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Social Media

Blogging

Simple SEO tricks bloggers should know

December 1, 2015
Simple SEO Tricks

I have been blogging at Hello The Mushroom for the past few years and to be honest, for a long time I’ve always heard things get thrown around about SEO all the time. “What is SEO? What can it do for you and your blog? Does it really work?”. Who hasn’t seen these floating around the internet or wondered about it themselves?

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Panini Cheapskates – a case study in blogging and social media

July 1, 2014
Panini Cheapskates

“With apologies to Frank in particular, and to art in general.”

Some of you may have already heard about Panini Cheapskates, a very funny blog started by a couple of friends, Alex and Sian (or a friendly couple, or couple friend, you get what I mean). When I say you may, I’m not exaggerating – they’ve been featured in the online edition of the Guardian more than once, the BBC, as well as in several online publications around the world, from Iran to Mexico.

I’ve been watching this all unfold on Alex’s Facebook page and it’s been quite an interesting thing to see, especially if you’re in the social media and blogging business. So, what’s Panini Cheapskates all about? Alex collected World Cup Panini stickers when he was a kid in 1994, but didn’t manage to finish the album. It costs money, you see? So move forward to 2014, it’s still expensive, so why not draw them? What a great idea, with hilarious results. You can read it in more detail here.

Panini Cheapskates

What makes this interesting, besides being funny as hell? This blog was started on the 12th of June… and has amassed to the present day over 61,000 hits! In around a fortnight…now that’s an accomplishment! I was curious to know how they’ve done it, so I asked Alex:

“On the first day, the Guardian were running a live blog building up to the first game of the World Cup. So I emailed them, telling them what we were doing, they liked it and put a link to it in their live blog. Within a couple of hours we had 1000-2000 hits. I started the Twitter feed at the same time so I could constantly update with pictures more often than the blog (which I updated one to three times a day at the beginning, just once a day now). I kept Googling our twitter handle and the blog URL to find instances of people sharing it around the web, and if possible tried to give thanks wherever appropriate. Whenever we get a new follower, I try and tweet them with a “Hello” and a picture too. They tend to RT that, which in turn brings in more followers I guess. I’d never used Twitter till this month, it’s been a crash course!”.

A crash course that clearly worked! What lessons can other bloggers take from this? Panini Cheapskates is a great example how a great idea, combined with a good sense of opportunity can really take off and become viral.

I don’t know if there are any plans to carry on doing it in 4 years, but for now and while the current World Cup lasts, follow them on the blog or on Twitter.

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Last minute: I’m joining the Great British Budget challenge in February!

January 31, 2014

Join the Great British Budget Challenge
It’s unusual for me to make 2 posts in one day but I was just invited to join a group of other fantastic bloggers in the Great British Budget challenge. This is a campaign organized by the folks over at yourwealth.co.uk and design to encourage people to learn to budget and save money.

As you may have read on my New Year’s resolutions post, it is one of my objectives for the year to reduce my consumption of clothes, shoes and beauty products in general and save more money for travelling. This year I want to go home to Portugal, visit my sister in Barcelona and visit Berlin as I won 2 nights at the Westin Grand hotel and I’ll definitely need to take advantage of them. So this came just in the right time. In January I managed to save £100, in February I want to save £200 or more.

Fortunately I don’t have any debt to pay off but I do need to be more careful with my money and change my priorities. I never got a credit card because I work in debt management and I have the idea that for someone who is financially disorganized like me they are the devil. (Who am I trying to fool? I’m pretty disorganized with a lot of things.) The reality is, I don’t need a new pair of shoes every month – I have too many already and I’m drowning in clothes.  It’s embarrassing, really.

So this is how it’s going to be: I’ll continue to not spend any money on clothes and will avoid spending money thoughtlessly, as I tend to do it often. the pennies do add up and sometimes I lose track of how much money I spent just on stupid small things… Hopefully I’ll still be able to enjoy a lot of good things (trips to London, eating out once or twice) and still leave money in the bank, if I’m smart.

I’m really looking forward to learning all the money saving tips from all the other fantastic bloggers that will be joining the Expert panel – I will surely need them! We will also be receiving emails with updates and motivation.

The bit that’s convinced me to join the campaign was the photo challenges. What a fun way to share tips and ideas on social media and to get to know new bloggers – my social media online marketing executive alter ego is loving the idea.

Gotta love some social media action and the chance of winning shopping vouchers. Join me in this challenge, it’s going to be fun and thrifty!

PS: I didn’t get paid to do this post, just offered a complimentary bottle of bubbly. I joined the campaign because I believe it will help me and other people!

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Something’s bugging me…

January 3, 2014

It’s become increasingly clear that with the proliferation of new platforms, no person or company can become the master of them all. Nor should they. The harder decision is figuring out which ones you should prioritize — or jettison.

I read this article at the Harvard Business Review blog and it made me wonder about all this social media/ blog etc. Sometimes I feel like I am spreading myself too thin – I barely have the energy to come up with posts some days, and having to keep up not only with the blog but also maintain the relationships developed over the time (which I love, by the way) and also be on top of Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook and have a life offline, can sometimes be a little bit daunting. I really want to know other people’s views on this. How do you do it? which ones are your favourites?

Photos by me, taken in Florida.