Amara Interior Blog Awards 2015
This blog has turned from a promotional tool for my online business, Laura Thomas Linens into an entity all of it’s own. The subconscious mind is a powerful tool! Once upon a time I dreamed of being a journalist and I’ve pushed and pushed that towards a reality.
I started this blog back in June 2012 while living in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. Awake at 2 am and unable to fall back to sleep I thought ‘that’s it’ I’m going start a blog. So in my cotton nightie, wrapped in blankets, deep in the middle of a cold winter’s night I started to tap away.
You can have a peep at that post here and to date it has only had 22 views!
Fast forward nearly three years to the day, I love my blog more than ever. Six months ago LTID changed from being a one sheet blog to a simple magazine style. It receives traffic of between 300 – 400 views a day and one post has received a whopping 30,434 hits!
I now work with three London Interior PR firms and have gained sponsorship from Dulux for a forthcoming renovation. All this from one cold night!
One big thing that changed recently for this blog is that it is now advert free. You’ll start to notice more and more bloggers going this way. Recently Holly Becker from blog Decor8 posted about her blog going ad free too. Blogging guru Grace Bonny from Design*Sponge in a recent interview with life coach Marie Forleo predicted this would happen. Even though the revenue from this blog has come 80% from paid advertisements I still decided to kill them. I’m not an advert person. I always thought it looked tacky having ads down the right hand column of my homepage. Staying true to myself back in April I decided once the last advert expired not to renew any of them.
LTID will however do more sponsored posts, product reviews, house tours and report on interior trends. I’ve started a food column called ‘The Foodie’ and along side this there will be a page dedicated to healthy foods and the latest diet trends.
However..
Drum roll please..
I do have a big announcement to make. At a date yet to be confirmed the LTID blog will follow my own personal renovation project. I’ve just purchased an old doctors surgery that needs to be completely reconstructed. Structurally sound, cosmetically ugly, watch this space as I transform a village sickbay into a sleek, modern, Scandinavian inspired family home.
Last year was a truly great one. I had no idea how or who had nominated my blog in the 2014 Amara Blog Awards for ‘Best Luxury Blog’ where LTID got down to the last five! It was such a boost. All those hours spend posting, all those days spent thinking, not to mention all the months spent continually improving my photography skills through reading books, listening to YouTube tutorials and actually taking shots.
The nominations have just come out for the 2015 Amara Interior Blog Awards. LTID has been nominated again in the ‘Best Luxury Blog’ category. All fingers and toes crossed when voting opens in July that I get through to the next stage down in London!
Thank you to all who have read and commented on my blog. Finally thanks to this blog for letting me see light during the times when all I could think of was dark..
