I wanted to follow-up from my earlier post this morning with more details of the Blog Better Boston Conference that was held yesterday.  It was held at Boston’s Google headquarters, which was very exciting to check out!  The day was broken out into five panels/workshops with breaks in between to get an opportunity to meet with other bloggers and brands.

Here are my key takeaways I took away from each session I attended:

Monetize Your Blog

-This panel seemed more geared for fashion bloggers (and wow, there were a lot of fashion bloggers there yesterday.)  However, I did take some notes on a number of things.  One of the things Lea from Found with Love said was to set 3-4 goals every few months.  The goals you set should be ones you feel you can achieve so that you are actually able to carry them out.
-A few websites that were highlighted during the panel were:

• ProBlogger–  This website provides tips to help you make money blogging.  I am actually in process of reading Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger book right now.
• Crazy Egg Web Analytics– shows you a heatmap of your blog to show you were your readers are clicking
• RescueTime– A time management tool that tracks your time.  May be a good place to see what aspect of your blog is eating away at your time and could be outsourced to someone else.
• Blog with Integrity– Covers ethical issues faced by bloggers.

Food Photography

-This panel was hosted by food photographer Kristin Teig.  She provided a great handout with tons of helpful tips:

• She provided several tips for shooting meals at night (which happens a lot to food bloggers because by the time you finish preparing the food you are about to shoot, it’s dark out!)  Consider investing in a Westcott Spiderlites or a Britek light with a fluorescent day light balance bulb. A detailed tutorial for shooting in articial light can be found at Wrightfood.
• For natural light, you need to diffuse or reflect the light depending on lighting conditions.  You can diffuse light with vellum paper on your window or a wooden frame.  Sometimes you can even use a window shade.  To reflect light, Kristin showed how she had scored a piece of foam board in half…that’s a great photography trick for very little money!
• For photo props, check out the Todd Farm Flea Market in Rowley, MA and the SOWA vintage market.
• Kristen recommended checking out Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots by Nicole S. Young for a more detailed tutorial on food photography.

Google Analytics

-This workshop was hosted by Ramesh Kumar from The Papa Post.  He posted his whole presentation to his blog and I definitely recommend stopping over and checking it out!

• Ramesh’s 5 takeaways were: creativity over keywords, content format matters, metadata (Did you know there is a Google recipe search?  If you have a food blog, you should think about installing a recipe SEO plugin), stickiness, and more content leads to more SEO.
• Don’t just look at your top 10 keywords in Google Analytics…this rarely changes.  Instead, pick 2 date ranges and sort them by absolute change to see what keywords are rising and falling.
• Check out blekko to compare your SEO to another site

Traffic & Community

-Lots of great tips at this session:

• Engage in an off-line community and interact with other bloggers.
• Don’t be afraid to self-promote.
• Don’t react to negative comments.
• Find the one thing you are passionate about and read everything you can about that specific topic.
• Connect with other blogs- leave thoughtful comments, tweet, and be personal and authentic.

Photo Editing

–Kristyn Ulanday led this workshop.  She had lots of great editing tips

• For composition, always remember the human eye likes three’s (ex: 3 people, 3 depths, rule of thirds, etc.)
• To create collages or combine two pictures into one file, use Picasa.
• Gimp is another great free photo editing tool.

I loved swapping business cards and finally getting a chance to meet some other bloggers in person.  Here are just a few of the bloggers I got a chance to meet:

-Sara from Forever and a Recipe– I have followed Sara’s blog for a while so it was great to meet her in person!
-Kristen from the imperfect home
-Lindsay from Lindsay’s Look
-Emily from What Emily Cooks
-Jen from Losing the Shadow Behind Me
-Emily from so anthro
-Erin from OneTwoSummer

There was also a DIY table to decorate the swag bags.  I had so much fun decorating mine with the DecoArt SoSoft fabric paint.  Up until this point in my life, I have really only attended Finance & Accounting-related conferences.  I touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate the point that this is not something that typically done at those types of conferences (although maybe they should!)  I’ll post more later this week on what was actually in those swag bags, as well as more on the rest of the conference sponsors!

Did you attend the conference?  What were some of your key takeaways?