This post contains affiliate links – if you click the link and make a purchase of any kind from that website within a certain time, I will receive a percentage of that purchase. This should not affect the price that you pay.
If you would like to learn more about how affiliate links work, please head over to this post and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!
I posted about this on my IG stories recently but felt like it deserved a more permanent memorial on the blog since it was such a big part of my life! I made the decision earlier this year to close down Bonjour, Blogger!after 12 years because I just wasn’t giving it the love it deserved and I’m in a totally different place – both creatively and physically! – to where I was when I started things.
If you’re new around here, here’s a bit of backstory: I’ve been blogging since the early 2000’s, and when brands started realizing that there was a benefit to working with online creators, I was lucky enough to collaborate with a few favourites. Back then, there wasn’t a ton of information online about how to start and maintain a blog or things like how to work with brands, how much to charge for a sponsored post, etc. Whatever information there was out there was all very US orientated as well, which didn’t always translate well for British bloggers.
I kept getting asked by friends how to do all these sort of things, and eventually I figured I could just write everything I knew up and put it into a book. That became a Kindle guide, but while I was writing it in lunch breaks and spare hours, I realised that things were changing so quickly that a static book wasn’t enough – a website would make much more sense and in April 2013, bonjourblogger.com was born!
One of the best things that came out of Bonjour, Blogger! was #blogclub. It started as a casual meetup for bloggers in the Bristol area, because blogging was great fun but could be a bit lonely, and getting together was so much fun! Those early meetups were small and friendly, and I always came away from them feeling full of ideas and inspiration. So many lovely, smart, generous bloggers came through those metaphorical doors, ready to share what they knew and support each other. Some of you made real-life friendships there. (I definitely did!)
Moving to Seattle was the beginning of the end for the site for me though. I had always positioned Bonjour, Blogger! as being a UK specific resource but how could I write about UK specific things if I was no longer there? (and for really really obvious reasons, I couldn’t really do #blogclub any more…)
I still love talking about blogging and influencing, especially in real life, but as the industry has grown and changed, I’m just not as on top of it as I used to be! I decided to close the site down because I was still paying for the hosting and domain, but every time I saw the email address in my mail app, I felt guilty that I just wasn’t doing anything with it.
Maybe it will come back one day in a new form (or even just the old form!) but for now, I’ll probably just share the influencery things that catch my eye here – I already have a few things that I want to talk about plus a couple of posts I want to rewrite from Bonjour, Blogger! and bring over here (like the one explaining how affiliate links work – you may have noticed the disclaimer at the top of this post that links back to BB…well that doesn’t work right now, oops!).
I’m still not entirely sure how to wrap this up, to be honest. Letting go of something that was such a big part of my life for so long wasn’t easy -even if I knew it was the right thing to do but it feels like the right time to close that tab.
And who knows – maybe it’ll come back one day!
