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Driving Blog Traffic without Driving Yourself Nuts

Speakers

seo blog traffic wordcamp birmingham

This is a guest post by Carrie Rollwagen

Last year, I decided to come to WordCamp almost on a whim. I’m not a developer or a designer, so I thought the sessions would be over my head and hard to understand. One of my clients urged me to go, and I had a Saturday free, so I figured — why not.

That turned out to be an excellent decision. I really did learn a lot, and the User/Blogger track was totally relevant and understandable, even for someone like me who doesn’t know a thing about coding.

After I attended WordCamp last year, I finished my own WordPress site, and I learned a lot about blogging that I’ve put into practice for myself and my clients this past year. I also realized I have something to offer on the speaker track, too. This year, I’ve started teaching Pop Up Workshops on Social Media for Small Business and Personal Branding, and the experience has been incredibly rewarding. I’ve learned to help people through the rough beginnings of transitioning into the world of social media, and I’m proud of what my students have accomplished. After all, I really believe that the key to successful blogging and social media is remembering that, even when we’re blogging and tweeting, we’re talking to people — and we use the same social skills we’ve already developed in our daily lives. We just have to tweak them a little so they work well online.

For my WordCamp presentation this year, I went to a question I get a lot from my clients — How do I drive blog traffic? The follow-up question — How do I do this without driving myself nuts? — doesn’t usually occur to people until they’ve already begun, but I’m including it in my presentation anyway. We’ll touch very lightly on SEO, and we’ll jump into how to use social media to get likes and shares for your site. After all, it’s frustrating to work hard on the perfect WordPress site and create great content and then have no idea how to get readers. I’ll help you do that, and this presentation is 100% appropriate for beginners.

I’m excited to present at WordCamp, but I’m even more excited to attend. If it’s anything like last year, I’ll have a good time, I’ll get to network, and I’ll learn a lot. I’m so thankful that I get to be a part of that.

Carrie Rollwagen is a copywriter at Infomedia, co-owner of Church Street Coffee & Books, and  teaches Pop Up social media workshops.

Speakers, Sessions, and Schedule

Announcements

This year is gearing up to have some really great content. We had a ton of speaker submissions this year and we’re excited to about all of them.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the schedule, speakers and sessions are all up on the website. This year we’re also doing a series of workshops that will be geared more for those people that are wanting to get their hands dirty. The workshops will be longer than the regular sessions but they’ll have breaks in-between. There’s a limited number of spots in each workshop so if you’re interest hurry on over to the tickets area and reserve your spot now and if you haven’t bought your ticket yet, you can do that while you’re there.

 

 

Call for Speakers: Closed

Announcements

Submissions are Closed. We’ll be notifying Speakers and we’ll have the schedule up on the site soon. Thanks to everyone that submitted.

Planning for this year’s WordCamp is coming along smoothly, but now it’s time to hear from you. Are you interested in being a speaker? It doesn’t matter what your experience is, we want to hear your stories and share in your experience. We are looking for people who can share how WordPress has helped them to accomplish their goals, to talk about favorite plugins, themes, or functions, or to tell how you fit in to the WordPress community.

Presentations are typically 30 minutes with a Q and A session at the end. We’re looking for topics that revolve around the following topics.

  • WordPress for your Business
  • Developing with WordPress
  • Designing themes
  • Writing and Blogging
  • Getting Started with WordPress

We’re also looking at having a few workshops with smaller groups for 2-3 hours. These workshops would be focused on learning a specific thing about WordPress like “Creating your first WordPress site” or “Creating your first plugin”. If you’re interested in leading a workshop please note it in the form below.

Final Deadline: Fri, July 18th 2014

Getting Started

Announcements

Let me be the first to welcome you to WordCamp Birmingham 2014. We’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for this year. We’re currently in the planning stages now. If your looking for dates and tickets to the event, sign up to receive an email whenever we have updates.

Note to Volunteers: Since we’re in the middle of the planning stage, this is the perfect time to get involved. If you’re interested in helping we have lots of ways to get involved. Take a look at our organizers page to see what we need help with. If one of those areas doesn’t interest you, send us an email and we’ll find a way you can help.

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