Ég svaraði spurningum fyrir nýopnaða vefsíðu Code Name Woman nú á dögunum. Heimasíða sem er og verður blanda af persónulegu bloggi frumkvöðulsins Anja Anic ásamt viðtölum við eiginkonur atvinnumanna í íþróttum. En Anja vill gera konurnar á bak við velgengni mannana sýnilegri en hún er í dag. Frábær hugmynd.
Þetta eru mín svör um mig sem bloggara og eiginkonu (verðandi) Jónssonar – viðtalið í heild sinni. En mikið vitið þið svosem nú þegar.
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CNW: Elisabet, you are a blogger. What kind of blogger are you?
I blog about fashion, inspiration, my life and work.
CNW: Do you blog for business or pleasure? Or both at the same time?
When you have a blog, I think it is really important that you blog for yourself, that you are always true to yourself and don’t keep in mind what other people think. This way you will gain the readers’ trust. Even if the blog is really personal, it has been a mixture of blog and business from the beginning and has given me many opportunities on the side.
CNW: Since when do you own a blog? Why did you start at first?
I started my blog in 2009 when I lived in Sweden. At the beginning I blogged because of the business that I was doing at that time. I was helping Icelandic people buying scandinavian clothes from Sweden and I used the blog to show what the stores had in stock each time and what I thought was a “must have”. In 2012 I started a new page with my friend Álfrún, www.trendnet.is. There it is much more fun. On Trendnet we host ten most popular and exiting bloggers from Iceland in fashion, lifestyle and design, eleven different bloggers in different positions with a different focus on their blog. In that way we achieved great traffic on one page and made it easier for the readers to get everything on the same website. At the moment we got our revenues from selling ads to fashion and design companies, which appeared on Trendnet.
CNW: What does blogging mean to you? What purpose does it have for you?
In the last years it has become a lifestyle for me; to keep your readers you have to give them regular and interesting blogs. I look at a blog as a kind of personal magazine. The difference is that you always know who is telling you what to wear and what is new. In the magazines you don’t know who is telling you these things, so in blogs you get a more personal relation. What I am trying to say, I think people try to find a blogger that fits their style and personality.
CNW: Let’s talk about the best things that happened to you because of blogs? What in your opinion are the benefits of blogging?
The blogs have given me a lot of things. The best thing is maybe that I have built up my reputation and respect in this business in Iceland. I have learned a lot and got together some nice things to my CV.
The biggest assignments I have got is definitely meeting the big names in the fashion Industry. I went to London to take a interview with Marc Jacobs when he designed the cans for Coke Light. Later I met Matthew Williams’s son and some months ago I went to Paris to interview Jean Paul Gaultier when he had collaboration with the Swedish shop Lindex. He was a great inspiration for me, the way he looks at life, people and the fashion industry was really interesting. What inspired me the most was how nice he was to people, it didn’t matter if your name was Madonna or some John from the coffee shop. That is my first rule in life – be nice to ALL people.
CNW: Is being a wife of a professional athlete helpful for your blogging? I guess you have a chance to see a lot of different people, styles, cities, that inspire your work.
Actually I think I would probably not be blogging if I had’t moved abroad with my husband (to be). But that is true that your life is different from most people’s and that can be interesting for other people. I am glad that I have been able to create a job and a career that I can work on, no matter where I live. We are also a good team and help each other a lot, Gunnar is taking care of the administrational part of Trendnet and I am (of course ) his biggest fan in handball.
CNW: We are quite aware that fashion blogs are really popular in Scandinavian countries, you come from Iceland, is blogging there also so popular? Have successful bloggers got a status of ‘celebrities’ too, as we can see in Sweden?
It’s getting bigger and bigger in Iceland as well. Iceland is a small country and it will never be the same as I see in Sweden. Trendnet was the first “blog world” in Iceland, so we were making something new. These past years, some competitors have come to the market.
These past years, blogs have become a big marketing tool in the fashion and design industries, in Paris and New York you see bloggers in the first row on Fashion Week. I think the companies are slowly realising this in Iceland as well, even though it is a much smaller market.
CNW: Could you say blogging is your current career or is it at least connected to your career plans and wishes?
As I said before, my personal blog is more like a lifestyle for me today. I hope my website, Trendnet.is will grow in the right direction with good supervision from me and my team. Thanks to my blog, I have been working on different projects with different people and companies. I am thankful for that and hope to keep doing that in the future.
CNW: Future plans for your blog…
Keep going the same line – be myself and hope my readers will keep on visiting me because of that. My plan is to put a lot of effort in the projects I get on the side and do them as well as I can so that these projects will keep coming back to me.
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Takk fyrir mig CNW.
xx,-EG-.
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