Welcome to another post in my The Low Down series, where I get a bit more serious and give you the low down on things. For this one, I am just going to be sharing ways to genuinely just be a nice person which I feel like is pretty obvious, but a lot of people seem to need it?
Now, you might be bored of hearing about kindness now, especially as it has been heavily emphasised since the start of the pandemic, and a few years back we had the #BeKind movement. But have you ever stopped to think how we only have movements like that after someone has taken their own life? And afterwards, it doesn't take long for people to forget about the detrimental, and even fatal effects that nastiness has on our mental health.
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A lot of people reading this will be thinking, being kind is so obvious, like why would you not be? But you'd be surprised by the amount of people who sadly are not. Every day, I hear about influencers and creators getting hate on a daily basis. Just look at the boys in the England team getting racial abuse for not scoring penalties, rather than getting praised for coming so far at a young age. Racism is a complete other topic and it is never OK in any situation. But it just goes to show how quickly people can turn nasty as these were supposedly England 'fans'.
Take Love Island as another example, sadly a few people have taken their own lives as a result of the hate they had received from being on the show. But this year, people are still giving them hate and tweeting awful things about them. OK, we all judge people on TV a little bit sometimes and maybe don't always agree with their decisions, but they are just ordinary humans on the TV with feelings. If you really have to say something nasty about someone on the TV or someone online, it's so easy to just send something privately to a friend rather than broadcasting it so that they can see.
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These are just a few recent examples, but I'm sure if I ask you about a time someone has been nasty to you personally, you could tell me straight away. And being online, does make it easier for people to be unkind, but it's not always online.
We are all just getting through life and enough shit has gone on with things like Covid, climate change and just general other bad stuff for anyone to have to put up with people being dicks on top of that. So I am going to give you some of my own personal advice on how to just be a nice person generally, and just to live life in more of a happy way.
I'm not saying I'm an amazingly nice person, no one is perfect and it's hard to be kind all the time - especially because there are some real arseholes out there. Most of my blog readers are lovely too! I am just using my platform for important topics.
How to be a nice person
1. Try to find happiness within yourself
2. Keep your mouth shut
3. Compliment people
4. Surround yourself with positivity
5. Do's and don'ts
- Work on your happiness
- Compliment people and promote kindness
- Spend your time with nice people
- Put others down to make yourself feel better
- Be rude and say nasty things
You might be thinking, what is a media kit and why I need one? Well, I'm here to answer these questions and give you some advice on creating one, and what to include.
What is a Media Kit?
A media kit is a document that bloggers, content creators and influencers use to show information about their platform. It's usually shared to brands so they can learn more about the creators they are working with.
If you want to work with brands, it's important to have a media kit that you can keep up to date with your stats. This way if you are emailing a brand to work with them, you don't need to send a long email about the views you receive on your blog or the engagement you get on your social posts. You can keep all this information in your media kit and attach it, such a time saver.
I used Canva to create my media kit and made sure the branding aligned with the colours I have used across my blog and social media channels to keep it all consistent. Mine is also only 3 pages because I feel like for now, that is all that's needed but yours may be more or less depending on how much information you want to put in. I would try to keep it to around 2-5 pages though, to try and be concise.
What to include
- A short bio about what your platform/blog is about.
- A photo of yourself.
- Who your main target audience is.
- Your blog and social media platfroms and stats - I just included followers on my socials, my blog views and blog domain authority, but you may wish to include social engagement rates too. Make sure these are up to date before you send it to brands.
- Brands you have worked with in the past. This is optional, if you are new to this you won't be able to add this just yet but it's just a good way to show your experience if you have it.
How to use it
Bit of a chatty one - I just thought I'd update you all on my life as I have finished university!
A few years ago, I wrote posts on applying to uni and wrote updates on how my first year was going, but since then I haven't really spoken about it that much on here.
So after 4 years of being a Communication and Media student at Bournemouth University, I have finally finished and I got a 2:1 overall with a 1st in my dissertation! I am now working as a Social Media and Communications Coordinator for the same organisation I did my internship with between second and third year.
I am so glad I went to uni it was such a good experience, obviously there were some downs but I wouldn't change it. I won't get into all of my highlights and lowlights for the year because that would take forever. Maybe I will do that when I am really missing uni but for now I just wanted to update you all.
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What have I learnt?
To be honest, I feel like most of the stuff I learnt was about adult life and what kind of person I am rather than academic. Obviously I did learn a lot about media too, I feel like I can never watch a film or read a newspaper article properly again without analysing every word or every scene. But reflecting back, the experiences I had will mean more to me than that kind of stuff (sorry lecturers).
It was a shame that Covid kind of got in the way a little bit of my final year but I have still been able to do lots of fun things with my friends. 2021 is definitely the year of the bottomless brunch!
Luckily, because I live an hour away from Bournemouth I can go and visit whenever I want and I will still have friends living there.
I live in a very small town where I'm never really pushed out of my comfort zone so uni really helped push me to make friends and put myself out there (usually helped by a little Dutch courage too).
Where do we go from here?
As I mentioned before, I am starting my career in social media marketing and I am really enjoying it so far. I'm really looking forward to see how my career goes too. At the moment I am still learning about it while working.
I've had a few questions about university and applying to jobs so if you want to know anything, please feel free to ask me.
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To be honest, I just can't believe uni is over it's so weird how quickly it went. I still feel the same age as when I started too, I feel like everyone says that.
It definitely feels like the end of an era but also not in some ways because I am still planning to keep in touch with all my uni pals as much as possible.
Last month, my boyfriend Joe and I had a lovely day out in Weymouth. Usually I would write posts when I spend a few days away somewhere but I has such a good time that I thought I'd share it with you. Living in Bournemouth, it was close enough for us to go there for a day trip but our tenancy for our student house ends very soon sadly.
If you are not from the UK, Weymouth is a lovely seaside town in Dorset, England where lots of people go and stay for a holiday and now I know why.
Sea Life Weymouth
First of all, we started our day at Sea Life Weymouth. I am like a child when it comes to seeing animals, I just love it so this was really good. It was a lot more expensive than the aquarium in Bournemouth that I'm used to, but it was a lot bigger and better.
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We had so much fun seeing all the animals and it was the first time I'd ever seen a seal in the flesh. I had fun taking pictures of them all and I created a Weymouth and Sea Life Instagram reel too, which you can see below.
Visiting Weymouth
After visiting Sea Life, we took a walk along the beach and into Weymouth. As we went on a weekday that was a bit cloudy, it wasn't too busy but there were still quite a lot of people about.
Living in Bournemouth for uni, we go to the beach a lot but it was nice to go to a different one. I am a lover of the beach!
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After walking round the beach for a while, we walked to the harbour and then went through all the little side streets that had some really cute shops.
Sadly, we didn't stop anywhere for food except an ice cream so I would love to go back and do that. I love going to seaside towns and eating local seafood.
A bit of a short blog post this time as we only spent one day in Weymouth but it was a lovely day nonetheless.
Where have you been lately that you really enjoyed?
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