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| Photo booths make me feel silly. |
What better way to kick off my new and improved blog than by writing about attending
School House Craft Blogger's Summer Camp today. As I started writing this post it started to get a little long winded so I am going to break this up into 3 different posts.
First of all I want to say thank you so much to
etsyRain for the for sending me. I was excited to attend and winning a contest to go to something I was already super excited about was just icing on the cake.
The entire panel of women were amazing and gave such a wealth of information that I hope I was able to absorb it all because I know my notes just don't do the day justice! During the discussion a ton of websites were discussed and I will make a complete list of them at the end of this series.
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| People starting to arrive and beginning to mingle. |
I am going to do a quick roundup of the information I quickly jotted down in my journal from these amazing blogging superstars starting with the first panel:
Arianne Foulks of Aeolidia
Blair Stocker of Wise Craft
Andie Powers of Assemble
Megan Reardon of Not Martha
This panel discussion was about blog/life balance which is something that I struggle with. Which is kind of a funny thing to say since my previous blog was posted on so few and far between and I never really figured out what I wanted to say or show or talk about. But the reality is I have 2 kids. There, I said it. They are both under the age of 4 and I am a Stay at Home Mom. I also have a letterpress business that I am working on getting up and running. This means that I usually work between the hours of 9pm-12am. And when I am working at these hours I am trying to focus on my craft: designing stationery for myself and others, doing custom work, and printing.
I was always putting my blog off because I wanted to focus on creating my product. I am starting to see more and more how social media and my business are tied together. I think I am finally ready to make the leap into creating more online content and using this platform as another aspect of my business instead of something I have to do just because.
But anyway back to the panel advice: Set a schedule. Use
Post-it Notes. Download an Editorial Calendar (which will be good for me since I may not want to be doing all of my postings at 11pm since no one is going to see them) and Photography, Photography, Photography. Another key take away point was cross referencing yourself across all the various social media platforms. I am sometime hesitant to do this because I dont want to seem annoying or pandering, but in a lot of ways this makes sense. I had this idea that I had to create separate content for each platform and that is not entirely true.
Another interesting tidbit is the idea of boosting your posts on Facebook to reach a wider audience. At this current moment I have 42 likes of Facebook, and the fact of the matter is 98% of them are my friends. Boosting a post could be huge for me to start actually building a network of people who are interested in my work and aren't just liking me because we are friends IRL.
Some other tips to increase traffic were to make sure to include any links that you may be referencing, and adding comments to blogs that I already regularly read. I must confess that I am an anonymus blog reader. I never have commented before, but that is about to change. No more hiding in the pixels for me.
Bloggers Summer Camp Part 2 will be posted next Monday, June 24th. Stay tuned.
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| Don't I look incognito? |
