Stepping Outside My Comfort Zone

In case you didn’t hear me anxiously talk about heading to Utah two weeks ago for a blogging conference, let me tell you all about it! I have had this blog now for about four years, granted the first year was mainly geared towards updating family. The past few years I have really had a desire for it to grow, but in a natural way. I have loved connecting with you guys whether it be through comments, social media, or some even in real life now! I love this blog for what it provides me. It is a creative outlet, an online journal for my family, and a great way to connect to lots of amazing people.

A lot of bloggers view their blog as more of a business than anything else. I never had that mindset. And anytime that mindset would start to creep in, it would totally stress me out and make me not want to post anything at all. I would instantly go hide in my shell and think ‘this is my blog, I can stop it or continue it however I see fit’. But my mindset has sifted a little lately. I not only want to continue this blog normally, but I also want to take it more seriously. I want to be more consistent for you guys. I want to not continue throwing posts together at 10pm the night before. And I knew I needed something to help me achieve everything I was wanting, and that thing was a blog conference.

SNAP is a blog conference held in Utah every year, and this year there was over 500 other bloggers in attendance. It was kind of funny when I would talk to other bloggers there about how long we have been doing this blog. Most women that were at a conference for the first time had only been blogging for maybe a year or two. When they would hear that I have had this going since 2010, they were all shocked that I hadn’t been to a conference before. Apparently this was something that most do within their first year. And now I see why…

The conference was Thursday-Saturday, and yet it felt like I was there a full week with how much was packed in!! The days were jam packed with classes, meeting with sponsors, keynote speakers, hands on classes, amazing meals, and finally a fun party to end the day. Being 31 weeks pregnant and going NON-stop from 7:30 AM- midnight {at least} every day was totally exhausting, but totally worth it!

I met so many incredible people while there. I am not going to lie, I was nervous beyond belief to go. I am born and raised in Arizona. I have an incredible big group of friends here, and J and I never plan to move for the fact that we don’t want to be away from our family and friends. We both highly value close relationships. Yes, we are open to new people, but NEVER had I traveled somewhere where I didn’t know people. I only had met ONE girl in real life before going, and ‘knew of’ one of AZ girl. I admittedly was freaked out by the fact that I {in order to keep costs down} needed to find three other girls to share a room with. No joke, I became a stalker of sorts to make these roomies happen. I scoped out the Facebook group page for the conference and tracked down a few girls that I thought I would get along with, and emailed them until they gave in and said yes;)

At first I was totally freaked out thinking that I didn’t really have any friends there, but in the end I think that helped me more than I could have imagined. It forced me to step outside my comfort zone. To mingle with all different groups of people. To pass out as many of my business cards as humanly possible. Minted was so awesome and hooked me up with cards for the conference. They were SO good to me as I probably edited my card more times than you should, and yet they made it just right in the end! Truly though, they are the only company I even consider using for any and all paper goods, because you cant beat their product AND their customer service!

In the end of the conference I not only left with an insane amount of knowledge, a to-do list of over 50 things, but most importantly- some amazing new friends. There were some reallllyy big bloggers and business women there, many that I didn’t have the guts to go up to. I wondered how they were able to pull themselves away from their hectic lives of running their businesses to attend this event; it seemed like with all their responsibilities that they would surely be swamped with work. But here is an HR tool that I suppose they might have been able to make use of in order to free up their time in this area to actually allow them to go to things like this – now I think about it, this might be a good idea for me if I grow my business to a level that might require something along those lines.

This is something to think about for the future, but it is definitely a dream of mine to be able to grow my business as big as possible. I just keep thinking about how great it would be to manage my own set of employees. I’ve always loved the togetherness that working for the same company can provide so I think this would be wonderful. And the last thing I would want to happen is for them to leave, so I think it would be a great idea to implement an employee engagement survey, that I can get with the help of somewhere like Qualtrics to see if I could change anything about how the business is run to ensure they feel valued. This is important in a business, and if I were to ever grow my own, this is something that I would need to think about.

There are also many other things to think about too because blogging is a business, and I think it would be important that bloggers do things to increase their website traffic and get more people over to their page. However, those are new bloggers, they might need to get accustomed to the entire process of blogging. For example, newbies who want to create their first blog on WordPress might want to learn about plugins, features (like using trash and excerpt), backend and WordPress hosting. Many experienced bloggers often emphasize on the web hosting part because without a high-performing host, sites tend to suffer, both in user experience and search engine rankings. Furthermore, bloggers who host their site on a dedicated server or a managed WordPress server can witness improved performance levels. So, interested parties who want to learn more about WordPress hosting, can check websites like https://wpdevshed.com/wordpress-hosting/.

Additioanlly, I would like to emphasize on what other bloggers at this event were talking about. Some bloggers were discussing about their content marketing strategies. So, I suppose I’ll have to look into that later to make sure I keep up with the competition. Perhaps I could look at this website here to see what sort of things I’d need for a good content marketing strategy. That could be useful for my blog.

I did gather some courage and introduce myself to Susan from Freshly Picked, and she was incredible {and yes, that is totally my signature nervous smile in the photo!}.

I was also so excited to finally meet in person some ‘friends’ from online over the years. Theres nothing more interesting than walking up to a person who you have never met, and yet you know so many details about them and their life {I probably looked like a creep for how often I did that this weekend!} These two ladies were some of the women I was really looking forward to, Allison and Kirsten:

I am so glad I stepped outside my comfort zone. I am so glad that life can always be unexpected and yet better than you think possible. I am SO glad I have a supportive hubby who not only took care of all the things back at home, but also encouraged me and was so excited for me to go! And finally, I am so glad that I don’t have to take as many selfies as I did that weekend, because it was a little out of control;)