There comes a time in every blogger’s life when she suddenly feels the need to take a photo of a cupcake and put it on the internet. Apparently that time has now come for me: I am so sorry.
And the reason for this sudden descent into fashion-blogger cliché? Well, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by the people at Groupon (which, for those of you who’ve never heard of it, is a website which allows you to buy discount vouchers for local businesses and services), who asked me if I’d like to choose one of the offers on the site to try out. Now, as it happens, Terry and I are big Groupon fans – in fact, we rarely seem to do anything these days without printing out a Groupon first – so of course I said yes.
As those of you who’ve used Groupon will know, you can find deals for almost anything on there. We use it a lot for restaurants, but Terry has also used the site to get discounts on the action-adventure things he liked to do (snowboarding, white-water rafting: that kind of thing), and we used it for a couple of the things we did on holiday this year, too, like the whale-watching trip we took, for instance. This time, though, we decided to spend it on cupcakes. We found an offer for afternoon tea for two at a place called The Birdcage, which is in Mussleburgh, just outside Edinburgh, and looked pretty nice. By “afternoon tea”, we discovered they meant “cocktails and Prosecco”, and that was good enough for us, so the deal was purchased, the Groupon was printed, and we were good to go. Except we weren’t, because in a strange twist of fate, we suddenly acquired a social life, and found ourselves booked solid for the next few weeks. Huh.
We finally got round to making our booking this weekend, though, and I took some blurry iPhone photos to show you what it was like. I’m all heart!
The interior of the place was really impressive: it was once a Victorian cotton mill, but it’s been painstakingly restored, and is totally modern inside. We were there late on Sunday afternoon, when it was really quiet, which was probably a good thing, because, minutes after the photo below was taken, Terry spilled half his cocktail over our table, much to my delight: I mean, it’s not often I get to see someone else be a complete klutz, is it? Seriously, every time we go out now, Terry warns me not to set anything on fire…
For £18, we each got a glass of Prosecco, a cocktail (or half a cocktail, in Terry’s case) from the menu, and this to share:
I know I make fun of the whole “cupcakes n’ macarons” thing, but damn, that was a good cupcake, it really was. And the rest of the food was pretty good, too: in fact, it was so good that once we’d scoffed that lot, we decided to pay a bit extra and order some savoury snacks from the bar so we could stay a little longer, and continue stuffing ourselves silly. Which is a pretty good way to spend a Sunday afternoon, if you ask me…
[Disclosure: our meal was partly financed by a voucher code supplied by Groupon. If you want to visit The Birdcage, you'll find their website here. Just try NOT to throw your cocktail over your date, though...]
This is what I’ve been wearing lately:
(Skirt, Topshop; turtleneck, Primark; boots, River Island; enormous hair, Amber’s own.)
I mean, not this exact outfit EVERY day, obviously. I don’t have a wardrobe filled with seven identical green pencil skirts and seven identical green turtlenecks, or anything. That would be weird. And also kind of cool. (I do have a lot of pairs of black boots, mind you…) But some variation on this has become my winter uniform: pencil skirt, turtleneck, tall boots, done. Sometimes I’ll go wild and replace the skirt with cropped pants. Living ON THE EDGE, people.
Anyway. This is my uniform, and this is also why I was reluctant to join in with Dressember this year. As those of you who’ve been following me for a whole year (just humour me and pretend you have, OK?) may remember, Dressember is a month-long attempt to bring back “dressy” dressing, with participants encouraged to wear a dress every day for the entire month, and take photographs as “evidence”. It was set up in reaction to something I think of as The Cult of the Casual, whereby people tend to live in jeans or sweatpants, and only get “dressed up” for weddings, or other very formal events: and sometimes not even then.
Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with dressing casually, if that’s what works for you. But for those of us who really love to dress up, the fact that there are so few opportunities to do it these days can be a bit of a drag: and when we DO throw on a dress and a pair of heels, we’re usually met with scornful glances and endless questions about whether we have an interview, and why we’re “all dressed up”. Sometimes it can be hard to overcome that. I got sucked into the cycle of “jeans with everything” a few years ago, and it was really hard to break out of it: not because I didn’t WANT to, but because it’s so unusual to see someone wearing a dress of ANY kind in my town that you can end up feeling really uncomfortable when you do.
But now I wear dresses. Quite often, in fact. And that’s one of the reasons I wasn’t going to take part in Dressember this year: because it’s supposed to be a challenge, and for me it’s not so much a “challenge” as it is “taking photos of what I wear every day and posting them on the Internets,” which isn’t really something I want to do, for various reasons. I really enjoyed Dressember last year, though, mostly because I met some great people through the Facebook group at the centre of it all, so I’ve decided to give it a go this year too, although with a couple of modifications: I won’t be posting photos every day this time, and I will probably also include the occasional skirt, just to have a bit of variety. This is a bit cheaty of me, but they were allowed last year, and like I said: obsessed.
