brands about how they can work with bloggers and how she promotes her content through social channels.

Why should people read your blog? What makes it different? My blog isn’t glossy or sugar-coated and doesn’t feature exotic holidays and experiences. Instead, it is for normal everyday families and features lots of ideas for budget family travel and days out. Rather than being aspirational, my blog is real and I think people relate to that.

How do you measure the success of your website? I always think a thoughtful comment from a reader is the best way to measure success. You just can’t beat the feeling you get when a reader takes the time to let you know they have visited somewhere on my recommendation and loved it. It’s easy to get caught up with stats and page views but I think engagement is a much better way to measure success.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? Make sure you start a blog for the right reasons (not for ‘freebies’) and do not expect overnight success. It may look easy, but blogging is a lot more than just sitting behind a laptop and writing. If you are serious about blogging, you need to dedicate at least 20 hours per week to making it a success (usually more).

How do you work with marketers and PRs? Over the years I have managed to develop good relationships with many PRs and have worked on multiple campaigns. This could be creating videos, writing content for their site, promoting their events or products across my social media channels or creatively incorporating their product into a blog post.

How do you use social media to promote and share content? What are the challenges? I think the key is to not share everything everywhere or people tend to turn off. I have a few different Facebook pages and groups for different niches within my blog and have engaged audiences for each page. I might share a Christmas day out in my ‘North East Christmas Group’ and a recipe on my ‘Life As Mrs R’ page rather than sharing everything everywhere. My no1 tip would be to make sure you share external and relevant content alongside your own.

What can PRs do in working better with you? There are some really lovely PRs who completely ‘get’ blogging but others still need to get the basics right. A generic copy and paste email asking me to post content for their client for free is never going to work (yet it still happens daily) however if the PR takes the time to engage, is friendly and sends a personalised pitch and offers appropriate compensation, I will definitely take the time to find out more.

What has been your blogging highlight? Delivering a seminar to thirty brands about how they can work with bloggers has been a definite highlight. Working with brands that I already use and love and being able to travel up and down the country on lots of family adventures and call it work is fantastic and certainly beats a day in the office.

What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? I am branching out into blogger outreach and have a few big projects in the next few months in this area which is nice as it’s a new challenge and as a blogger myself, I love being able to hand pick and select the very best bloggers who I know will deliver to work on a campaign. Also, Christmas is always the biggest time of year for my blog and I have just launched a dedicated Christmas blog, watch this space!