by Lisa B on August 25, 2009
I want to thank my Christian buddies who attended BlogHer for commenting on my Differences post. I would absolutely love some more feedback — so if you are a Christian and you attended BlogHer, please go leave a comment on your perspective.
Knowing your bloggy purpose is very important
One of the sessions I attended at She Speaks was given by the two absolutely adorable sisters, Emily @ Chatting at the Sky and The Nester at Nesting Place. They gave a great presentation with a lot of great advice. There were lots of great nuggets of advice, and I tweeted what I could. Here are some of my tweets during that session:
If you try to have a blog to please everyone, you won’t. You’ll be able to deal with criticism.
When someone comes to your blog, you want them to know what to expect. Ragu ads don’t go with furniture
Don’t get caught in trying to keep up with others – post when you want about the thing that makes you come alive 
RT @dcrmom: “I’m not a person who loves to write. I’m a person who loves what I write about.” {brilliant} @thenester
Do you need some “space for your soul to breathe?” Check out @skychatter ’s blog: http://chattingatthesky.com
For writers: http://encouragingwordsforwriters.com Awesome blog from Bonita (who’s here)
What we build, we have to maintain. {Bonita’s encouraging words for writers}
Are you getting tons of email? Maybe you can take them and use them as blog posts. Info on site might cut down on email.
Have a writing session and write multiple posts – schedule them to post in the future. Don’t feel forced to write every day.
Protecting your family on the Internet. Recommended from fellow attendee: http://bit.ly/e3md4
When Nester shared about the Ragu ads, I had to laugh. She knows interior design, furniture, and how to make stuff even if it’s not perfect. She’s not a cooking blog so Ragu ads really don’t go with furniture. But if she didn’t really understand the purpose of her blog, then she might have just ignored that.
Purpose?
{I first wrote the following on April 28, 2008. Amazingly, I made sense back then!}
To be completely honest, I don’t like the word ‘purpose’ very much. Purpose is defined as an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions. That scares me. Most of the time when I anticipate good things happening, I’ve been let down. So I lower my expectations which is not a good thing either. But the thing that scares me the most is the fear of failure. I am afraid to define a purpose, let it guide my actions and then fail to meet that purpose.
Most of us have probably heard the following scripture:
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
– Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)
The 2 verses that follow Jeremiah 29:11 are relevant also:
“Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” — Jeremiah 29:12, 13 (NIV)
Whether you have a blog already or you want to start one, the best advice I can give you is to find your bloggy purpose.
Pray: Ask God what purpose and plan He has for your blog. Here are some questions to ask Him when you are developing your purpose:
- Is that purpose to keep in touch with family who are far away?
- Can you use the blog to subtly share your faith with others like unsaved family?
- Can you share some knowledge you have to help others (homeschooling? crafts? fashion?)?
- Are you going to use your blog to make money?
- Do you want your blog to be an online ministry?
That last one is a doozy to answer! When I started simply His, it was a way for me to keep in touch with family and friends. I honestly did not want to subject them to ads here and there so I could make a few dollars. It was not worth it. There’s nothing wrong with making a little money to help support your family, but there is a fine line you must be sure you want to cross. Blogging is about building a community. Be respectful of your readers. Treat them as your friends. If you would recommend a product to your friend, then do so on your blog. Don’t recommend stuff just to try and earn some money. Remember what your Bloggy Purpose is! When your Bloggy Purpose comes from God, answers to these questions will become quite clear.
{other She Speaks posts}
by Lisa B on August 17, 2009
I certainly didn’t want to offend anyone with my comparison of BlogHer and She Speaks. They are really like comparing apples and oranges. Certainly there are Christians who went to BlogHer and didn’t lose their testimony. I want to thank all my Christian bloggy buddies for chiming in about BlogHer as well — thank you for your perspective! To me, if you need filled up inside, then She Speaks is for you. You will meet God there in a very real way. If you are filled up and want to learn more about blogging, then BlogHer would be the way to go. It all greatly depends on why you blog and what you’re looking for.
Last week I started a couple of different posts on Bloggy Purpose. Emily @ Chatting at the Sky and Nester @ The Nesting Place gave a wonderful session at She Speaks on Defining and Refining Your Blogging Purpose. I have so many good notes from them and I also have so much to say myself — that I couldn’t write comprehensively last week. Oh, I was procrastinating on balancing the books here too — so God mixed up my words I think
Hopefully this week I’ll go into greater details about Bloggy Purpose but if you don’t know yours, then please start praying about it now. It may take awhile for you to figure it out, but once you do — your decisions will be much easier. Like Nester said her blog is about “it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.” She went to her blog one day and saw a picture of a beautiful sofa next to a Ragu ad. There’s nothing wrong with Ragu — it just didn’t go with the sofa or the purpose of her blog. So she took off the ads.
What I’m missing
I’ve been to She Speaks and I’ve been to BlissDom. The things that I’m missing from these conferences (whether they are at one or the other or missing totally) have to do with those ladies who blog for ministry. Whether their ministry is to their family and keeping in touch over long distances or whether their ministry is in their writing, ladies want to get together with other ladies who get them. They want tips on how to write blog posts better. They want to know a little about the technical stuff — enough to float a picture over here or there. They want to make their blogs better for themselves. These ladies aren’t interested in stats, pr people or free products. They don’t want ads on their blogs to take away from their writing. They aren’t even looking for a book deal — they just want to write.
