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We accumulate a staggering amount of knowledge and skills throughout our different walks of life. The different roles, professions, hobbies and relationships all add to our experience. Utilising these skills to propel our online business or hobby is no different to any of the other challenges we’ve faced in our lives. Many of us have now realised that applying our passion and skills to online spaces provides us with new chances to build and monetize our side hustles in retirement.
Speaking to Tilly Dix Smith, we found out how seamless it’s been for her to take the skills gained from her previous profession and adapt them to the digital landscape. The transition was a no-brainer for Tilly, who explains, “I decided to become a blogger because it was an extension of one of my true passions – writing”. Her role as a publicist has seen major shifts with the rise of technology, and she’s been happy to embrace them, moving from pen to stylus, from magazine to blog, from pasting photos with a glue stick to pasting with “ctrl C + ctrl V”. As she describes, her biggest fear was handling the layout because “as an old school journalist and editor, we used to plan the layout on paper”.
Now, with many blog posts under her carefully selected belt, Tilly has shared her top blogging tips.
When you’re passionate about something, it always translates onto the page. A great place to start is to lean into your personal experiences – this might be your profession, your life stories or your interests. Writing from your own experience can help you to bring a unique point of view to standard topics.
When inspiration strikes, jot it down before you forget it. Tilly recommends collecting your thoughts in the notes app on your smartphone or sending yourself an email. It doesn’t have to be fully-formed - sometimes a couple of words are enough to retain your idea, so just make sure it’s written down.
Time to bring your ideas to life with a website. Many bloggers publish their content online with a website-building platform like WordPress. These platforms are beginner-friendly and provide a range of free templates to choose from. You can learn more through tutorials on the WordPress website or watch YouTube video’s which helped Tilly through the step-by-step process of customising the design, building a navigation bar, changing the permalinks, and other useful tips.
There’s a lot you can learn about how to digitise your skills (blogging or otherwise) from looking into what others are doing online. For blogging, find others who are writing about your area of interest, look at their website, layout, how many photos they use and the length of their blog posts. By studying how others are doing things, you can borrow what’s working well and avoid what’s not, to help you develop your own unique blogging style.
Digitising existing skills has liberated business owners like Tilly by providing them with more flexibility. She says, “technology has played right into my court because I love working from home and I love my own space”.
Check out our video to hear how Tilly is enjoying the digital growth of her side hustle.
Hi I'm Tilly Smith Dix and I'm an online fashion blogger.
My biggest fear was handling the layout because as an old school journalist and editor, we used the plan the layout on paper. And now I had to do this online. It was scary but setting up a WordPress account is actually dead easy!
I never write directly onto my WordPress blog. I first create a file in MS Word on my laptop because then I can edit and play around with it. And then I will transfer it onto WordPress which is very easy. It's a cut and paste scenario and then I can do another edit and add my photographs.
Selecting images for the blog post, I list the slugs (the titles of the images) I would like to use because they will be complimenting the stories that I have written.
Becoming a blogger has actually widened my horizons. It keeps the brain going and especially when one is evolving with the times and growing - is just fun.
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