A new era of Chronic Illness Bloggers

Hello, I’m Jenna and I am the new owner of www.chronicillnessbloggers.com; I just wanted to take five minutes to log-on and let you know the plans for the platform!

I am a freelance blogger and writer with Crohn’s Disease. I run two blogs-www.abalancedbelly.co.uk about my struggle with IBD and www.thebloglancer.co.uk about making money from blogging. I am also a freelance journalist. And the lady on the left is my blind pup Stevie!

I am so excited to get started with the platform and have all sorts of new ideas. I am so grateful to be able to work from home full-time with my illness and if I can help others with that; even in the smallest of ways- I’ll be incredibly happy.

So what’s the plan?

• Grow the Instagram platform to push the social aspect of our community. I know myself that a brand might not be able to afford to pay a high rate for a blog post or they might only want to send a sample. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, one option to offer brands is social media promotion instead. So, I’d love to be able to curate an amazing Instagram feed-a visual portfolio if you will that we can link to and show brands what we’re all doing! There are all sorts of options for this- such as Instagram takeovers, twitter chats etc. So whilst I’m a blogger at heart- I will be giving the social media a revamp and building this into negotiations with brands. Do go find us on insta @chronicblogs and use the hashtag #chronicinsta should you want us to regram you! Because of this, we may consider accepting those who don’t have a blog but a particularly strong social channel.

• Build a bank of blog posts and content. I want the site to be super useful to bloggers;so I will be working on getting some blog posts up to help with things like growing a blog, monetising etc. If you’ve got an idea, do let us know and we’re happy to host guest content and link back to your blog.

• Brand+Blogger Connection Posts. Obviously, the aim is to focus on campaigns that help as many bloggers as possible but I’d like to get a huge amount of content up on the blog and one way to do that is to work with brands on this site specifically. It’s a fantastic site-and brands can see how many visitors it gets and that it reaches you all. So we’ll be offering brands the chance to advertise directly on the site but so we all benefit, we’ll also team them up with a blogger who will write the post and receive payment for it. This way we are still helping bloggers find work and getting great content out there! I’ll be posting about potentially paid posts of this nature in the near future.

• Tiered outreach We have a couple of brands we’re chatting to but I am keen to offer a range of different options. For example, one thing I have offered in the past for blog outreach, is a smaller package which will allow the advertiser to get a shout-out on our site/platform and then bloggers will get in touch directly. I’d like to bring this option in to ensure I’m still able to offer brands the chance to work with bloggers-even if they don’t have the budget for outreach. Of course, they’ll be other campaigns that will be led much more closely by myself-but I’m hoping that there will be a mix of the two; and that there will be plenty of blog posts on here to help you negotiate things like pay and emailing.

• Facebook community support. I know there are already some great moderators in the group and I have a couple of ideas that might help users get the most of the group. I know we already have a post sharing thread but I have a few ideas for things such as weekly social sharing threads etc.

Anyway, these are some tentative thoughts and I just wanted to check-in and share!