By Cheval John

January 24th, 2017

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Today’s episode of What’s The Word? features Bobbie Byrd and Lisa Stauber, Co-Founders of the Blog Elevated conference.

The conference evolved from the houston bloggers association which was started in 2010 to connect fellow bloggers in the houston area on growing their online presence.

They later created Quirky Owl Media, which became the parent company of the blog elevated conference and the twitter chat.

In this episode, you will hear:

-what led them to form the conference

-should businesses embrace live video

-their thoughts on snapchat

Snippet on Vallano Media TV

Full Episode on BlogTalkRadio

Website: www.blogelevated.com

Twitter: @BlogElevated

Quotes from Bobbie Byrd and Lisa Stauber on

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Lisa: I think because the opportunity is just there.

It’s one of the ways that you can monetize your instagram channel or your snaps or your tweets or your blog by doing partnerships with brands.

Their biggest asset is their reader’s trust.

So when you become an influencer, you are basically able to leverage that trust into an income.

Now some people will just show anything for any money and they quickly lose that trust and find that their business flames out.

So the smart influencers are authentic and were already sharing everything they do anyway.

If we really love an appliance, we share it.

If we really love a meal at a restaurant, we already sharing it.

So it’s just a way to make an income stream from things we are already doing.

Bobbie: As far as influencers, many of us already have the followings built up behind us.

If it’s something you want to promote, there is nothing wrong with making money of of that.

From the business side, it’s genius for these companies to be using them.

This past weekend, I went on a sponsored trip out of town and I just shared it on my social media accounts.

I had several personal friends, not even people are outside of my immediate friend group, asking questions and saying, “We Want To Do That.”

It’s just because of what they saw me doing.

I can take that same message I’m sharing with my personal friends and share it with my fans which are over 50,000.

I think for the bloggers perspective, it’s something that’s easy to monetize if you truly love it.

If you are a brand and you are not doing that, I think you are missing out on a huge opportunity.

TWITTER CHAT #BLOGELEVATED

Lisa: The chat has really kind of changed over the years which originally started as houston bloggers chat.

During our meetups, we would tweet using houston bloggers as a hashtag.

Then people would say, “Oh, I can not come to the meeting or I missed it or can I follow the hashtag.”

So it kind of grew from there.

We would do our meetings once a month and the other three weekdays of that month to keep the connection strong.

We kind of tweet about what was in the news or if some big new thing happens.

We would just tweet back and forth.

It was a really small group of people.

But the chat became more popular and we started having people from other cities joining.

So we had Dallas saying, “I’m not in houston, can I come to houston bloggers chat” which obviously it’s on Twitter.

We had people in Austin and in San Antonio and people who did not live near a city, but really crave that connection with bloggers.

Maybe they lived in a small town and did not know one other single blogger around.

So we morphed into Texas blogger chat and found that we were doing it three weeks that we did not meet and a lot of people missed out on the fourth week because it was a bigger chat.

So we moved it to a different night and we’re chatting every week.

From there, we created the conference and changed the hashtag to blog elevated so we could encompass everybody interested in the conference and everyone attending the conference because we have a pretty heavy Texas group at our conference.

We also have people from other countries attend.

We are an international conference at this point.

DIGITAL MARKETING

Lisa: If there’s one area of digital marketing that’s over-saturated, it’s the coach of the coaches.

The people that will have a webinar to teach you how to do webinars, but only ever had a successful webinar about webinars.

It becomes an echo chamber.

So our Twitter chat gives us the opportunity to show that we’re not just people who talk about blogging, we really have actionable things that will move your blog forward.

One of the hearts and soul of blog elevated is we are trying to avoid cliques and welcome everybody.

We are also helpers.

We try to always be serving our audience at all times.

It also because it’s the opportunity to reach out to bloggers one-on-one a lot of times during the chat or after the chat asking a more specific question.

We can help them right then and there because again, we’re all about education and helping bloggers.

Whether they come to our conference or not, we’re still gonna help you.

I think the conference is a great opportunity to get all in one area all at once to meet with brands and network with other people and hear from other speakers.

If you really want to blog, you do not have to go to a comprehensive e-course or buy an ebook.

You an figure it out just by having other bloggers help you.

From a business perspective, it’s also given us cold hard numbers that we can share.

I do not think a lot of attendees know that we do not make any money off the ticket sales.

We have the ticket sales to confirm that you are attending and to cover things like coffee and your lunch.

We do not make a profit off of the conference.

What help us run the conference as a business is getting outside sponsors.

BLOGGERS PITCHING TO BRANDS

Lisa: We get between five and thirty million impressions in a single hour on the blog elevated twitter chat.

We usually trend in houston and at times nationally.

Those are numbers that the people who want to work with us can take to their bosses and say, “They are not just shooting in the dark or hoping to get results.”

We can show exactly how many people saw it, how many people retweeted, how many people stuck around.

It is really helpful to give us proof of concept.

Bobbie: Our numbers are proof.

They need to know without a doubt that you can provide value to them.

If you want to sell $100 course to twenty people and yet you do not have any proof that shows you can do what you are trying to sell, it’s gonna be hard.

You gonna have to work quadruple the amount of time that you would if you just simply went out and offer your services for free for a little bit.

We’re big of don’t work for free.

But there is a big difference between working and serving others.

That’s where you kind of have to figure it out.

Are you working for them or are you serving and helping them?

If you are serving them, it’s gonna come back to you and you will see a payout in that as well.

Lisa: It also helps you build your portfolio.

If you are new to an area, maybe you have never run facebook ads before and you help somebody and you are not charging them because you are learning yourself.

Plus, you help the other person and you can build your portfolio and show concrete results.