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This past weekend I attended the Florida Bloggers Conference at Full Sail University, and really had a blast. I met a lot of new people, and some of them I have talked to virtually on social media like Twitter but most were new. For me that was probably the most exciting part of the conference was getting to met other bloggers and hobbyists and professionals.
A brief description about #FLBlogCon is a one day conference for bloggers around Florida (and beyond) to hear from influential leaders and speakers on topics from social media, monetizing, blogging tips, legal, and more.
Bess Auer is the founder and main organizer of this event and has been doing so for over four years and it continues to get sold out weeks after tickets are announced. This year’s conference started with a really cool launch party at Universal Studios for the Blue Man Group. I’ve never been, but was so excited to be going with my wife Nicole to experience this show. I won’t talk about any spoilers in this post so I’ll let you have that to yourself, but if you’ve gone already I would love to discuss it in the comments below.
While I did take a few photos of the day, I think my greater take-a-ways were some notes I took to take action with my business, website, and blogging tactics.
Monica Dawn Stone talked some pretty good points in terms of monetizing your blog. Some of my take-a-ways were:
- Look into affiliate sales for products (Amazon)
- Banner ads and ebooks (give a ways)
- Create a Resource Page on your website
- Create sponsored posts with brands
- Create a media kit with logo, stats, social media links, your offerings, rates, banner sizes, analytics
- Create a “pitch letter” to the brands you’re targeting. How can you help them, how you can help readers
She has a bunch more if you visit her website you’ll be enlightened!
Tom Jelneck from OnTarget Web Solutions talked about Google Analytics. Some points that resonated with me where:
A low bounce rate may not be a bad thing depending on the type of website and business that you have. A high bounce rate with a great call to action is a good thing.
- Use FeedBurner to see your subscribers and blog reach
- Understand your engagement rate. Should be higher if people are talking back to your blog
- Food for thought: Users and readers visit 10.4 places/sites before buying a product
- Define your blog/website goals
Justice Mitchell probably had the most energetic and lively presentation I’ve attended…. I’d say ever. Absolutely loved his quick hits and fell back in my seat with excitement for his surprise “Bonus Round”
- Get an influencer or performer to promote your products. Be it a shirt, hat, tool, etc.
- Construct a social group or community (Facebook groups, TweetChats, etc)
- Revise your popular content. Create a v2.0 post from a previous post you wrote that did really well.
- Create This vs. That content (because everyone has an opinion, and they’ll want to weigh in)
- Challenge people to do the same photo as you in a blog post
- Solve a problem a day for your audience
- Create inspiraGrams on Instagram (inspirational quotes with serene backgrounds)
- Write blogs about your own historical content (this date on this year. …)
Well that’s my wrap up. I’m still swimming in a bunch of ideas and things that I want to try and map out for the next few weeks and months. I’ve also taken action on a few things right out of the gate. If you also attended or have more to add please do so in the comments below and lets share some great ideas.
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All Posts, Photography
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A close friend of mine has been crushing it with teaching people different forms of Yoga. Her name is Cheryl Snyder. I took a body flow class with her not long ago and I’m looking forward to my first hot yoga class soon.
The photos here were from a shoot we did for her at the beach. My associate photographer that day was Trevor King of KingTMedia. It was a fun shoot capturing different poses of Cheryl as she performed some of her routines as well as some popular and difficult positions for this shoot. Check out the photos and let me know what you think in the comments below.
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All Posts, Blog, WordPress
Ever come across a website that you really like? Sure we all do from time to time. Since over 27% of websites on the web are using WordPress, and with the tons and tons of available plugins out there, you’re going to come across some functionality that you would like to add t your own website.
I came across a nice little browser add-on called SpyBar.
The browser add-on as you can see shows you a list of the plugins and theme being used as well as a hotlink for you to Google the items and get more information about them.
The cost of this add-on is $12.95. And with this you’ll have a new tool for your web creating arsenal. Be sure to let us know in the comments below how you intent on using this or ways that this can help.
All Posts, Automotive, Photography
Last weekend I went out with a few of my friends to the Ritz Carlton for the annual Festival of Speed car show. If you’re not familiar with it, think high-end expensive cars all over the back yard of a hotel. Sprinkle in some concepts, classic Chevrolet’s and Fords, and a few bikes and a few tall models and you’ve got a pretty interesting afternoon. Take a look at some of the shots below and see for yourself.