So, who wants to join us? If you do, you’ll find the Facebook group here: there’s no obligation to post photos if you don’t want to, though: you’re more than welcome to just join in however you like!
As for me, here’s one of the reasons I won’t be doing daily photos:
Left to my own devices, they all end up blurry as hell. Or I get a ton of photos that look like this:
With me grinning rigidly at the camera, while thinking, “Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it working? Why isn’t it working?”
Anyway: Dressember! Who’s in?
[Silent Sunday: photos with no words]
One of the side-effects of blogging for a living is that, after a while, people start to assume that you know what you’re talking about, and they send you emails and tweets asking for advice on how they can blog for a living, too.
I get quite a lot of these requests, and honestly, I never really know how to answer them: not just because I always feel like I’m making it up as I go along, and that one day someone will go, “Wait! This woman isn’t a REAL pro-blogger! This woman is an IMPOSTOR!” and my professional-blogger card will be revoked or something, but also because it’s such a huge subject that there’s no easy answer. I mean, entire books have been written on the subject of blogging: how can I expect to dispense nuggets of wisdom in the space of a 140-character tweet, or in a few paragraphs of an email? Just in case you haven’t noticed, I’m wordy. I sometimes have to use several tweets, just to talk about my breakfast*, so I’ve NO hope of being able to give you blogging tips over Twitter.
(*Not true. I never tweet about my breakfast.)
Rather than writing lengthy emails or multiple tweets, then, I thought I’d put together a lengthy blog post instead, which I can point people to in the event of their asking my advice. And here it is!
Important note for new readers: most of these questions are geared towards blogging for money, and as you can see, I don’t do that here, so if you’re curious to see examples of what I’m talking about, you might want to check out my commercial sites, The Fashion Police, Shoeperwoman and Hey, Dollface! I should probably stress, before I get started, that I don’t have all of the answers. I attribute a lot of the success of my blogs to dumb luck, and being in the right place at the right time, so I’m not writing this as an “expert”, but simply as an easy way to answer some of the questions I’m asked most frequently. Starting off with…
How on earth can you make money from blogging?
This is by far the most frequent question I get asked. (Well, actually, no it isn’t: “Do redheads have souls?” is the most frequent question I get asked. But the less said about that, the better…). Most people understand WHAT I do – I post photos of shoes, dresses, and sometimes myself on the Internet every day. They just don’t understand how I can possibly be getting paid for it. Which is fair enough, really: I mean, it’s a kinda weird thing to be getting paid for, isn’t it? If I were to go back in time and tell my younger self, “Amber, one day there will be a thing called the Internet, and you will get paid to put pictures of shoes on it,” my younger self would be AMAZED. Not least because she totally expected she would grow up to be a famous showjumper, and be in the Olympics and stuff. It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it?
On the other hand, though, it’s actually not THAT strange, when you really think about it. I mean, a blog is just another form of media, like a newspaper, or magazine, or TV show. And if you can create something – ANYTHING, really – that enough people want to look at every day, then there’s going to be some way to make money out of it. If enough people look at your blog, then there are actually lots of different ways you can monetise it. I do it by charging for advertising space on the sites: basically, the more popular a site is, the more people are willing to pay to have their advert displayed on it, and there are lots of different types of adverts you can use, which I’ll talk about some other time. Or, you know, maybe I won’t.
Some bloggers also use the popularity of their blogs to help establish themselves as experts in their fields, and that allows them to charge for other services: public speaking, consultancy, freelancing, etc. I don’t do any of that, so if you’re looking for tips on those things, sorry, nothing to see here..
What should I write about?
The answer to this is limited only by your imagination, so my best advice is to write about something you are genuinely passionate about, and which there’s a good chance you’ll be able to CONTINUE to write about, over and over again, for a very long time. You could, of course, pick some random subject which you think will be profitable, but trust me: it’s hard enough to find something to say about the things you ARE interested in after a while, without trying to write about something you don’t really care about. I mean, there are days when even I think, “Jesus, they’re JUST SHOES.” Seriously.
So, first of all, pick a subject you have some knowledge of, and which you know you’ll be able to generate lots of content about, for the foreseeable future. Pick a subject you have something to say about – and, ideally, which you have something UNIQUE to say about. If there are a hundred blogs about cheese, say, you better have something different to say about cheese, or people will have no reason to read your blog rather than all of the other cheese-lovin’ blogs. God, I love cheese.
