If you follow me on TikTok, you might have seen I’ve done a collaboration this week with Wild Refills (If not, you can check it out here). In the past, I’ve been quite hesitant about doing collabs because it can feel quite scary and I was not really sure how to go about it and I was always scared of doing it wrong. After getting a job in marketing, I feel a lot more confident in making ads and doing collabs as I’ve learnt those skills and I know how to push a product but also how to make it fun and to make people stop on their FYP and watch the ad.

I’m going to go into a bit of detail about how I make my ads, what products I advertise and more about gaining the confidence to do collabs.

What Products Will I Advertise?

The first question to ask yourself is ‘What products am I willing to advertise?’ Whether you reach out to the brand or they reach out to you, you need to know what kind of products you’re willing to advertise and whether or not your audience will like the products. Personally, I only advertise products I would actually use in my day-to-day life so my ads can be genuine and I actually feel confident advertising a product I can vouch for. My audience on TikTok is mainly younger women, like myself, and for that reason, any ‘Skinny Teas’ or ridiculous weight loss products are a HUGE NO. I would personally never use these products and they are completely against all my values as a mental health advocate.

How I Make My Ads

Normally, I treat my ads like i’d treat my normal videos so they blend in and to encourage my followers to stop and watch it like it’s my regular content. I like to film them in a bright location, ideally on a sunny date but in the UK, that’s not always possible so a ring light is a great investment if you’re looking to do collabs or improve your videos. I like to make sure the product is mentioned or at least seen within the first 3 seconds so even if people quickly scroll, they’ll still at least see the product and it also makes people curious about what the product is and what is does. I like to start my videos with some kind of statement which makes people stop and think for a second, an example of this is my most recent collab where I start with ‘I think I may be the sweatiest person in the world’ and this leads people to either think ‘why on earth is she telling me this?’ or ‘wait, i’m also really sweaty and this is relatable’ and then continue to watch. However, it depends on the product you’re promoting as when I advertised the Cricut Joy, it was more like a How-To video because that’s the type of video the target audience may be more interested in. Not every ad is the same and it’s important to tailor your ads to whatever the product is and whatever their target audience is.

USPs – This is something you really wanna mention in your ads and it’s the unique selling points of this particular product. You want people to know why they should choose this product over a competitor. If someone’s stopped scrolling to watch the ad then they’re interested in the product and you want to reel them in and let them know all the best features about this product to get them over the fence of whether or not they should buy it or even just look into it.

Gaining The Confidence To Do Collabs

If you’re a micro-influencer or just starting out doing ads, it can be SCARY. I was always scared because my ads were never going to my up to the standard you see on TV, but that’s the point! These brands want collabs with all types of influencers because it feels more real and genuine to have someone in their target audience showing everyday people how they use their product. Ads don’t have to be perfect, they just need to get that brand in people’s faces and make people want to look into and buy the product. I don’t know about you but I’m far more likely to buy a product when I see reviews from actual people because you can picture how this product would fit into your life instead of this perfect ad you see on TV.

Have FUN With It!

Have fun with ads, make something you’d want to watch and that you would enjoy! Make sure you follow the guidelines the brand lays out and most importantly, make sure you learn how to pronounce the brand’s name!

Rachel

I recently asked people on my insta stories what films they were watching and I got a lot of responses so I thought I’d share some with you.

These are the films people recommended I watch:

• Knives Out
• Parasite
• Midsommar
• Beauty and The Beast
• Hot Fuzz
• Brain on Fire
• Parent Trap
• Princess Diaries
• You’re Next
• Black and Blue
• Cool Runnings
• All the Harry Potter films
• Green Room
• Catch Me If You Can
• John Wick
• About Time
• Love, Simon
• Sing Street
• Little Women
• Moonrise Kingdom
• Nutcracker and the Four Realms
• All the Toy Story Films
• All the MCU
• Prisoners
• Interstellar
• 1917
• Ad Astra
• The Gift
• Me Before You
• Snatch
• Frozen 2
• Seeing Double
• Synecdoche, New York
• The Iron Giant
• The Gentlemen
• The Invisible Man
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople
• Whiplash
• Contagion
• Chicago 2002
• Bird man
• Les Miserables
• Cats
• The Rescuers

There’s this weird misconception that taking medication for your mental health makes you weak. There’s also a weird misconception that mental health medication is something you shouldn’t take because ‘nature is a natural antidepressant’.

