#mnblogcon

Minnesota Blogger Conference 2016

Jennifer Kane, Keynote Speaker

The Minnesota Blogger Conferencealways provides an air of inspiration and excitement. The 2016 conference was held at Concordia University, and bloggers from all over the region filtered in early on a Saturday morning to grab coffee and start chatting with friends, some old and some new. We spent the day buzzing in and out of sessions, comparing notes, and tweeting…

"You can choose courage or you can choose comfort, but you cannot have both."  -- Brene Brown

Yesterday, October 15th, Harley and I attended Minnesota Blogger Conference which was held at Concordia in Saint Paul. It was an all day event filled of seminars and networking. We attended the following sessions: Becoming a Fierce and Fearless Blogger, Using Writer's Block to Your Creative Advantage, Standing Out in Live Video, How Successful Bloggers Monetize Their Site, Working with Small Businesses, What Bloggers Need to Know About SEO, and How TopRank Marketing Takes Conference Attendance. Now I'm not going to go into super in depth discussion on each topic but briefly highlight some things I think would be beneficial. As well as how I gained inspiration to shift the focus of the blog. Now before you panic, it's not really going to be much of a change more just taking off a tag line I hardly use and don't actually find exciting to write about.

Next year I want to go to Minnesota Blogger Conference and I want to go to more blogging events in the future.

Becoming a Fierce and Fearless Blogger

This was the keynote speech that everyone went to at Minnesota Blogger Conference and this inspired me so much. And I will definitely be incorporating this attitude towards the blog in the future. Jennifer Kane was the speaker for this session and she did the whole thing by relating it to Lemonade by Beyonce. The main thing it you want to be fearless by trying new things, meeting your audience on their turf, and get comfortable with failure. And be fierce by getting some perspective, finding your voice and using it, and learn to deal with the haters. Now there are a hundred other things that I took away from this session but we would be here forever if I did that for every section.

Using Writer's Block to Your Creative Advantage

After that we went to learn about getting over writer's block. And I've been having that lately in some aspects of the blog. Holidays are easy as you just talk about holiday things, but as I've been blogging daily for almost a year now my creative juices are starting to lull. But I'll get more to that in the re-purposing section of this post. 

This session was given to us by Abbie Burgess from The Pink Paperdoll, a lifestyle blog, and a freelance writer. And I got so many tips that helped me get out of the block. Plus I got several dozen ideas for future posts and a direction I want the blog to head. I'm going to be doing a blog post about getting past writer's block in the future and I'll probably reference this seminar from Abbie.

Standing Out in Live Video

The next seminar was with Erica Hanna from Puke Rainbows, who is an Emmy Award Winning film maker all about live streaming on either Facebook, Periscope, YouTube or Twitch. Though I have been making YouTube videos I have shyed away from live streaming. Now I've done a few twitch streams here for there but didn't know how to use it to my advantage. And I'm debating on changing my Ten Minutes With Mae videos that I do on my YouTube channel to a live stream event that I do on a weekly or semi-weekly basis. Let me know if there are any topics you would like me to do in the future.

How Successful Bloggers Monetize Their Site

The first session we went to have lunch was all about monetizing your blog with the CEO of MonuMetric and I learned so much. Some things I knew about but there is so much I didn't know about. Like I thought Google AdSense was a good tool to earn revenue but actually stacked ads where advertisers bid for the ad space is actually better as you as the publisher get more revenue out of it than you do when just going through AdSense.

Working with Small Businesses

At this point in the conference I was starting to reach information overload but I pushed through that so I could learn as much as I could through the remaining three seminars. This topic in particular is something I want to get more into on the blog. And Sonal Gaeten from Tumblewalla helped pull me into this topic so I didn't zone out as my brain reloaded. As I find these posts/collaborations so meaningful especially when the blogger truly is excited or interested in the business. And one thing I'm going to start to do is monthly thank yous as well as a blog feature post on a blogger than inspired me during the month.

What Bloggers Need to Know About SEO

This next seminar was delivered by Ben Sailer from CoSchedule, and going in I thought that I had like almost no knowledge on this subject. But I learned I actually was doing all the things he was talking about. But I still filled an entire two pages in my notebook with notes, to re-enforce all the things that we talked about. The main thing I took away from it was to only use one to two categories on a post or it gets lost in the search engine as they don't know which to index the post under.

How TopRank Marketing Takes Conference Attendance

Lastly everyone at the conference went to the seminar with TopRank Marketing which was delivered by several of their staff. They talked about how to use events or conferences to your benefit on your blog and all of their slides were old school gaming themed which I was in love with! From what to do before events, during events and after events. As well as the lifecycle of your content.

Refocusing MaePolzine.com

Remember, I said don't panic. This isn't a major change, more of just a formal realization. Since I decided on the brand of the blog I focused on life, beauty and fashion. As well as one blog post every day of the week at 4:00 PM CST/CDT. But over the recent months some of the topics that were part of the "brand", I have had no interest nor inspiration to write about. And I think you can guess what topic I'm referring to. Fashion. I don't find myself writing about this unless there is either an award show or a sponsor post. So I will be dropping this from the tag line.

Why the formal statement on it? Because I felt it was important to state. I still enjoy fashion but not to the extent I feel like I should if I wanted to have that tag line. I might still do a post here or there, but those will be far and few. 

The 6th annual Minnesota Blogger Conference was held last Saturday in St. Paul, MN.

Highly informative breakout sessions and a great opportunity to meet fellow (local) bloggers made the event worthwhile.  WordPress and Securi were there to answer our most pressing questions, and there was even a professional photographer providing discounted headshots.

Twin Cities public relations operative Arik…