Happy Wednesday! I hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July weekend with family or friends! Today, I’m finally bringing you a full recap of my trip to Orlando for the Blogher Conference. I had so much fun and I’m going to talk about what I did, what I learned, and if I think the conference was worth it!
I invited one of my best friends from college, Haleigh to go to the conference with me because she works with social media at her company and knew she could get some useful information from the sessions. Our trip started late Wednesday night, as our flight got delayed for 5 hours going out of Austin! Once we got settled in on Wednesday night we planned out our next day because we decided to do Disney on Thursday since the conference didn’t really start their social media sessions until Friday. We went to Disney’s Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios for the day and we had a lot of fun, but it was SO hot. Haleigh and I both didn’t feel good at one point in the day, haha. You really have to be prepared and know what you’re doing to go to Disney when it’s that hot! We took lots of fun pictures though and we rode Space Mountain, Aerosmith’s Rockin’ Roller Coaster, and some other fun rides too. We didn’t get to everything though because the waits for unbelievably long. One thing I would’ve like to do was the new Avatar land but since it was a new attraction the wait was a couple of hours!
On Friday, we woke up early and attended breakfast with a keynote speaker and after that was over we split up into our small sessions. Here are the sessions I chose to attend on Friday and Saturday:
“Live Broadcasting & Streaming”
This was the first sessions I attended and while the speakers were interesting and nice, I didn’t feel like I learned a whole lot. Things discussed were: blocking “haters”, practice going live on private before actually going live, and to create a problem and then address how to fix it in your video. Most of these topics were things I already knew. I did learn about some equipment that I probably need to get but overall I was disappointed in this session.
“Improve Video Skills & Production Value”
This session was a little more helpful but still didn’t give me the information I thought it would. I did learn about some more equipment that is helpful for making videos and I learned that making a production schedule before doing a video can help make you a little more prepared. I also learned about a free music archive for videos too.
“Legal & Tax Issues for Small Business”
I was excited about this session because I really want to learn what needs to be done tax wise as I start to make money with my blog. There’s a lot you can deduct from your taxes and that was good to learn. I also learned about FTC rules and how to cover your butt which is important in the blogging world when you are constantly advertising products to your followers.
“SEO”
I was also looking forward to this session the most because it’s the subject I know the least about. I definitely felt like I was given some tools to help me learn SEO better, but since I didn’t know much about what they were talking about, a lot of the time I was lost. I took a lot of notes though and also get a free book from one of the Speakers, Stephan Spencer. This subject is going to take effort learning on my own.
“100 Million Views & Counting”
In this sessions I learned that everything on social media is headed towards video. In a couple of years our Facebook news feeds will be 80% video. I also learned a lot about Facebook in this session and how/when to promote an ad. I learned how to target people and why Facebook favors certain things over others. I thought this session was really useful!
I would’ve liked to attend more sessions but with the way it was set up you had to pick and choose which ones you wanted to go to because a lot of them were at the same time. I recorded all of the speakers in the sessions so that I can listen to them over again when I get a chance so I’m hoping that helps me get some more out of the sessions that maybe I missed while being there. The entire experience was a lot of fun and there were swag bags and lots of brands there to talk to too. I will say that there weren’t a ton of fashion brands so that was disappointing since I’m geared mostly towards fashion.
All in all, we had a blast and it was so much fun spending some much needed girl time with my old freshman roommate! We talked about old times and laughed so much. When the sessions went on break we went out to the pool and hung out in the lazy river which was relaxing. I would absolutely attend this conference again but hopefully next time it’s not so far from Texas! It was still fun to get away though. I hope you enjoyed this post and feel free to comment below if you have any questions about the conference! Thanks for stopping by!
More pictures (mostly from my iPhone)!