I used to be really scared of taking medication for my mental health, mostly because of the huge stigma around it but also because I decided to read the long list of side effects almost all drugs have. The first thing I ever took for my mental health was something to help my anxiety and after a few months on it, I decided it wasn’t for me because although it sometimes calmed my anxiety, it also made my panic attacks worse when they did happen. I was put off medication for a while after that until things started to get really bad. I started antidepressants in 2017 and ever since then my life has completely changed for the better. The first few weeks sucked, I felt so ill and I was never hungry and it sucked but after a while I slowly but surely started to get better and I slowly and surely noticed my mental health also started to get better. I’ve been on my medication for a year and a half now and I’m so much more confident in myself and my panic attacks are so rare now that I can actually go out and enjoy myself. Medication hasn’t solved all my issues of course because I still do have really bad days and I still do get panic attacks but they’re not as frequent and I’ve found that the thoughts in my head are kinder than they used to be. I see the world very differently now than when I was at my worst and I owe a lot of that to my medication which is why it hurts so much to see people belittle it.

Please, if you’re going to belittle mental health medication please read the personal experiences of people, like me, whose lives have changed for the better because of it.

– Rachel

‘The room is on fire

Invisible smoke’

In just 7 words Taylor Swift has so beautifully and tragically summed up what anxiety feels like for me.

Anxiety is complex and I’ve spent so long trying to put into words what it feels like.

Having anxiety is like being trapped in the rubble of a demolished building. It’s you fighting so hard to clear away the stones and mess around you but no matter how hard you try there always seems to be more left. Some days I let myself suffocate in the rubble because I’m too tired of fighting and I’m too tired of feeling like I never close to the light whereas other days I swear I can see just a glimpse of light and that thought can help motivate me to carry on. The struggle is, the rubble isn’t real and it’s hard to escape from something that’s not really there.

The panic of a room being on fire is so real with anxiety because you always feel like something is really wrong but then when other people look around they see nothing and that’s why it’s so hard to explain what’s going on in your head because no one else can see it.

Just hearing these words just reminds me that although it’s not exactly the same, maybe other people get what I’m going through and maybe other people understand the pain of being scared of something that isn’t truly there and when I hear these lyrics I feel less alone and that’s all I’ve ever wanted and the light I need on those days where I’m consumed in my own thoughts.

– rachel

I made a summer Playlist which I personally think is kind of good so here’s the links to Spotify and Apple Music if you wanna listen

IMPORTANT!!!!

Listen to it in order!

Its very important to LISTEN in order and idc how much you like to shuffle. IN ORDER.

I basically just have a thing of making a playlist so it sounds good, to me at least, in a certain order and sometimes, not this one, the order kinda tells a story so yeah ORDER IS IMPORTANT

Apple Music:

https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/summer-playlist/pl.u-WabZpbYuq1Xm95

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/user/1122941746/playlist/4BmOOxsh3Yr4xAJdVrHion?si=ithMVTgKQHqd8Up6pTqYsw

– rachel

So today’s video is another mental health related video and it’s about coping with panic attacks, if you couldn’t already tell from the title.

Why now?

So, recently I went to Disneyland Paris and posted A LOT on instagram but what I didn’t actually post about was that I had a panic attack on my last day. Panic attacks always come out of the blue, for me at least, but this one was so unexpected because I haven’t had a major panic attack in months and because of that I actually struggled to cope with it. This is why I wanted to make this video because whether its your first panic attack or you 100th panic attack, it can still be scary and unexpected and in the moment you don’t really know what to do. This video is both a reminder for other people and myself on simple ways to just help get your panic attack under control.

I hope you like this video and I hope it helps you as much as it helps me 🙂

Rachel

Sadly, Lancaster is no New York because unlike the city that never sleeps, Lancaster always seems to sleep (apart from on Wednesdays and Fridays, of course)

So, it’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post but I really want to start with this blogging thing as it’s basically YouTube but I have to use punctuation. (Which is scary bc I mess it up a lot)

Anyway, let’s go.

– rachel

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton