Bloggy Conference

I’m sharing some things I learned from the Bloggy Conference I attended last month in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Time for part 3.

Nathan Engels of We Use Coupons shared a lot of great tips and helpful information to help us monetize our blogs. He went beyond that, though. When one of the speakers got sick and had to cancel one of the breakout sessions, Nathan stepped in and offered to hold a session on YouTube.

And I’m so glad he did. I gleaned so much information from that session, and I was able to take good notes because Elisabeth was napping at the time.

I’ll start with what I learned from his first talk, which he called – Show Me the Money! Great way to grab our attention with a title like that! Let’s dig in.

1. In order to earn money blogging, you need to have content. Good content brings traffic, which develops into readers of your blog, which leads to income from your blog.
2. Blogging is hard, and making money from blogging is even harder. You need to be in it for the long haul to be successful and to make an income from your blog. In Nathan’s words, “Don’t expect to hit the jackpot!” Think of blogging as something long term and not as a fast way to make money.
3. You can make money from your blog with both passive and aggressive strategies.
4. Passive ways to make income: Google Adsense, ad networks, and text placement ads (Kontera would be an example of this – sidenote – I had the chance to meet and spend time with two of the ladies from Kontera while I was at the Savvy Blogging conference. They were so nice and friendly. My sister and I ate with them and two other lovely bloggers at lunch on the final day of the conference. The Kontera ladies took brutally honest feedback from the bloggers who had used their ads before, and they impressed me with their desire to truly understand what is and isn’t working in terms of their ad use on blogs.)
5. Ever wonder why sometimes your Google Adsense ads show up as white space on your blog? Google Adsense allows you to have only 3 image/text ads per page. I never knew this.
6. Also, never, ever, ever, click on your own ads. Ever. Google will ban you from using Adsense, and it will be difficult to get reinstated.
7. Ad placement is important. Test to see where on your site certain types of ads perform the best. Think about your readers and where they are likely to see and interact with an ad.
8. Active ways to earn income: Private ads, sponsored posts, and affiliate offers. Some of Nathan’s favorite affiliates were Amazon Associates and Commission Junction (CJ).
9. It’s hard to make a full-time income blogging, and most people make far less than a full-time income. But if you keep your focus on your readers and aren’t looking to make a ton of money, blogging can be fun and very worthwhile. You might even develop some deep friendships with people you would have never met otherwise.

Nathan’s YouTube session

I loved the tips that Nathan shared during the impromptu session he volunteered to put together. Honestly, this was one of my favorite sessions. Here’s what jumped out to me:

1. If you are not on YouTube, get there. YouTube is huge, and it’s growing.
2. Video is exploding.
3. Create a YouTube show, and brand your channel.
4. You can have an entirely different audience on YouTube than you have for your blog, and YouTube audiences are loyal.
5. YouTube videos should ideally be between 2-4 minutes in length.
6. Use a monopod to avoid ‘camera shake.’
7. Create and ‘intro’ and ‘outro’ for your YouTube videos. I had no idea ‘outro’ was even a word. 🙂
8. Tag your YouTube videos and give them a great description. Treat your YouTube videos like you would posts. Think about the words you are using to describe your videos.
9. Tell people to Subscribe! Encourage them to hit the ‘subscribe’ button. The more subscribers you have, the closer you get to being accepted into the YouTube Partners program where you can start earning money with your YouTube videos.
10. iMovie (on a Mac) is great for editing your videos, and you can use Windows Movie Maker if you own a PC.
11. Use annotations in your videos. You can do this right in YouTube, but you can also do it in iMovie. I don’t know much about annotations, personally, but I want to learn more.
12. You can find royalty free music for your YouTube videos at AudioJungle.net.
13. You can find royalty free video for your YouTube videos at VideoHive.net.
14. Add ‘Subscribe’ links to your actual YouTube videos to encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel while they are watching your video.

After the session, I was more ready than ever to start investing time in my YouTube channel. Feel free to check out my channel and subscribe to it. I have an idea for which direction I want to take my channel, I just need to start executing it.

Do you have a YouTube channel you want to share with us? Feel free to leave a link to it in the comments.

I know I said I was going to do 3 parts for my Bloggy Conference Wrap-Up, but I think I’m going to squeeze in one more part with everything else I took away from this conference. I’ll get that post up next week.

Some of the links in this post are my referral links.

I know I’m late in writing this post.

