It's been a while since we've had an interview for my blog series "Why Work in PR?" I hadn't forgotten about it but I didn't have the right person to go next yet. Now I do. 

Today, Farzana Baduel shares her PR experiences and some fantastic advice for students and young professionals.

Farzana and I 'met' on Twitter a few months ago, I was impressed by her profile, then I 'stalked' her on LinkedIn and was amazed by her achievements, building up her own very successful global PR agency. A true career that can you inspire you too and so I offered to interview her, and she gracefully accepted. I encourage you to follow her on Twitter and shoot her a friendly tweet about reading her story.  

(If you've missed any of the previous interviews, you can take a look as well: Richard Bailey, Pippa Hanson, Jessica Hodkinson and Chryssa Skodra.) 

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Farzana Baduel

1. As a short introduction, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

I am the Managing Director of Curzon PR, an award‐winning global strategic communications firm with offices in London, New York, Dubai and soon to be launched in Delhi, and a doting Mother.

It’s been four years since I’ve started this blog.

I never even dreamed of the many things that I would learn, achieve and get to do purely thanks to this blog that I once started just as an experiment.

I’m glad that I didn’t give up on it and continued investing my free time in learning, writing and sharing all that with you.

As the New Year is now upon us, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learned while blogging in 2015 – a year of so much change, new experiences and aspirations.

Blogging at iliyanastareva.com – Fourth Year in Review:

There are three main learnings from 2015 from my blog and I’ll dive into each one of them below:

• Inbound marketing really works, even for a small site and blog whose traffic has now almost tripled in just one year of doing inbound marketing.
• PR students are actively searching for help online, whether for their dissertations or how to find a job.
• Evergreen content is the name of the game – it’s the best performing content that continues to bring traffic and conversions even if you don’t do much with it (but you should).

2016 is just three days away. It’s time not only for reflections and predictions but also for making resolutions – personal and professional.

For startups, too, this is the perfect timing to plan well for the New Year and focus on trying new things. After all, being agile is “in their blood”.

This is why I was so thrilled when I was invited to speak about my new inbound PR concept at a startup marketing meetup in Sofia last week.

Even though it was almost Christmas, we had a great turnout and I was happy to see so many people there interested in learning something new, attentively listening during my presentation, and then asking a lot of questions and introducing themselves to me to chat personally.  

Because of the timing – right before the end of the year – many of these entrepreneurs were there to find out what to focus on in 2016 and how to structure their efforts.

My presentation therefore not only introduced the inbound PR concept and how it differs from traditional PR, but also I gave them a lot of practical tips and actionable advice that they can implement right now, even if they don’t have a sophisticated software like HubSpot.

2016 is just around the corner! It's time for predictions! And educated hopes.

I’m sure you’ve seen quite a few 2016-prediction posts going on and I thought it would be worth sharing my reflections of the past year and my views for the new one with you too.

Time really does fly… I can’t believe how much has happened over the last year in my professional and personal life, but also in our non-silent-always-on digital economy.

Things change in seconds; they get adopted, adjusted and forgotten unbelievably quickly. Our world doesn’t sleep, ever.

I’ve observed many passing and growing trends over 2015 that have given me an indication of what will be happening more and more in 2016 and where brands should focus their efforts on.

My predictions-advice list is short – just 5 things, but if you master them, your 2016 will be a true success.

5 Key Things for Brands to Focus on in 2016:

Dear PR students, how many of you are starting to work on your PR dissertations?

I'm guessing quite a few.

By now, many of you should have at least started planning the synopsis (i.e. topic, objectives, research methods and literature) and thinking abount the actual execution (i.e. doing the research and then the writing). I thought it would be a good time to share with you some useful tools to help you throughout that process.

In fact, the below tools are super helpful for any student or professional as they can be easily adopted into one’s daily life to improve planning, writing, productivity and creativity.

The list is not rank-based but aligned with the actual process a student goes through – from initial activities such as planning and research through to putting findings together and doing the actual writing.

Hope the tools help!

Top 10 Online Tools to Help with Your PR Dissertation: