This fall, y’all. Conference season was in full swing and Mediavine was EVERYWHERE.
We love the opportunity to meet our existing publishers face-to-face, as well as new potential MVPs. And we’re very committed to supporting the blogging community as a whole, so we sponsor and attend as many events as possible.
Which means…FALL TRAVEL MADNESS!
The Create & Cultivate event in Seattle was such fun. They had a fabulous keynote by Mandy Moore, and Heather and Nicole enjoyed meeting everyone and seeing the Microsoft campus.
Seattle is such a great city for an event, and not only because it is semi-local for Nicole, but also because it has some of the most beautiful event spaces in the country.
Create & Cultivate was held at the Microsoft campus in Redmond this year, and it was a beautiful venue.
The opening party was in a great co-working venue that they were featuring, and we met some pretty awesome people and got to chat about all things blogging.
Before we leave a city, it is always our goal to visit some of the area’s strangest bars, and Seattle didn’t disappoint. We found ourselves at a neat little place where the walls are lined with dollar bills.
We couldn’t leave without leaving some Mediavine behind. We enlisted our not-even-on-staff-yet new support engineer, Brady, to help us get it in a prime location.
This was evidently against the rules, and Brady got a stern talking to from the bartender, but Mediavine is now in a prime location forevermore. Way to be a team player, Brady!
One of the things we love most here at Mediavine – aside from snacks and teal cocktails at the Sticky Sidebar – is learning.
You can imagine our delight in hosting an awesome kick-off party for ACTIVATE: EBA Live in Portland, Oregon on September 15th.
It was the perfect combination of meeting publishers who were excited to learn more about blogging and great drinks and snacks. What more could we want? Oh, and a raffle for a gorgeous camera bag?
Teal, of course. SOLD. We had a great time in Portland, meeting tons of current and future MVPs.
The Mediavine team had a fantastic Air BnB right in Portland, and got to wake up to fun signs outside like this:
Portland was amazing, as always, and we can’t wait to go back for an event in 2018. Do you have one planned? Let us know! We’d love to consider sponsoring.
On September 21-22, Heather and Susannah road tripped to the epic Great Wolf Lodge outside of Charlotte, N.C., where they visited with publishers from all over the country. We loved meeting a mixture of entrepreneurs, lifestyle bloggers and their families.
Together we learned the secrets of success in a diverse range of topics, from affiliate marketing to photography to podcasting. We spent two jam-packed days taking in a ton of great information and sustaining attendees with Mediavine-branded M&Ms — which were a huge hit!
It’s always awesome to meet up with publishers, and Blog Life University was a great way to kick off our conference season.
The International Food Bloggers Conference was held September 28-30 in sunny Sacramento, a first for all three attending Mediavine team members, Nicole, Heather and Susannah.
We kicked things off with a party on the Sacramento River Train where we imbibed the best of California’s grapes and craft brews with current and future MVPs as we chugged through the vineyards of the Central Valley.
When we weren’t attending sessions, we were mixing up teal cocktails to serve at the expo. If you’ve never been to IFBC, one of the best parts of their expo is that nearly everyone is offering up some form of food or drink during the expo hall hours.
We made big batches of Long Island Iced Teals (a teal twist on the famous LIT drink) and MVPunch (a vodka lemonade with blue curaçao). It was awesome to connect with lots of food bloggers and talk shop in such a cool city.
Any sort of conference in its 10th year is cause for celebration, especially a conference in an industry as new and frequently changeable as blogging. And from October 4th through the 7th in Washington D.C., celebrate they did, with panels, classes, dance parties and crab cakes galore.
Founded in 2007 by Kelby Hartson-Carr, Type-A Parent is one of the original blogger conferences and has weathered all the many changes in digital content creation with their extremely loyal attendees.
Mediavine’s new Marketing Associate Jenny Guy spoke on a panel about the future of influencer marketing in addition to her session, Dating A Brand: How To Make Them Swipe Right.
This year’s conference also marked a passing of the torch from original founder Kelby to Rachel Honoway and her firm Rust Built.
MPN is looking forward to Type-A’s new direction and bright future!
Ten bloggers, picked to live in a house. Watch what happens. ONLY KIDDING! But really, Blog Breck Retreat, organized by Erin from Dinners, Dishes and Desserts, was a fantastic learning experience.