But I’m still going to finish up sharing what I learned at the Bloggy Conference that took place in Cincinnati, Ohio from September 27-29.

You can read part one of this mini-series of posts here.

Next up I listened to Allison Kulage’s talk. Allison is from Bare Knuckle Marketing, and she’s an SEO ninja. She gave us some great SEO tips and tricks to make our sites work better for us.

Here are some of the main points I learned:

• Use and pay attention to keywords. These are the words people are typing into search engines, and if you have them in your posts and post titles, there’s a better chance that the search engines (like Google) will rank your site higher if you use the right keywords. For example, if you want people to find your recipe for homemade pumpkin spice bread, make sure to use those words in your post title as well as in your post. Use keywords for the images that are in your posts, too. Basically, using the right keywords will attract the right traffic to your blog.

• Link to other blogs. If you do this, they are more likely to link to your blog. Link love = Google Juice.

• Use short keyword phrases that are specific (not single words) in your posts.

• The right keywords can bring in a lot of traffic to your blog – think 50% or more.

• Get to know Google Analytics to find out what keywords are bringing in traffic to your blog. You may be getting traffic from words that you wouldn’t expect.

• Don’t over think the whole SEO thing. Write for your readers, but be mindful of SEO.

Allison made the subject of SEO less daunting, and I appreciate that. I don’t stress out or spend a lot of time thinking about SEO, but I am mindful of it. I know which keywords people are using to find my blog, and I always rename my images to make them more SEO-friendly. I also think that being on WordPress and using a great theme framework helps, too.

My next post will include the good stuff I gleaned from Nathan Engels of We Use Coupons. He shared some fabulous tips! And his tips are not just for deal-bloggers, they would be great to implement and execute on just about any blog.

Fun.

Exceeded my expectations.

Filled with networking opportunities.

Packed with bloggy goodness about how to monetize and grow your blog.

These are words I’d use to describe the Bloggy Conference I attended last week.

I had the opportunity to attend the conference with my sister, Sarah, who I hadn’t seen (other than Skype) in nearly 6 months, so you can imagine that we did quite a bit of talking and catching up. 🙂 I was so glad to be able to go to my very first blog conference with her, because, like so many bloggers…I’m a bit of an introvert. It was nice to have a fellow introvert with me to take in the conference, learn, and enjoy it together.

The conference ran from Sept. 27th to Sept. 29th, and in order to keep these posts from getting too long, I’m going to break them up into at least 3 parts over the next 3 days.

I’m going to jump right into the good stuff now!

 Day 1 – Keynote

Phil Hollows of Feedblitz shared his story about how he ended up where he is today and how Feedblitz evolved. Feedblitz sounds like a great service, if I ever decide to move my subscribers from Feedburner. I’m signed up for a few newsletters from other bloggers that use Feedblitz, and I admit that I love how pretty their links look.

I didn’t take any notes during this session, because I was at the back of the room nursing Elisabeth and keeping her entertained. She did great, and I was able to hear Phil’s entire talk.

Next Session

Andrea Deckard of Savings Lifestyle spoke and gave some great tips for monetizing your blog.

Some of the main points I wrote down:

Sign up for IZEA, if you are interested in doing sponsored posts on your blog.

Sign up with the affiliate CJ (Commission Junction).

Get an EIN number for tax purposes

Savings Lifestyle accepts guest posts

Find out your top sources of blog traffic, and focus on those.

Run giveaways on your blog

Create unique promotions for your blog

Take advantage of the resources that Google offers, such as gmail and google docs.

Optimize your top 10 posts (going to be adding a link to my book to my top posts)

Recommended Plugins:

– Editorial Calendar Plugin

– Post Templates Plugin

– Gravity Forms Plugin

– SignNow Plugin

*I haven’t personally used any of these plugins yet, but I’m looking forward to trying them out.

Thanks for the suggestions, Andrea!

I’m always on the lookout for great plugin recommendations. I had the chance to chat briefly with Andrea before she left, and I’m looking forward to seeing her again at the Savvy Blogging Summit this week! Andrea had a lot more to say than just the points I mentioned, but those are the main ones that stuck out to me and that I was able to jot down in the midst of entertaining my baby girl. 🙂

As a side note, it was really neat to sit in on Andrea’s talk, because I’ve been following her blog for a very longtime – back when Andrea’s blog was named, Mommy Snacks. It was neat to hear her story about how she got to where she is today.

More to come! I wish I could write more now, but I have a messy kitchen to clean…

This post contains my affiliate link.