Welcome back to the blog and to a post which – you can tell by the name – is special to me. My hundredth post!

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I started my blog after really really wanting to do so for a long time, and now I am so incredibly happy that I did it. Some days I still cannot believe that opening up my laptop and typing words about beauty products brings me so much joy. I can do it for hours on end and now that I have started I do not think I will ever shut down my blog. That being said, its only been eight months, I could start to despise it.

I’ve titled this as a ‘My Blogging Experience’ post but I am also going to throw in a few blogging tips and tricks which may just be obvious to you, but they are tips which helped me out a bit at the beginning. Blogging can be an exhilarating but daunting experience, especially if you aren’t sure about what you want to write about or what platform to use. Luckily there are blogging site comparison sites to help you get started.

Blogging is so much fun but anything that is done behind a keyboard will result in bullying. End of. I have always heard of “my friend was bullied by this blogger”, “she sub-tweeted me”, etc etc and another local blogger wrote a post on her own friends’ experience with cyber-bullying. I knew this was out there, and I have thankfully never been a victim of it (unless I have but I just haven’t noticed) but I never saw it happen. Then just all of a sudden bam bam bam out of no-where I saw it happen three times on the internet within one week. Girls being BRUTAL. And most shocking of all? One bully is a friend of mine. I was so confused and I thought there had been a misunderstanding because why on earth would she do this, is she maybe jealous? She just did it and she blamed it on something that happened years ago. It didn’t make sense.

Another scenario was a “big” beauty blogger in South Africa who I actually think is pretty damn cool for the way she speaks her mind tweeted about another “big” blogger without tagging her. She tweeted this nasty message to over 5000 Twitter followers and it just wasn’t cool. I personally don’t like the blogger that she tweeted about, but it gives NO reason to cyber-bully. Maybe the girl would never see it, but thats not the point. It also shows a LOT about the girl’s personality..

The best part for me when it comes to blogging is the friends you make a long the way. I know that sounds corny and so many people say the same thing, but I have made SO many amazing friends from all around the world and I know that if I ever need a chat or some advice I can simply log onto Twitter and any number of them will be online and available. I am so hoping to meet some of my local blogging friends before the year is over! Its also extremely handy being in touch with so many international beauty bloggers when you need to get your hands onto overseas brands.. As well as the friends I have made, I’ve also found that being a blogger has taught me a lot when it comes to SEO and digital marketing as a whole. There is a lot to get your head around initially, but it is worth knowing. Plus, with the option to use something like a google rank check tool, it isn’t as difficult as I once thought. With this being said, it all takes time.

Now for a few things that really annoy me. I may step on some toes here but I feel like so many people feel the same way so there.

1. If you are going to comment on my post “nice post *adds link for own site*” then no, I am not going to click on your link. I am not expecting a comment of novel length but there are way too many people leaving comments which should actually be marked as spam because all they show is that you could not take the minute to read the post. By all means, read it, but I’d prefer that you did not comment. Goodbye.

2. This is more a PR thing but please ladies, please. Do you know how lame it looks when twenty of you review THE EXACT SAME ITEM ON THE SAME DAY. Shew. I know this is not a blogger’s fault if they happen to put their review up on the same day that every other blogger who received the product did so, but still. Something needs to change here, I could not be bothered to read that many reviews on the same product on one day. No thank you.

3. If you are a “bigger” blogger, please help a sister out. I have personally never approached another blogger for help or guidance but you really should be there to help. Some local bloggers have loaded blog series or Youtube videos where they cover everything you could possibly want and need to know and thats awesome to get that extra help. However, if someone tweets you and you blatantly ignore them, thats not cool. Simply direct them to the post or video and thats that. No need to be rude. Also please be open to answering beauty related questions via Twitter. You are a BEAUTY blogger, no? You have put yourself out there to answer beauty related things so please do so. Thank you.

4. Know your worth. My blogging friend in England post a fabulous post here regarding knowing your worth. And it is so true. Every month when monthly favourites are posted I just see blogger’s ONLY including products which were part of press drops. Or their online feeds are filled with sponsored products. If you love the products then this is awesome, but you are not forced to include these items just because a company sent them to you for free. Very recently there was a huge press to a ton of bloggers and it was a product line which I blogged about a few months ago as being of a very average quality (keep in mind that I am not hard to please) yet every single one of these bloggers are going on as if this is a life changing product. It really is not. Although maybe my batch was bad, you never know. Just know your worth and that you are not forced into positive reviews because you don’t want to disappoint a company into not sending you products any longer. Rather just don’t review the items at all instead of raving about a very average product.

Now to be done with the negative and move on to some, hopefully, helpful tidbits 🙂

– My most important tip. If you are using WordPress, download SEO by Yoast. You will increase your chances of popping up on Google search pages tenfold. Be clever with your focus keyword and think of catchy titles. Are you asking yourself, should I use WordPress or Wix? Check out my article on that!

– Be VERY active on social media. I have found Twitter to be the most helpful and fun in regards to connecting with other beauty bloggers and readers.

– Tag beauty blog retweet accounts such as @BBlogRT and @SAblogRT. These accounts will get your tweets viewed by many more people which will generally result in many more views. Don’t be shy to do this. This step also goes a long way toward connecting with overseas bloggers.

– Also tag appropriate hashtags when you are asking a beauty related question or sharing a beauty related post. My favourites are #bblog and #bbloggers.

– And last, but probably my most useful tip that I learned, is always (when commenting on other blog posts) link your blog as a proper link like so ‘MAKE IT RAYNE‘ – Obviously replace MAKE IT RAYNE with your own blog name or else you will be redirecting people back here. But thats okay with me 😉 I feel like people are too lazy to copy and paste your link so this is much easier as they can just click and it will pop up in its own tab.

And now my half rant-half hopefully helpful post is over. Have a fabulous day lovely people

Rayne XX