Lady Blogger 2015 – Conference Recap

I was invited to speak at Lady Blogger 2015. I actually went with one of my WordPress friend’s Michele Butcher of Can’t Speak Geek. I presented on Making Money Using WordPress.

As a side note, Michele and I realized as we entered the conference that we were wearing the same EXACT colors. (In the pic below: Michele is on the left and I’m in the back, on the right side.)

LULZ!!!!

The conference was held in St. Louis on April 11, 2015 and hosted by Bonnie Frank. There were quite a few topics and there were a lot of venders.

Speaker List:

• Keri Jaehnig
• Bonnie Frank
• Michele Butcher
• Will Hanke
• Stephanie Nissen
• Katy Blevins
• Lisa Boero
• Rhonda Robinson
• Ginger Kadlec

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #LB2015. You’re welcome to read through it, but you’d have to scroll down to around April 11, 2015. Apparently something else was also using the same Twitter hashtag.

I sat in on Lisa Boero’s Publishing The Book Within You presentation and bought her book.

I also got to sit in on Will Hanke’s presentation, Building An Online Marketing Plan, which was entertaining and I nodded along with him as his information was rock solid.

Of course, I also sat in my friend, Michele Butcher’s presentation, Are You Safe From Hackers? Lots of great security information!

If your website gets hacked, it's not the end of the world. It can be fixed. @Michele_Butcher #LB2015

— Nile Flores (@blondishnet) April 11, 2015

During Michele’s security talk, there was a huge WordPress help pow wow that went on. 🙂

My biggest beef about the conference is that the speakers had not been thanked properly. Most conferences I’ve spoke at (and I’ve spoken at about 22 conferences), have always either wined and dined the speakers, and/or have given something small. None of that was done, especially when the conference was a “for profit” event. Just a thank you.

Also, prior to the event, while I was arranging WordCamp St. Louis, Bonnie spammed most of our attendees on Twitter and caused a quite a few complaints. I was on the organization team for WordCamp St. Louis, so this seriously embarrassed me as I did not encourage her to do this. If you’re running a conference, let it be a lesson learned to not suitcase events, even on their Twitter hashtag.

Also, Bonnie herself spoke several times, rather than utilize more speakers from the area to build more authority and trust. While her topics were fine, even a bit more geared to selling herself, the conference could have benefited more from choosing more speakers or fill those areas with Q&A panels. It’s not easy putting together a conference, I know this from helping with quite a few, but for the most part, I enjoyed meeting some of the attendees and listening to some of the speakers.

I usually don’t post negative experiences, but I honestly walked away a little ticked off. I’m not certain if I’d consider attending a future Lady Blogger conference in the future, unless it were more organized, better designed, and actually thanked their speakers properly. Outside of that comment, I’d recommend attending a conference that had most of the speakers that were at Lady Blogger.

Did you attend Lady Blogger 2015?