ITWBN Blogger Network Turned Two

This weekend I had a busy one. I am part of a blogger network which is also present on Facebook as a group who celebrated their 2nd birthday yesterday. The network focuses mainly on bloggers from West Ireland. Sometimes it can be quite hard to attend blog events because most of them are in Cork or Dublin. I’ve no issue traveling to Dublin as it’s about the same journey as when I would go from Sligo to Galway but Galway you can manage a bit better when you only want to travel for a day.

The event started at 12.30pm. I was staying in the Connacht Hotel the night before because I went out with a friend that evening. It was a treat to me and some deserved me time while hubby was busy minding the kids at home. By the way, he suggested this to me.

This was my second blog event I attended. The last one was in Dublin so all the bloggers at the Galway event were all new to me so I didn’t know anyone really. But I wasn’t on my own with that, as lots of other bloggers attended for the fist time.

Once registered we were all greeted by the lovely girls from Juicy Lucy. They sell healthy drinks with cucumber for example. I didn’t try one myself because I am not a fan of them but they were well presented.

Each table was named after an Irish celebrity. Our table was called Chris O’Dowd. I met some nice bloggers who were sitting at my table. There was Amie from Floralesque, the 2 sisters from Sirens and Souls, Rachel from That is so Ray and Aileen who is in the middle of setting up her newly established blog all about nutrition and food allergies. Most bloggers niche was either beauty, fashion or food. As a parenting blogger I felt a bit out of place to be honest. I didn’t meet anyone who was a parenting blogger in fact. It would have been nice to share the same interest and talk about babies/kids all day.

I do have to say that everything was well organised, so well done to Sinead and Saibh for putting all this together. First guest speaker on stage was Olivia who is working for a Food PR company. She talked about the importance of bloggers working with PR companies and the other way around. It was interesting to see how each PR company operates different. I compared them to the ones I worked with in the past.

Next up was Nikki who talked about the past 10 years of her life. She had a difficult time with her hip and as a result she is on crutches. She was aiming to show us bloggers what can be achieved by simply sharing a life time story on a blog and contact a local paper who she started working with. The whole thing went viral in no time. If you are interested reading more about her, you can do so here on her WordPress blog.

At this stage I was starving and so were a few others. We couldn’t wait for the food to come in.

There was a selection of sandwiches as a bap, bagel, wrap or bread. Inside them was either beef, chicken, salmon or tuna. On a seperate plate we could choose from spring rolls and other chinese selections. There was 6 at our table. I think we all might have been too shy to eat it all as lots was left behind. Then again I could have eaten the whole plate. I might have been nice to have some sort of buffet option. The other thing that was missing was drinks. I didn’t really want to drink coffee or tea all day. The choices of desserts were delicious. Chocolate brownie, cheese cake and apple tart.

After an hour of lunch another guest speaker, Gill, was up. A new thing they introduced was the Sofa session with a few bloggers. Every blogger said a few words what they do and what they blog about. The main subject that was talked about was social media. Everyone preferred a different platform. Snapchat seems to be a big thing. Personally I am not too hooked on it. I am registered on it but that’s about it. I prefer Instagram.

Everyone received a goody bag with vouchers, make ups, cremes etc. Again very fashion/beauty blogger oriented. I will probably use some of it but most of it wouldn’t be much use to me so I might give it away to people who have more use for it.

With a bit of delay the birthday bash was finished around 16.40pm. I was kind of panicking at that time because I needed to be home by 7pm as the kids needed to get a bath before a new week starts and I had to get them ready for bed but luckily I made it on time.

In summary I did enjoy the event and it was nice to be a bit social with other bloggers but hopefully the next one I am going to is also including parenting bloggers. They seem to be all more located in Dublin I think.