This past weekend, I attended my first ever blog conference — The Hive at the betahaus in Berlin.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I blog, what my goals are for No Apathy Allowed, and how much free time I want to devote to it.  And the Hive turned out to be the perfect place for me to rediscover my love for blogging.  I walked away with so many new ideas and lots of inspiration to put them into action.

Meeting other bloggers

It also goes without saying that maybe the best part of the Hive was meeting both old and new blog friends!  It was such a treat to finally get to meet Kate of An American in Wiesbaden (but soon to be Berlinerin) in person!  Melanie of Dejlige Days, Nina Bungers of Pinspiration, and Sharon of Travel Meets Food were also sweet beyond belief, and I’m looking forward to following their blogs.

Sharing ideas

There were so many talks and workshops to choose from (check out the speakers page to read about them), and I definitely didn’t get to attend everything that I wanted, but that’s the nature of conferences, right?  But here are a few of my favorites talks:

• Tina Fussell (aka Travelling Mama) of Flying House gave a refreshing talk about keeping the fun in blogging.   Your blog should be a representation of who you are and a way of sharing your passions.  And you should be willing to change and evolve over time to keep it fun and exciting.
• I also adored how Desiree of Vosgesparis approached the topic of monetizing blogs.  Although it’s not something I’m actually interested in doing right now, Desiree offered lots of good ideas for improving the quality of your blog and how to keep things fresh.  I really loved her style and thought she was great to listen to.
• Deborah of Kickcan & Conkers focused on how to grow your online community, and I thought she did a great job of talking about how this has evolved over the years for her, as new social media outlets have also grown and changed.  She convinced me to see Pinterest as a tool for communication and interaction, rather than simply a place to collect my ideas.
• Another long-time veteran of blogging, Erin Loechner of Design for Mankind, presented via Google Hangouts.  Although she’s totally in the mega-bloggers league, her “rules for blogging” were really down-to-earth and practical.
• It was also fun to hear from Travelettes‘ founder, Katja Henschel.  She encouraged bloggers to define our own standards, show off our skills, and write what we would want to read.
• And last, but not least, I thought Digital Cosmonaut did an awesome job covering the very unsexy topic of SEO (search engine optimization — don’t worry, I didn’t really know what it meant until recently either).  I’m not quite ready to dive into the crazy world of SEO yet, but now I feel like I would know exactly where to start if I did.

The kinks

The Hive has obviously gathered a lot of interest and momentum since last year, and there seemed to be some growing pains involved — the space, for example, while totally cool, just felt a bit too cramped for the size of the conference (200+ bloggers).  There were also a couple of keynote speakers who clearly did not do their homework on who their audience was going to be, so it might be worthwhile to have some sort of process in the future for vetting the talks.

So much inspiration!

Despite some of those issues, though, I felt like I got a lot out of the conference and am really glad I attended.  My goal for the next few weeks is to ride the wave of inspiration and excitement, and keep working on improving No Apathy Allowed.  I can’t wait to get started!

P.S.  Keep your eyes out for my post later this week about a pre-conference visit to the Jewish Museum organized by Jenni Fuchs from the Museum Diary!

Have you ever attended a blog conference before?  What would you most want to hear about?