Next week is my second opportunity to attend the Blissdom Conference in Nashville, TN.
“Blissdom is for women who find and express their bliss by publishing online“
I’ve attended many conferences over the years; they are great opportunities to learn a great deal of information quickly about any given subject. Especially new technology. Conferences attract the best and the brightest – both speakers and those attendees serious enough to pay the price to attend.
This is the reason I attended last year. I needed to immerse myself in this “blogging” thingy because my clients had started asking me to help them build and design blogs. I had SO many questions and I knew NO ONE!
BLISSDOM was different from any conference I’d ever attended. Every room was packed with women typing furiously on their computers as they listened to speakers. The Twittersphere was so active you could almost see smoke from the mobile devices. People “knew” each other by twitter names and everyone’s given name was secondary. “Oh YOU’RE BeckysGraphicD” – “What is your real name?”
The nicest thing was the atmosphere was creative, encouraging and full of laughter.
I left three days later with pages and pages of notes and many new friends.
It was a great experience!
For those coming next week, prepare to be inspired!
The conference wasn’t different in how much I learned! I thought I’d recap my main list of take-aways from last year in preparation for next week. It’s fun to remember all I learned and help me prepare a mental list of questions for this year’s conference.
LESSONS LEARNED at BLISSDOM
1. Content is KING!
2. Only blog when you have something AWESOME to say
3. Readership comes BEFORE monetization! See #1
4. Write for your audience, not the SEO
5. Keyword research brainstorming can triple blog traffic – Ang England had a great presentation on this that really helped me understand that concept! Really appreciated her clearing up my confusion on that!
6. Use less fields in forms if you want a good response.
7. Have a congruent brand across all your social media channels!!!
8. Blogging your “personal brand” is like talking with your best girl friend – authentically
9. Monitor and Measure your brand – Google Analytic, Tweetstats
10. Use descriptive titles and alt tags for great SEO
I can’t wait to find out what I’ll learn this year. I have my yellow pad ready to go – I’m too short to use a computer or iPad on my lap, I spend all my time trying to keep it from sliding off my lap!
Thank you so much for sharing all of this – sometimes I forget one or two of these points and need a kick in the pants to remind me. 😉
I’m glad you got something out of it. It was a good review for me too. I think I’ve followed through on MOST of them! I keep working on it!