Oh. My. God. can someone please tell me what’s going on over here?! A few weeks ago I got an email from Harriet Mellor, a journalist for the Daily Express, one of the most widely read newspapers in the UK. She was writing an article about 5-9ers, people like me who still work full time and run their own business in their spare time. She wanted to interview me to be included in this article and of course I was over the moon to oblige.
If you’re in the UK, I hope you were able to go pick up your copy today but for all the rest of you, here’s the text around my ‘bit’…and that huge photo of my pink head!
Using out-of-hours as a launch pad
It’s only Rock n Roll: Kat Williams For bride-to-be, Kat Williams, what started as an entertaining blog crossed over into an international web business with advertising and sponsorship.
Kat, 26, who is far from being a conventional, ‘meringue wearer’, wrote Rock n Roll Bride while planning her wedding to husband Gareth in April 2008. She collated the coolest photographers, dress designers and boutiques from around the planet.
When her big day was over, Kat, a producer on Bid TV, was reluctant to let go of her after work diversion. The decision had unexpected results.
“I didn’t even start the blog to make money but without realising it I had created a niche business,” she said. “Funky photography and pictures of cool wedding couples are the Holy Grail for wedding photographers and I started to get advertising enquiries from them. I looked into how it would work. I’d put a few Google ads on the site and the click-through rate was quite high. The presence of having proper ads created a snowball effect.”
With 90,000 global visitors a month and over 3,000 followers on Twitter, Kat has just cut her TV hours to spend more time on the site. However, she’ll never totally give up the TV work. “I’ve not become rich from the site but I’m making enough,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave Bid TV, not just for the money but because for the most part I do love my crazy producing job.”
Thanks to Harriot for writing such a lovey article and to Emma Jones of Enterprise Nation for hooking me up!
