Here is the final entry for my top five highlights at BlogPaws. I’d love to know what some of your favorite things were from BlogPaws…leave me a comment below. I can’t wait to get to next years conference in Salt Lake City, Utah…hope to see you there!
2. Breakout Sessions
Over the course of the conference, I went to seven breakout sessions. I live tweeted from all of them, so you can check out my twitter feed @puppaccino if you’re interested in reading all of the takeaways from each session I attended. The two I enjoyed the most were Demystifying Search Engine Optimization (August 26) and Authentic Influence: How to Use Social Media to Expand Your Influence & Grow Your Business or Blog (August 27).
I personally want to thank Lena West’s assistant for booking her into the wrong hotel! Originally, SEO Optimization and Authentic Influence were scheduled at the same time. Due to the error, the BlogPaws organizers thought Lena wasn’t able to make it to Virginia because of the hurricane and cancelled her session. Had she been there, I would not have attended SEO Optimization and would have missed out on a great presentation.
I learned a lot about how to improve SEO from Michael Ayalon of Pet Web Designer. A few of his tips included: have your own self-hosted blog with your own URL; the more frequently you update your site the more often Google spiders will index it; have key words in your page titles (www.blogname.com/key-words-in-your-title); encourage people to leave comments on your blog post; use target key words in the text of your blog post, meta tags and post title; and Google will tell you what people are searching for at the following URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal!
Lena West of Influence Expansion was engaging and shared her proven approach to building influence. It was really a treat to be a part of this session. She explained that having influence means you’re able to get a group of people to do something when you ask them to do it. Influence doesn’t happen overnight, you have to work at it. To develop your influence be yourself, engage with your followers, and in the world of social media it’s essential to be consistent and not drop off the map for weeks at a time. Once you have influence you can write your own rules providing a little more flexibility. The best thing about influence is it drives everything else – it will drive your SEO, traffic to your blog, the potential to earn money and much more. And most importantly, be who you are because you won’t expand your influence if you aren’t being yourself! Check out Lena’s website, www.influenceexpansion.com and download 76 Ways to Expand Your Influence, you won’t be disappointed!
1. BlogPaws Community!
My favorite part of the conference was meeting all of the amazing people who attended BlogPaws! This is a special group of people and I’m honored to be a part of this community!