Finally, pick something that other people are interested in, too. You could be the world’s leading expert on the mating habits of the electric catfish, for instance, but if you also happen to be the only person in the world interested in the mating habits of the electric catfish, your blog probably won’t be attracting readers in their thousands. Just you and the electric catfish, really.
(No offence to electric catfish.)
Do I really need to have a “niche”? Can’t I just write about ME, wonderful ME?
Well, you can, obviously. You can write about anything you like. But you’ll find it much more difficult to make money out of blogging if you don’t have a focus. Take this site, for instance. It’s the blog I’ve had longest, and it’s the one I have the biggest emotional connection to, but it’s by far the least successful of all of my sites. Even Hey, Dollface! which is updated infrequently, and always the first site to be neglected if I’m busy, gets more than twice the traffic this site does. There could be – and probably are – lots of reasons for that, obviously, but the most obvious one is that this site doesn’t have any particular focus, and the others all do. People like to know what they’re getting. They tend to like blogs which are about SOMETHING, as opposed to blogs which are about EVERYTHING. There are some very notable exceptions to that, obviously – I’m thinking of people like Dooce, here – but they’re few and far between, and tend to have a) gotten into blogging just at the right time or b) had something really dramatic happen to them (in Dooce’s case, getting fired because of her blog) which catapulted them into the public eye. So while I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a commercially successful blog with no particular focus, I am saying you’ll be making it much harder on yourself.
Which blogging platform should I use?
Obviously personal preference will come into play here, but I’ve used Blogger, Typepad, Moveable Type and WordPress, and for what it’s worth, WordPress kicks them all to the kerb. In my humble opinion, anyway. As well as being self-hosted (you’ll want to be self-hosted if you plan on making a business out of blogging), it’s totally customisable, very user-friendly, and is constantly being updated, and having new plugins, etc developed for it. Whichever platform you decide to go with, though, the most important thing is to think very carefully about it BEFORE you start your blog. Don’t just get impatient and sign up for Blogger because it’s free, and all the other kids are using it, because Blogger sucks ass if you change your mind down the line (and trust me, you will) you’ll find that moving platforms can be an absolute bitch – especially if you have a blog with a large amount of posts. Trust one who has been there and done it, although thankfully not with Blogger, which I’ve only ever used for brief periods of time.
* * *
So, when I started writing this, I thought I could answer all of the questions in one, and have a neat little post I could point people to when they ask me for blogging advice. I must have been delirious or something, though, because, like I say, I’M WORDY. And it turns out that I have a LOT to say about not having a lot to say on this subject, and as I’ve just hit the 1,500 word mark (First rule of blogging: KEEP IT SHORT. No one reads long posts!) on this, I’ve decided to split this up into a few different posts. So, yay, that’s something for you all to look forward to, no? And you thought this week would be boring, too!
I’m joking. I won’t do them all in one week. I may not do them all AT ALL, actually. We’ll see…
Getting Into The Spirit
Edited by Taylor Davies
Thanksgiving is now officially behind us, so it’s time to start looking ahead to the coming holidays and all the fan-fair that comes along with them. From Black Friday shopping to holiday parties to festive DIY projects, there’s a lot of inspiration in this week’s Links a la Mode selections.
Along with all this inspiration, a few of our bloggers tackled some tough issues, from finding the balance between sexy and frumpy dressing in the workplace, vanity sizing, recession dressing and improving your blog posts. I thought these were important and critical to include for this week’s round up, because even as the holiday season gets into full swing, and we’re overcome with twinkling lights, festive parties and sequins galore – the same problems and difficulties we face the rest of the year will be here.
THE IFB WEEKLY ROUNDUP: LINKS À LA MODE: NOVEMBER 25TH
SPONSOR:
Holiday Sale at Shopbop: Rachel Roy, Anya Hindmarch, Rachel Zoe Bags, Coated Denim, Vix, Paige Jeans, Boots, Alexander Wang Purses, Sonia Rykiel, Tory Burch Bags, Vince Tops, Marc Jacobs Bags & Shoes.
PLEASE READ IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PARTICIPATE
If you would like to submit your link for next week’s Links à la Mode, please register first, then post your links HERE. The HTML code for this week will be found in the Links a la Mode group will be published later today. ~Jennine
This is how my week is shaping up so far.
Yeah, I got Man Flu, a.k.a. “a really heavy cold, but I will dramatise it to the extent that it will totally seem like I’ve had flu”. And I will liveblog it, too. Because I do that.
(Um, I don’t have a chesty cough, by the way. This was just the only cold remedy I had in the house. This is the most fascinating post I’ve written in a while, huh?)