All Posts, Free Stuff, Graphic Design, Photography
Tis the season to be thankful. So below are some free resources from us and our affiliates of free Thanksgiving graphics and images. Enjoy!
Happy Thanksgiving Day Vector
by Vecteezy.com
Thanksgiving Day Background Vector illustration
by FreeVectors.me
Thanksgiving greeting card PSD
by GraphicsFuel.com
All Posts, Web Development, WordPress
Over the past few months we’ve been experiencing some issues with our current hosting company. Before I start throwing them under the bus, let me first say that we’ve used them for almost 10 years and didn’t start having issues until this year. What were those problems you ask? Let me explain.
Server Processes
Something I will admit that I really didn’t know much about. I’m not a server guy, and no one in our agency is either so this server technology really wasn’t a topic for our meetings. Well with some hosting companies they actually have a limit to how many processes can be running on a server at any given time. Our partner company 1and1 didn’t inform us of this until a solid month of random site performance issues. Our HTML sites were fine, but our WordPress sites where the ones creating these processes that at times would halt their server. In most cases it could have been from adding plugins, new pages, new posts, updating theme settings, etc. It really was random and no thanks to the language barrier of 1and1’s off-shore customer support that (by procedure) blames you first unless you request that they look at their system for errors.
Memory Usage
Here at Design Theory, we manage many websites. Since end of last year just about all of our new sites coming online have been in WordPress. WordPress runs on MySQL, and thus a new database is needed for each site. Each of those databases have an amount of memory usage depending on how much content the site has. So having upwards of 70+ databases and you’ve got a perfect storm just waiting to flood the server your sites are on. The amount of memory the hosting company allotted for your websites is limited. Each company may offer a different amount but it isn’t much when you’re on the economy hosting companies like 1and1, GoDaddy, Blue Host, and others. I suggest you either give them a call or do an extensive search through the fine print to find out what yours is.
Price
I can’t stress enough how you get what you pay for. For those of you that pay for your own hosting for your one main site, for now you may be safe. But isn’t the idea of a business website that it will continue to grow? Aren’t we doing things to boost traffic to our sites to promote our products and services? Well if you’re doing it right you should notice an increasing number of visits each week and month. At some point you’ll need to make the decision to move away from the economy hosting options to either higher cost VPS (Virtual Private Servers) or to a hosting company that specializes in WordPress – Like Media Temple. (shameless plug)
Performance
If you’ve had your WordPress up for a good few months, you may start to notice things running a bit slower than it did when you first set things up. You’ve added a ton of great content, images, pages, posts, plugins, etc. Nothing wrong with that if you’re creating value for your visitors. Until it takes them more than a few extra seconds to pull up your site and pages. The decrease in performance could be due to your site or other sites on the same server (unbeknownst to you). A better hosting plan or company will have optimized servers that don’t:
- Throttle your bandwidth
- Force a site shut down (Error 403)
- Service Temporarily Unavailable error
WordPress Security & Automatic Updates
There are are some hosting companies that actually offer automatic updates to WordPress while also taking preventative measures to keep their infrastructure secure from malware and attacks. If you think about it, it actually benefits those hosting companies a bit more than you as their customer; mainly because they can assure version control and scheduled updates for off-peak times. Some even vet the updates prior to making them live to all of their hosted WordPress sites.
What’s To Come
For a lot of those sites staying on economy $10/mo hosting run the risk of these types of errors above in the very near future. For the amount of websites currently online, 20% of them are WordPress sites according to w3techs. Looking at the chart below, you can see that in a year there’s been substantial growth. Imagine what percentage of site will be on WP by the end of next year and beyond if it keeps growing like this.
I actually had a client just recently had their website taken down for what the hosting company (Blue Host) said that she had used up too much of their server. Are hosting companies preparing for the increased stress on their servers? You have to wonder right? To most you’re just an account number that is being billed regardless of the level of service. There probably are hundreds of site owners that can may not even notice if their website goes down for a few hours or days. But for those of you that have frequent traffic to your site for your great content and resources, and those of you that are working to be the authority figure on your industry, you really can’t afford to have your website go down for something that could be easily avoided sans frivolous predetermined hosting restrictions.
As always your thoughts and point of views are appreciated. Lets continue the conversation below in the comments.
Image Credit: 2heads_Advertising (via RGB Stock)
