I am sharing this through my new blogger friend Cheryl Stober, a syndicated blogger on the BlogHer platform. She has been blogging for eight years, at a time when I was chasing after stories and yawning at township meetings for print media.
“You gotta cover that,” said the editor also yawning, “It’s our bread and butter you know.”
Among hundreds of posts, Stober caught my attention with her nice piece about getting ready for the conference. I was bummed that I couldn’t go so I literally devoured the article and commented and I got a comment back. And there you go we were friends.
My new BlogHer buddy Cheryl Stober
“I hope to meet you at the conference next year,” she wrote. “Follow me on @cherylstober.”
Her article included getting new business cards and clothes for the event. Of course fashion police at these conferences are on their toes.
Today, Stober tweeted she had lunch with my favorite Glee star, Gwyneth Paltrow. who is a keynote speaker at the conference. I am jealous, no just kidding.
I have probably the best news in a long time since I established the Emma Blogs, LLC last year in July. Prior to that I connected my EW blog into the Gatehouse Media, a 15-million reader market.
Now, again in July I found out about a great platform for women bloggers from a Monday’s post by Michelle W. “Heading to BlogHer ’15, so are we.”
Well I checked out BlogHer and found a perfect fit for my Emma Blogs,LLC. Under the umbrella of http://www.sheknowsmedia.com, the platform has a social media reach of 100,000 women across the country. Wow, I could not believe the great content, the great women. It was just an overall positive vibe.
Emma Blogs are now a part of the BlogHer network.
So, I submitted two posts, Coach Leigh Ann Dickey inspires and Women Inspired…
Subscribe to CJ Aunt Jarmilka’s newsletter. This is EW’s sister publication newsletter for July. Sign up for great recipes and info about Czech baking, canning and cuisine.
Education: associates degree in health sciences-respiratory therapy, certificate in health coaching from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition, Oct. 2014
Residence: Gainesville, Georgia
By Emma Palova
EW Emma’s Writings
Lowell, MI – Leigh Ann Dickey wanted to share her story of losing 35 pounds when she joined the nutrition school. Dickey started out with a page on facebook, Instagram and a blog on WordPress two years ago using tutorials and mentors.
“I developed a nice site,” she said.
Coach Leigh Ann Dickey loves helping people.
Dickey was offering a weight loss product. But when she sustained a head injury on her bicycle, Dickey took the site down.
Since she has always liked design Dickey wanted to master WordPress. She already had a great feather in her cap; 12 years of HTML coding. Dickey completely coded her animal charity site herself from the start.
She took a WordPress class to get up to speed in 2013 & 2014. Dickey joined the Learn to Blog in 2014, but found out that she already knew a lot of the stuff from the WordPress classes.
The biggest challenge of blogging for Dickey was targeting her niche.
“I felt tossed around,” Dickey said in a Skype interview last week. “I was posting and sharing trying to target my niche. I went all over the place.”
She tried health & fitness, business coaching and design. It wasn’t until recently she found that her real passion was teaching and coaching. So, Dickey launched her Soulpreneurs this week. Soulpreneurs is a membership site on the Genesis framework.
But, before that Dickey started a WordPress support group on facebook.
“It used to be enough to have a facebook page two years ago, but now you have to create a group,” she said.
Two years ago with a budget of $150, Dickey could increase traffic to her facebook page to 3,600.
However, two years in an online business is eternity.
“That was old school,” she laughed. “Start a facebook group not a page. Find like-minded people. Join other groups inside of facebook.”
Dickey offered a lot of advice for newbie bloggers. Number one on the advice list is determining your niche.
“It all starts with ourselves knowing what we enjoy doing,” she said, “And then turn that into business. People should ask themselves what is it that they enjoy doing all day long.”
According to Dickey, the advantages of realizing what you really like to do are the following:
You best will know a lot about it.
It will be easy to develop products and services around your niche or like.
Then you have to boil it all down to specific types that is; rather than pets narrow it down to dogs and then go further, different breeds and such.
In response to what she likes about blogging, Dickey was very spontaneous.
“I enjoy the process of creating that plays into my geeky side telling the story,” she said. “I enjoy helping people.”
Blogging was a life changing experience for Dickey who had suffered a head injury.
“Blogging helped me get past something and I relate that to overcoming obstacles in business and in life. It’s just human nature to get that feedback.”
The second part of Dickey’s story with more valuable advice will appear later this week. Stay tuned and feel free to comment with your advice.
BlogHer ’15, one of the biggest and best annual conferences for bloggers, lands in New York City later this week, from July 16th through the 18th. You’ll find hundreds of passionate bloggers, workshops to hone every aspect of your blogging, incredible keynote speakers like Ava DuVernay and Gwyneth Paltrow — and us!
At our Happiness Lounge in the expo hall, you’ll be able to get one-on-one help with your WordPress sites. Staff from across Automattic will also be leading mini-workshops on some of the topics you care most about, and our “WordPress Insiders” panels bring multiple WordPress.com staffers together for informal panels to give you a range of takes on everything from tools to traffic.
The WordPress.com booth hums with activity at BlogHer ’14.
With all the 4th of July holiday activities I fell a bit behind with the Emma Blogs monthly newsletter that I absolutely love to design on super easy MailChimp. I wish everything was that easy. The newsletter features correspondent Emma Palova-Chavent, MD and fellow word press blogger for the month of July Coach Leigh Ann Dickey. Palova-Chavent, MD resides permanently in France and works at the emergency center in Dijon.
Emma Blogs newsletter for July features Coach Leigh Ann.
Coach Leigh Ann started blogging on WordPress two years ago when she hit 40 and lost 35 pounds.
“i wanted to share my story,” she said.
However, after suffering a head injury on a bike,she wanted to figure out where she was going with her life. Coach Leigh Ann took the site down and went into design.
For full story about Coach Leigh Ann Dickey follow EW Emma’s writings on http://emmapalova.com.
The feature story 50 years of Fallasburg preservation takes you back in time. There is still time to make plans to visit during the Fallasburg Fall Festival on Sept.19 & Sept.20.
The featured photo on the blog with the banner is downtown Lowell getting ready for the annual Riverwalk festival that starts today and runs through Saturday.
Emma Blogs runs a summer special 25% off on blog and web design. Just submit the email with the newsletter.
To sign up for the newsletter, fill out the form at the end of this message.
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