As always when I get ill, I I find myself face-to-face with one of the very few downsides of self-employment. You see, my bed is RIGHT THERE. I can actually see it from my desk. I bet it would be really comfy and cosy in there right now. I could curl up with a good book, and maybe some really unhealthy snack food (because, as we all know, food you eat while ill totally doesn’t count. Feed a cold, folks!) and a giant mug of coffee. It would be almost like a holiday, but with added Lemsip and sneezing. It would be ace, actually.
But it is not to be. Because if I were to give in to this impulse, and retire to bed to nurse my Man Flu, my laptop would taunt me from just across the hall. “Hey, Amber!” it would say. “While you’re languishing in bed, like a Jane Austen heroine with a touch of the vapours, no one is doing your work! Your readers are all unsubscribing in droves. They will NEVER come back, and you will go out of business, and have to go and work down the pit or something. Have a nice day!” And even although my laptop is actually talking rubbish here, I believe it, and so I bravely soldier on, even although I think my nose just fell off and rolled under my desk.
Instead of taking the day off and going back to bed, then, I’m just going to whine a lot instead. I apologise in advance to those of you who follow me on Twitter…
Tagged lurgy
This skirt is a UK size 6, which, for the benefit of my transatlantic readers, roughly corresponds to a US size 0:
I say “roughly”. The size charts will normally equate US0 to a UK4 (which is a largely mythical dress size, usually only found in petite ranges, and even then, in such tiny quantities that it’s like finding the Holy Grail, seriously). That may well have been the case at some point in the past, but as someone who shops a lot in both countries, and who also regularly orders online from the US-based Shopbop, (who, in the interests of disclosure, are sponsors of Shoeperwoman and TheFashionPolice) my experience has always been that size 0= UK6. This is why it always annoys me when the UK media bangs on about “size 0″: it leads people who don’t know a lot about sizing differences between countries to believe that this is some terrifyingly-unnatural size which is THREE FULL SIZES smaller than a UK6. It’s not. Seriously.)
But I digress. This skirt is a UK size 6:
That’s Terry wearing it.
(Yes, he IS a good sport, isn’t he? Also, I’m trying to convince him to start a personal style blog: he already knows how to WORK IT, after all.)
THIS IS WHAT YOUR “SIZE ZERO” LOOKS LIKE, UK FASHION MEDIA.
Or at least, it does at La Redoute, which is where I ordered this skirt from last week, along with a bunch of sweaters which would also have fit Terry, but which wouldn’t have been nearly as amusing on him. Sorry, Terry.
(And yes, I double and triple-checked the label and dispatch notice to make sure they’d sent me the correct size, and they had. I guess there’s a chance it could’ve been wrongly labelled in the factory, but I’ve had to send back items in the past for the same reason, so I suspect it’s simply a case of vanity-sizing gone mad.)
What does this tell us? Other than that Terry should totally have a fashion blog, and that green is SO his colour, obviously? Well, it tells us that vanity sizing is OUT. OF. CONTROL. with some brands. It also helps illustrate how totally random clothes sizing is these days. Because if the “Tall” ranges are too short even for a petite woman, and the smallest dress sizes available will fit a 6ft tall MAN, where on earth are people supposed to shop? Not all of us are handy with a sewing machine (or have the time to alter everything, even if we are), and it’s so frustrating to constantly order clothes and find that they’re not just a little bit larger or smaller than you’d expect, but are actually a completely different size altogether. And will fit your husband.
(It also hopefully tells us that some of the skinny-bashing comments I’m forced to read on The Fashion Police every day, telling me that “no one should be that size!” because “It’s not healthy!” are even more misguided than I’ve always thought they were, given that I now have a “size 0″ husband. But perhaps it’s better not to open that particular can of worms…)
Of course, these issues aren’t just confined to the petites: every woman I have ever met seems to struggle to find clothes that fit properly, and while I understand that it’s impossible for brands to please everyone with their sizing, as we’re all so different, just a little bit of consistency would go a long way, I think.
Still, at least Terry gets a new skirt. Every cloud, people, every cloud…
(P.S. I feel I have to point out here that this photo was actually Terry’s idea, as was posting it on the Internets. I ask a lot of that man sometimes, but posing in a skirt for my blawg was a line even I had hesitated to cross!)
(P.P.S. For some reason, WordPress is currently sending about 50% of my comments straight to spam, for no reason whatsoever. I’m releasing them as quickly as I can, but if your comment hasn’t appeared yet, don’t worry, it’s nothing personal: it’s doing it to my own comments, too!)
Tagged dress sizes, Terry
You see this dress, readers?
