Blogging While Brown Recap

The opening keynote from Markus Robinson of Interactive One opened my eyes to several new ways to gather traffic and reach out to a large audience. Some of his advice included besides social media sharing and guest blogging were to put your blog in your email signature (which I do), post on Craigslist, answer questions on Quora, post SlideShare presentations and update Wikipedia pages. So far, I have placed my blog in the external links on the afrofuturism page.

Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup was a book frequently mentioned at the conference and Robinson used the lean marketing loop points – acquisition (get viewers to site), activation (join/buy), retention (come back), and referrals (other people join) – and tools to use to help to do it:

For email lists – Mail Chimp or Constant Contactor

For analytics of site – Google Analytics, Segment.Io, Mix Panel, Lucky Orange (real-time), Lead Converter, Optimizely (not free) and Social Crawlytics. Also, Luvvie and Scott mentioned Feedburner

Black Web 2.0 is another resource for more information on internet technology and innovation.

After Jeneba Ghatt and Nicole Taylor talk about Google+, Pinterest and Instagram, I finally joined Pinterest, and put up a another related page to my blog on Soundcloud. I will work on the rest later (so much social media, so little time).

For more from the conference, take a look at my twitter feed and blogging while brown’s.

But besides all he knowledge I gained, I also met a few people (given that I am not that great at networking), like a new blogger who is developing her website for Black Women Inspired about black women professionals and she will be doing a series of posts on female bloggers (hopefully I will be one of them). Another I met, Tatianah Green, a relationship blogger who also likes fashion, introduced me to a couple of futuristic designers –Laquan Smith and Cleons. At the after party, I met Harlem Uptown Flavor blogger, Damaa Bell, who was really nice and we ended up watching the free screening of Fruitvale together. By the way that film had me shaking at the end. If you get a chance, see it!

I had a nice time at Blogging While Brown and I will most likely be going again next year, especially since it will again be in New York City!!!!