I attended Techmunch in Boston on Sunday. It is a food blogging conference hosted by the site Bakespace. The conference consisted of several classes that focused on such things as marketing, making connections with Brands, and SEO.
meeting people at the mixer after all the classes/ a caramelized onion & goat cheese tart
I took a lot away from Techmunch. I could talk and blog for hours about it.
But I leave you with this:
1) Be yourself!
Don’t tailor your blog to fit into something you are not. Find you passion and your voice. It will make blogging easier and a lot more fun. You will connect the people because you are being real.
2) You photos need to say ‘eat me’.
Take a step back and look at your photos. If you saw them, would you want to eat the thing you are looking at? There are simple tips and tricks to folow that will help you. Stobist was suggested as a site to learn food photography.
3) It takes time.
Be patient. Things take time. The people that have successful blogs took their time, learned from their mistakes, and improved things from writing, layouts, graphics, and photography to get where they are today. They are passionate about what they do, if you are and you stick to it then you will find your own degree of success.
4) Traffic isn’t the end all and be all in sponsors.
While you can worry about your site traffic all day long it won’t be thing ONLY thing that sponsors look that. Absolutely, sponsors are looking to pay you for reviews or host giveaways if you have a lot of traffic, but there are other factors in place. Are you a good fit for their brand? Are you just generally a nice person? Is there potential?
Additionally, you can’t just agree to all sponsorship. You should not host giveaways or write reviews if it doesn’t fit you (see #1). Does it make sense for you to give ________ away? Is there a conflict of interest because you are supporting another brand?
And last but not least…
5) SEO! SEO!! SEO!!!
There are things you can do on your blog to make your site come up in searches a lot easier. They are fairly simple. They are kinda obvious once you think about them. Do them! You can refer to this PDF for some help.
books to win through Harvard Common Press/ Sharon Sprague and Justin Ide chatting
I had a wonderful time on Sunday.
Thank you Babette and the rest of the Bakespace team
Thank you Kitchenaid for giving away a variety of kitchenwares. I won a hand mixer!
Thank you Harvard Common Press for giving away books. I am enjoying the Dark Spirits book already.