This dress is from the Topshop Tall collection. Yes, TALL. For women of 5″9 and above.
I am not tall.
In fact, I’m just a smidge under 5″4 (that “smidge” is important, by the way. Not least because it makes me just slightly too tall for the “petite” section, but still too small for the “regulars”. Won’t someone please think of the women who are 5″4!), so when I ordered this, back in the summer, I thought there was absolutely no danger of it being too short. In fact, I was feeling pretty smug, because I felt sure I had stumbled upon The Answer to all of my “too short” dress woes: just shop from the Tall section! Get easy access to dresses which fall just on, or just above the knee, without having to scour the earth from them (or, er, buy them from Bettie Page or Stop Staring, which let’s face it, is what I normally do..)!
This, you see, is an issue which is starting to get on my last nerve. Why must clothing manufacturers assume that every woman in the world wants to either walk around with her ass hanging out, or dress like a nun? Why is there no middle ground? (Other than the aforementioned Bettie Page/SS middle ground, which is an expensive bit of ground, let me tell you.) Why is it that every time I spy a dress I like hanging in a store, I’ll get it into the fitting room, only to discover that if I bought it, I’d have to walk around like a robot, never daring to lean forward or raise my arms even a fraction, lest I show the world my underwear?
This dress is obviously not QUITE that bad. It’s still fairly decent, albeit shorter than I’m really comfortable with, which is why I’ve had it for months, but had to wait until now to actually wear it, because I feel I can only really get away with it with tights. Did I mention how much I HATE wearing tights?
It’s a first world problem, to be sure.
Oh, and just to add to the confusion: Fi also has this dress. It’s roughly the same length on her as it is on me. And Fi is 5″11.
The lesson? There is no rhyme nor reason to hemlines. Most dresses are too short, regardless of what height you happen to be. (Um, except midi-dresses. Those actually ARE all cut for people who are very, very tall. Don’t even get me STARTED on that one…). And if I tell you I’ve had a bright idea regarding ordering clothes from the Tall section? Just ignore me…
As some of you may recall, I am the kiss of death when it comes to beauty products, in the sense that as soon as I find something I love, it is almost certain to be discontinued immediately. This is particularly true of colour-depositing conditioners for redheads, which I appear to be doomed to spend my life searching for, only for them to be discontinued as soon as I come across them.
So far I’ve managed to to get both John Frieda Radiant Red Color Glaze and Wella Lifetex Color Reflex Mask discontinued. This sucks, because apart from that one time when the Wella product turned my hair bright orange, they were great products: basically deep conditioners, but with a bit of added colour which made my hair a little more vibrant and, well, redder.
And then they discontinued them. Gah.
This month, however, a new product has entered my life, and I like it so much I feel duty-bound to warn you all in advance that it will probably be discontinued any day now. It’s Superdrug’s Colour Effects Wash In, Wash Out Conditioning Colour in Warm Copper Gold (fairly trips off the tongue, no?), you use it in the shower, just like a regular conditioner, and it adds nice, coppery-gold highlights to your hair, which you totally can’t see in this photo, but here it is, anyway:
It’s hard to photograph your own head, apparently. It’s also kind of pointless, because my hair colour can look totally different, depending on the lighting, what time of day it is, the angle of the photo… But yeah. Here is the back of my head, last week. You’re welcome!
This is only 99p per bottle, which is another sure sign that it won’t last. In fact, I became so paranoid that it would be discontinued that when I couldn’t find it on the Superdrug website, I sent them an email saying, “You’re totally discontinuing the Colour Effects Conditioner, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” They assure me they’re not, but…we’ll see. In the meantime, and in the interests of balance, I have to report that it’s kind of crappy AS a conditioner, in that it doesn’t do much for, you know, the actual condition of my hair, and I’ve been having to use my regular conditioner afterwards, or I emerge from the shower looking a bit like this. But still: 99p! And also available in other colours, which I’m afraid I didn’t pay any attention to, because I only have eyes for the redhead stuff.
Now, who wants to place bets on how soon it will be discontinued?
(Er, I wasn’t paid for this post, by the way. I just sound like I was.)
UPDATE 18/5/12: I’ve been getting lots of comments lately from people saying they’re having problems finding this product and that it’s been discontinued… I don’t think it has: I actually bought some just a couple of days ago, and while there were only a few bottles of the red shades (which I snapped up, naturally), they had plenty of the others. I think it’s probably just been popular and has sold out in some places: I have never been able to find it on their website, for instance, which is why I emailed them about it, and they told me they had no plans to discontinue it, so fingers crossed it’ll be back soon for those of you having problems!
Tagged red hair
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