Blog at the beach & 3 top tips for bloggers

A couple of months back I had the pleasure of being invited to Blog at the Beach with Icelolly Holidays who are somewhat heroic I think. Providing drool worthy holidays to hard working peeps is a pretty epic public service in my eyes.

They decided to go bigger and bolder this year by upping the ante with a Mexican themed fiesta at the gorgeous White Cloth Gallery. If anyone has been following Instagram they'll see that Mexico has been having a bit of a moment with travel bloggers lately and I want in!

Let me just begin by saying that Icelolly know how to get the party started and they welcomed us in with THE strongest tequila cocktail known to man, woman or blogger. Most people get nervous at these events, myself being no exception, but these cocktails could have bonded Batman and the Joker.

Working a treat, Vicky from Eat Sleep Love Travel and I worked the room a bit before hitting the sofas and chatting to Sabrina from Girl Vs Globe, who was so lovely and chatty but feeling a little nervous about being one of the speakers at Blog at the Beach. Then the lovely Laura from Lipstick at Weekends joined us and talk inevitably turned to our pets, as it often does.

At that a Mariachi band paraded through the room and got everyone in the Mexican fiesta mood. Luckily I managed to convince some littlies to sneak to the front and get me a great shot and they made me laugh when they plonked themselves down later to get front row seats.

Soon it was time to take our seats for the speakers and I was excited to get some advice about how to improve this little old space of mine on the internet. I do a lot of stuff and travel to a lot of places but often getting round to telling you guys about it and growing my blog gets a little sidelined with work and life pressures. If you want to keep up to date on my antics it's a good idea to catch me over on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook but I promise I'm working on being more consistent on the blogging front (pinky swear|).

See I even took notes in my lovely personalised Chroma notebook

Anyho back to the awesome presentations and luckily for you I made notes on my top 3 take away tips from the amazing speakers at Blog at the Beach.

- Kirsten from the Kooky Traveller said: 'set up Google alerts for yourself so if anyone Googles you, you will get a email notification and also set up a Linked In page as it ranks higher on Google.'

 - Mi from the Vlog Academy told us: 'a selfie stick and an iphone is actually all you need to get started with vlogging and use your body language and tone of voice to show your personality'

 - Sabrina from Girl vs Globe says 'use FIG as a good acronym to remember when blogging. F stands for - be a friend to your readers by addressing them directly, I is for - be your audiences inspiration and G means - be your readers guide by showing them how to achieve the same but also be honest in your reviews.'

All great advice I think and tips I intend to use myself.

The reason why I have held off publishing this post is because after the speakers had finished, we were told by Icelolly that under our seats there was a slip of paper containing prizes. We'd been chatting earlier about the previous winner of the Icelolly prize who had won a trip to Madeira but I did not for the life of me expect the winner of 2016 to be me but it was!!

You've never seen someone so excited and genuinely in disbelief, I mean just check out that cheesy grin! There may have been a cringey whoop and a lot of hugging too. On the spot I decided I would have to leave the Carnivore at home this time and take the bestie - hos' before bros and all that.

Since then I've been speaking to Icelolly about where to go in September with my prize and we've finally decided on Split in Croatia and we go in a month. Eeeek. How exciting! It looks absolutely beautiful and we can't wait to sample the food, do some tours and generally swim, laze about and explore a bit. Stay tuned for pictures over on social media and for a full report back to you in September.

Thanks again to Icelolly for a thoroughly jolly and useful event but also for making these travel bloggers very happy indeed.