The Blog Lowdown – Redhead Babyled

Today on The Blog Lowdown, I’m delighted to be hosting Donna from Redhead Babyled….

Please Introduce yourself:
Hi, I’m Donna, married to my Husband David (Dave!), Mummy to my Little Pickle (LP) and Little Man (LM). I’m on maternity leave at the moment from my day job as a Bank Manager but going back very soon – Next week in fact!

When did you start blogging?
I started blogging in April 2012 When LP was 7 months old to follow her weaning progress and to document the milestones that she would reach.

Tell us a little about your blog
Redhead Babyled is my one and only hobby. It’s a place where I document our family life, post regular reviews, host competitions and talk about anything that’s on my mind.

Who designed your blog?
Me, mostly. I went self hosted in August 2013 and decided to have a big blog makeover. I used a WordPress theme – Forever, that looks nothing like the blog as it is today. I changed colours and fonts and ta-da! I’m not a web designer and had no previous knowledge when it came to designing my blog but I googled everything that I wanted to change and found out how. It was time consuming but I’m now happy with it, it’s very ‘me’.

Which of your posts have been the most popular? Are there certain types that get more interest?
Competition posts are always very popular but I discount those really. My most popular ‘normal’ posts have been the ones about my experience of bullying and another about my thoughts on convenience food. Both completely different topics and both popular for incredibly different reasons! I think to have a popular post you either have to be very controversial or write about something that a lot of people can relate to. I didn’t expect either post to be as popular as they were.

How do you promote your blog posts, and which methods do you find to be most successful?
My posts automatically get promoted on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ when they’re published and I schedule tweets to promote them on Twitter through the day. I also pin the majority of my posts onto Pinterest when I get a chance – usually once a week. I tend to get most social media inbound traffic from Twitter and hardly anything from Pinterest but I think this should grow over time.

Which linkys do you most enjoy joining in with/reading?
I always join in with The Ordinary Moments, Living Arrows and The Family Portrait Projects: Me & Mine, Siblings and Me & You. I love to join in linkys that keep my blog grounded and in line with the reason I started blogging – Linkys that help me to record moments of our family lives.

When are your busiest days on the blog, and why? (if you know why!)
My blog views are pretty static to be honest, I get pretty much the same each day – give or take! But whenever I have a competition finishing I can guarantee a big increase in traffic.

Can you name 3 things that blogging has brought you?
Blogging has brought me a lot of opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise – Days out, holidays, things to review. These are all things I will never take for granted and feel incredibly fortunate to have.
Blogging has also brought me a HUGE circle of online friends – Some of which I now class as really good friends. The blogging community is an amazing thing to be a part of – I love having the support and chat of other bloggers.
Blogging has finally but most importantly brought me an incredible online diary of my childrens lives. Strip away the reviews and competitions and you are left with my children growing up – Little Man’s whole life is contained within the pages of Redhead Babyled and that is a pretty amazing thing.


top 5 tips to organise your blogging lifeMy top five tips to organise your blogging life:

– If you want to blog regularly, make a schedule to blog by – For example, I join in with Living Arrows on a Monday, have my Baby Led Weaning series guest post on a Tuesday and The Ordinary Moments on a Sunday. On top of this I do at least three reviews a week and at least two posts about our lives a week. As I do them I tick them off.
– Use tools to help you blog more efficiently – I use Hootsuite to schedule tweets to promote my blog posts and it can also be used to automatically publish posts to Facebook, Google+ and anywhere else you like – This all saves so much time.
– Try and set aside time every day or every week to blog. I try and blog every evening and break this time down into writing blog posts, editing photos and scheduling tweets.
– As well as making time to blog, make time to read and comment on other blogs too. I use Bloglovin to follow other blogs and have a folder of ones I read as often as I can, daily when possible. Bloglovin keeps me up to date with what I want to read and what has already been read & makes sure I don’t miss anything!
– If your Bloglovin gets overrun with unread posts, your housework is piling up and you’re finding it all a bit much, take a blogging break. Blogging should always be enjoyable no matter how often you blog. If you lose the enjoyment, step back and take a break until it can be fun again. Sometimes, ‘mark all as read’ is the best part of Bloglovin!

My Social Media Links:
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram

Redhead Babyled

Thanks very much, Donna! I think to write as regularly as you do, you do need to be well-organised and those are great tips, thank you.

If you’ve any questions for Donna, feel free to comment on this post, and she’ll pop by and check in. Next week, we will be hearing from Zoe from Mama Geek so be sure to pop by for that next Tuesday morning. You can catch up the previous posts from other bloggers here, too, if you’ve missed them.

If you’d like to feature on The Blog Lowdown, just email me at [email protected] to get involved.

To ensure you don’t miss any blogger posts, you can now sign up for my newsletter, and I’ll always include The Blog Lowdown round up in those.

Other posts you might like:

My 20 Top Tips for Bloggers

A Blogger’s Guide to Pinterest

10 Tips to Get your Blogging Mojo Back

Follow on Bloglovin

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5 thoughts on “The Blog Lowdown – Redhead Babyled”

  1. I always enjoy reading about other bloggers and the motivation behind their blog. Great to read this, I’m sure we all start our blogs to record family life.

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