We learned so much about how bloggers are running their businesses these days, in a lot of ways very similar to the way we run Food Fanatic. That didn’t always use to be the case, so it was a great experience for us to see that we’re not so different after all – anymore!
Amber was originally invited as the managing editor of Food Fanatic, but it seemed like the perfect opportunity to throw some support back to the community, so Mediavine sponsored all the food and drink that GoBreck hadn’t already covered.
Every blogger made recipes near and dear to their heart throughout the trip, and we spent one amazing evening at The Canteen. The mac and cheese is made with Cheez-Its, friends. Get yourself there.
We’re really trying to be out in the community more, helping with learning about SEO, site speed, and plenty of things that have nothing to do with ads and everything to do with getting traffic and keeping it. You’ll see more retreat sponsorships in 2018, so if you’ve got something in the works, make sure you let us know!
NOLA was a first for us, and we had such an amazing time there, attending the Learn to Blog Hangouts LIVE retreat. Held in New Orleans October 16-18, it was a totally beautiful time to visit!
Crystal and Kelli of the Learn to Blog Hangouts crew put together an amazing group of women to come together for a time of intensive learning and networking, and we were so thrilled to be included.
Heather and Nicole did 1-on-1 site audits with the whole group, and it was so fun to meet everyone, see all of the awesome work they’ve been doing, and offer some actionable tips to help them grow and monetize.
Learn to Blog Hangouts has a very similar mission to Mediavine: Their goal is for bloggers to make real money without losing the respect of their communities. We’re super grateful to have been included.
Question: What do you get when you put 1,700+ talented financial whizzes in one hotel in Dallas for 4 days?
Answer: A high-energy conference on steroids!
October 25-28 marked MPN’s first time at FinCon, which we were told is THE event for content creators in the financial world. It was everything we heard and then some.
We had a booth in the expo hall and loved getting to talk with the hundreds of people who stopped by with all the questions about monetization. Our teal swag was a huge hit with attendees as well as other sponsors.
Another hit was our Deep Ellum Pub Crawl on Wednesday night. We stopped by Adair’s Saloon, The Twilite Lounge and ended the evening at Easy Slider with fried hand pies.
We also snuck in some pretty epic pizza:
We took down the Mediavine booth on Friday evening with sore feet and smiles on our faces, knowing our first time at FinCon would not be our last.
There’s no place better to experience fall falling than in the beautiful Ozark mountains, which must be one of the reasons the Outdoor Blogger Summit chose Bentonville, AR as their 2016 & 2017 conference location.
This was MPN’s first year at the summit and we always love the opportunity to meet influencers in a new (to us) blogging genre.
While no one would call MPN team members Susannah, Stephie and Jenny ‘outdoorsy’, we enjoyed our time in Northwest Arkansas October 27-29.
Susannah represented Mediavine at the speed dating event on Friday while Stephie and Jenny spoke Saturday on viewability and did live site auditing over lunch on Sunday. Special shout out to audit volunteers James Raia from The Weekly Driver and Paulina from Little Grunts. You were both great sports!
And thank you, James, for the “Comedy Duo” line to be added to Stephie and Jenny’s resumes. We’ll be appearing at a blogging conference near you soon!
To conclude our fall tour de Mediavine, Nicole, Jenny and Susannah spent November 3-5 in Denver attending the Food Allergy Bloggers Conference.
FABlogCon was an awesome chance to talk to nutritionists and food bloggers who focus on writing about dietary restrictions and severe food allergies. We know firsthand that food allergies are no joke, and we think it’s incredible that there’s a whole conference dedicated to this niche of publishers.
We loved taking our place in the expo hall, surrounded by samples of the latest allergy-sensitive goodies. We’d walk a thousand miles to hang out in the Mile High City again with this fab bunch of bloggers!
So there you have it. We had an incredible fall and we’re already looking ahead to where we’re headed in 2018, starting with our own conference in Mountain View at the end of February.
If you’re planning a retreat, a conference, a small gathering, we’d love to hear about it. (In fact, we wrote a whole post about it here.) We try to meet as many of our publishers as we can.
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Amber Bracegirdle
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