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Swag Bag Giveaway

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Swag Bag Giveaway

As I mentioned in my last post, I am doing a giveaway of some of the contents in my swag bag that I got at the Blog Better Boston Food Summit.  I felt guilty keeping it all to myself so I wanted to share the love with our 2S2C readers!  This swag bag giveaway includes the following items:

  • Chef’n Veggichop hand-powered vegetable chopper
  • Collection of 6 Mara-Mi Oscar Wilde Bottle tags
  • 4oz. jar of Stonewall Kitchen Holiday Jam
  • 4oz. jar of Stonewall Kitchen Maine Maple Champagne Mustard (this item was not actually part of the swag bag, but I purchased it at the Stonewall Kitchen store…I love to use it in recipes as an alternative to dijon mustard.)
  • 8oz. bottle Wyman’s Wild Blueberry 100% Juice, complete with laminated recipe card with recipes for 14 blueberry drinks (laminated card not shown in above picture)

These items have a combined retail value of approximately $50.  Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Rules: U.S. residents only.  No entries will be accepted after October 31, 2012.  Entries that do not follow the entry requirements will not be considered.  One winner will be chosen at random and announced on November 1, 2012.  The chosen winners will then have 30 days to respond by e-mail to claim their prize.  While these products were given to 2sisters2cities.com for free, this giveaway is not associated with Chef’n, Mara-Mi, Stonewall Kitchen, or Wyman’s. Void where prohibited.  See additional rules and terms in the Rafflecopter widget.

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Attending BlogHer ’12

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K and I are both back to our normal routine this week after spending the past weekend attending BlogHer ’12 in New York City.  It was a complete whirlwind, but we enjoyed meeting lots of new people, learning about new ideas for 2S2C, and getting to know more about various brands.  Here are a few of our BlogHer ’12 highlights (seen in the photos above):

  • Having an awesome dinner on Thursday night at Bobo in the West Village.  We had to wait a little bit for a table, but we had drinks and appetizers at the most adorable bar on the 2nd floor.  The food was phenomenal!
  • Going to the California Dreams private party at the Terrace Club.  It was pretty cool to grab a cocktail on a rooftop bar and meet some fellow bloggers.
  • Getting to see Martha Stewart speak at one of the keynote speaker lunches.  K was also pretty excited about the Martha Stewart Home Office journal from the Staples booth.  Katie Couric was also a great keynote speaker.
  • Seeing the Pioneer Woman and the Jimmy Dean sun in person!
  • We laughed until we cried at the Listen To Your Mother Open Mic Salon.  If anyone sees a list of everyone who spoke there, please let me know- there were so many great speakers/bloggers!
  • Getting our photos taken with not one, but two different characters dressed up as bananas (Dole and Jamba Juice.)  Also, stunning photo of the two of us with a Great Northern toilet paper background- check.  K sailing the high seas with the Gorton’s fisherman- got it!
  • Trying out the new Starbucks Verismo system that is being released this fall.  Check out my latte that I made in the photo above!

We also tried to attend as many BlogHer panels as we could.  Between the two of us, we ended up attending

  • iPhoneography
  • Ten Things You Can Do Now to Maximize Your Social Media Expertise
  • Leveraging Facebook and Twitter
  • Leveraging Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram
  • Protecting Your Blogging Rights, Respecting Those of Others
  • Hot to Make an App, and How to Price and Value Your Services

Wooh- I think I need another cup of coffee just typing that. I think our three biggest takeaways from those sessions are:

  1. Sign up for a Google+ account to help increase search traffic.  This seemed to be a reoccurring theme through many of the sessions.
  2. Develop a media kit for 2 Sisters 2 Cities (this tutorial from @cecilyk was mentioned several times over a few sessions.)
  3. We need to decrease the load time on 2S2C so search engines won’t penalize our search results.

While we learned so much and had a great time attending BlogHer ’12, K and I both agreed in the future it would probably be more beneficial to us to attend a more specialized conference, such as BlogHer Food.  Most of the bloggers we met focused on parenting, fitness, celebrities, and other topics that we don’t cover.  Did you attend BlogHer ’12?  What was your experience like?

Taking the Plunge

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I’m writing today’s post aboard the Amtrack Acela heading to NYC. K and I will be attending BlogHer ’12 this weekend, a huge blogging conference with over 4,000 attendees. There are some superstar speakers lined up for the conference including Martha Stewart, Katie Couric, and oh yeah, Barack Obama.

While I’m so thrilled to be attending, I do have some anxiety/sadness about leaving Baby T for the first time ever. As my train pulled out of the station, I watched through the window as he burst into tears in my husband’s arms. Crap- I knew I forgot to pack something…tissues! Anyway, I’m recovering and looking forward to some toddler-free time this weekend. I’m pretty sure he will be on the back of my mind for most of it however.

We can’t wait to report back on our adventure to BlogHer ’12!

Cheers!
m

Blog Better Boston Conference Recap

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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?

 

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