Oct 16, 09

What I’ve Learned at Blog World Expo 09

Written by: Maren Kate // Comments

What I’ve Learned at Blog World Expo 09: A Love Story

Wow… So its been an amazing past few days, I have learned so much, met so many amazing people and been overwhelmed by the amount of information out there i don’t know. No fear though, Blog World Expo 09 was just the kick in the pants I needed to take my business and brand to a whole new level. And I’ll give you painless what I’ve learned tips right here, in easy to understand bites!

1. REblogworld is the portion of Blog World dedicated to real estate peoples, it isn’t as I thought just nerd talk like a response to a blog post. Fortunately for me I met some very nice real estate guys in gals at Blue Martini where Better Homes and Gardens was putting on an event including the illustrious Phoenix Real Estate Guy and Matt of ReRockstar.com. They were more than kind in telling me all about real estate & blogging, which is huge (who knew?) and talking to me so I wasn’t a lonely nerd in the corner!

2. Pack a Lunch. The food is not only ridiculously expensive, i.e. 3 bucks for a can of Pepsi, but also nasty. Except for some delicious little chocolates prepared by Clive from www.cookingwithclive.com that were truly heavenly.

3. Know your convention center. I spent an hour looking lost and stumbling into the National dentistry convention and one other happy mom’s club trying to find the right wing of the enormous convention center. There was no map, or at least that I could find, so I creeped out a few people by following them if I heard the words “blog world” or anything techy at all. Finally I found the right wing and I could tell because every other person was either on an iPhone or Blackberry and MACbooks were everywhere. Oh I love the smell of nerdiness in the morning!

4. Be prepared. In lieu of the business cards that I ordered and never showed I had to hand out my name and number on cocktail napkins. All I am saying is that when the napkin is from The Bank nightclub and stained with Champagne it hardly says “professional”, better luck next time. Instead I just collected business cards like crazy.

5. Now I will list in rapid order things I learned from the conferences & notes I took in my moleskin:

long tail keywords are making up for 50% of the searches on the major search engines
Chad Vader’s creators make a living making a Star Wars spoof & other funny YouTube videos. (How killer is that?)
There are more men than women in the blogosphere, much, much more.
eBay and Paypal give a lot of money to help small charities get noticed (good job!)
Acai berry juice tastes like crap.
GoToWebinar is a great device to turn social media contact into email list opt ins…
Follow back ratios rules on Twitter vary greatly depending on who you are talking to, some say only follow 10% of the people following you, others say follow back every person following you and in between. I listened to Jesse Stay who created SocialToo on the issue of twitter gaming and it was quite interesting.
Carrot Creative is a NY based company that is pretty much doing EVERYTHING i wish Tweeterpreneur was doing, so it was encouraging to talk to its founders… and kind of depressing! Get on the ball Maren!
Optimize meta tags, if you don’t know what a meta tag is… Google it.
Email opt in lists, a must for any blog!

Alright folks! That’s it! I’m going back tomorrow for one more great day, see you next year. If you went this year you should leave a comment and let me know someone is out there