Honey, Don't Bother Mommy. I'm Too Busy Building My Brand.
By JENNIFER MENDELSOHN March 12, 2010
BALTIMORE
ON a brisk Saturday morning this month, a dedicated crew of about 90 women, most in their 30s or thereabouts, arrived at a waterfront hotel here, prepared for a daylong conference that offered to school them in the latest must-have skill set for the minivan crowd.
Teaching your baby to read? Please. How to hide vegetables in your children's food? Oh, that's so 2008.
The topics on that day's agenda included search-engine optimization, building a "comment tribe" and how to create an effective media kit. There would be much talk of defining your "brand" and driving up page views.
You know. For your blog.
Yes, they had come to Bloggy Boot Camp, the sold-out first stop on a five-city tour. It is the brainchild of Tiffany Romero and Heather Blair, the founders of the Secret Is in the Sauce, a community of
5,000 female bloggers. Boot Camp is at once a networking and social event, bringing together virtual friends for some real-time girly bonding, and an educational seminar designed to help the participants- about 90 percent of them mothers - to take their blogs up a notch, whether in hopes of generating ad revenue and sponsorships, attracting attention to a cause or branching out into paid journalism or marketing.
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