She Speaks is actually the closest I’ve come to this, but all their writing sessions had to do with writing for magazines or publishing a book. Quite frankly, the price is steep for the conference. I totally don’t mean to scare you off here as I totally believe if God wants you there, He’ll make a way for you to be there. But the conference is geared more towards professionals or want to be professionals. What about the mom blogger who just wants to blog better? Who wants to catalog memories for her kids to read one day? The one who’s on a seriously tight budget and always buys stuff for her family before herself?
I had the privilege of talking with Amy Bayliss for a few hours on Friday (she’s the one I blurted out to over lunch the last day of She Speaks). She and I have similar hearts. We want to see women share their stories online. We want to see them be confident enough to not let technology get in the way. I’m so blessed to have spoken to her for so long because even as I rambled along to her, I started getting a clear picture of what I want my blog to be — what I want to write about, what I want it to look like around here. I’m also blessed that Amy and I are going to start working together. Perhaps we will be able to build an online conference for those ladies I feel are being left out — overlooked. Perhaps we can even develop a conference IRL (in real life) because I think there’s a lot to be said for actually reaching out and squeezing a neck or two
What kinds of things would you like to learn about at a blogging conference?
by Lisa B on August 10, 2009
I was asked this question a few times so I thought I’d make it into a blog post. There are so many differences I’m not even sure where to start. Mainly the question came up on Twitter because She Speaks was held the weekend after BlogHer.
First let me share a little bit about BlogHer. Honestly, if you are reading my blog because of She Speaks, you may not have ever heard of BlogHer. BlogHer is “the community for women who blog.” That’s there tag line. In 2007, the co-founders of the online community decided to put on an IRL (in real life) conference. They had people either volunteer to lead sessions or they asked some of the “big name” bloggers to present. They setup sessions for everything from the interests people blog about (crafts, food, etc.) to the business side of blogging. They had sessions on the techie stuff, branding, writing, and building communities online. Stories about the kind of gifts (swag) that were available at the first conferences just grew. Many big businesses saw this as an opportunity to market to women, and setup a booth on the exhibit floor. I’m not sure how many people attended the first BlogHer, but I did hear that around 1,500 women descended upon Chicago this year.
If you go to the BlogHer website, you will see many women bloggers post there about everything from home life to politics. These posts are in addition to the posts that the ladies post on their own blogs. To be quite honest, I never “got” BlogHer. I had enough trouble of my own posting to my own blog, why would I want to post there too? Looking around the website though I realized that there are many, many different women that are a part of that community — many, many people with different lifestyles and different views from me. That’s not bad — I just didn’t see anyone there even remotely close to “like” me. I didn’t feel like I would fit in there at all. And, I’ve never had a desire to go to the BlogHer conferences. Seriously? With all the talk of parties — exclusive most of them — where ladies are getting drunk off their booties — that just doesn’t entice me to go. Not. At. All.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to badmouth BlogHer, and I have never been so I don’t know first-hand how things are — just what I’ve heard from other bloggers. I also know several Christian women who attended BlogHer this year — I just know they were in the very small minority there.
She Speaks is very different. She Speaks was started by the Proverbs 31 Ministries ladies as a professional conference for Christian writers, speakers and women’s ministry leaders. From the day the last conference ended, the next conference is covered in prayer. This year there were around 600 ladies (200 more on the waiting list I heard) in attendance. There are main general sessions where ladies teach from the Bible a message that is relevant to all of us. There are breakout sessions on different tracks. The speaking track has sessions like Tailoring Your Message to Fit Each Event, Fear Not!, and The Power of a Story. The writing track has sessions like The Pathway to Publication, Magazine Writing 101, How to Write a Book, and Writing Book Proposals that Get Noticed.
In addition to these sessions, this year they added some blogging sessions. It was more of another track that I hope they will change so that more people can come. Whether you are a writer, speaker or women’s ministry leader, you will want to learn about blogging. Because they added this blogging track and most of us bloggers there tweet, we brought some exposure to She Speaks that wasn’t there before.
If you are just starting out, the sessions are wonderful to get you on your way. If you are a little more seasoned, you have the opportunity to schedule meetings with different publishers that are there as well. This provides an awesome opportunity for you to get your writings noticed, or just get feedback from a writer’s critique group. The speakers have critique groups as well if you are ready for that. Hmmm, maybe next year they should have a bloggers critique group A word of warning about She Speaks, it is expensive — more so than other blogging conferences I’ve seen put on. But it’s so totally worth it. God has a way of making a way if this is where you should be for sure.
God is at She Speaks — in a big way! He’s everywhere. I’m sure there may have been issues between ladies there, but I didn’t see any of it. Everyone seem to have an encouraging spirit about them. It’s not about competition. It was about learning to be better at what you felt God has called you to do whether that’s writing, speaking or just blogging.
{other She Speaks posts}
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