Portland Bloggers Archives - Chic Creative Life

Recap: Portland Bloggers Speed Networking Meetup at Passionfruit HQ

May 4, 2015 | Blogging

Last Sunday the Portland Bloggers group came together for a fun speed networking event at the Passionfruit headquarters in SE Portland.It was a morning filled with fun, laughter, quick-fire questions, networking, business card exchanging, and a ton of great advice on blogging issues. We noshed on deli cold cuts, cheeses, fruit, fresh vegetables, and bagels provided by Bowery Bagels (DELISH vegan cashew cheese on salted bagels!) and sipped coffee from Black Rock Coffee.

We also got an inside look at the incredibly cool Passionfruit office space and the inner workings of Passionfruit Ads where you can sell ad space, paid posts, or sponsored content through their blog widgets with minimal maintenance and upkeep (seriously if you haven’t tried it out – DO IT NOW! I can’t believe how much time I spent on managing individual sponsors and advertisers with the emails, and back-and-forth, and getting their banner ads, having to re-optimize them, uploading, then taking down once the ad had run. Once you do it through Passionfruit, all the headaches are GONE and you just collect a paycheck. Seriously cool.)We had a fun photo shooting area with photo booth props Bee and Jenni had made. I’ll be updating this space soon with the photos!It was a great morning and I met a number of local bloggers to add to my reading list and my blogging buddy list. We had a prize draw and 3 bloggers won some awesome prizes including a year of Passionfruit ad service, the book Blog, Inc.by Joy Cho, and a package of blogging goodies like stationery supplies and blog planner. (Plus we all received a sample of Lemon Dream Bar King Cream ice cream to take home with us!)

Stay up to date with all Portland Bloggers events here. Hope to see you at the next one!

Have you ever been to a blogging meet up? Was it worthwhile to attend?

xo
Carly

I’m a volunteer member of the organizing team of Portland Bloggers, a local organization dedicated to bringing together bloggers and providing networking and resources. I designed their logo and also maintain their website and do videography for them.

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Recap: Portland Bloggers Back to Design School Event

Oct 5, 2014 | Blogging

Last Saturday, the Portland Bloggers group met for our annual Back to School Event at Portland Community College. With a schoolhouse theme (cue 2B yellow pencils, lined paper, gold spray-painted clipboards, and polished red apples), the event focused on blog design and unifying the look and feel of your online presence.

After a short meet-and-greet and welcome from Portland Bloggers founder Jenni Bost from A Well-Crafted Party, Suzannah Hamlin-Stanley from Create/Enjoy spoke to the group about what branding actually is. (Hint: it’s different from marketing and is a more subtle pull of your audience, rather than an overt push, of your message.)

#Branding is more subtle: a PULL rather than a #marketing PUSH of your message. #blogging #tips

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With a background in advertising and years running the successful blog Adventures in Dressmaking, Suzannah helped impart a better understanding of how branding impacts your blog.

Left: Portland Bloggers’ founder Jenni from A Well Crafted Party, Right: Suzannah from Create/Enjoy working the camera for our “class” photos.

Designer Sze Wa Cheung then spoke about blog design, segmenting current blog design trends into 2 major ones: the Infinite Scroll design (think Pinterest) vs. the Category Showcase design, and offering notes about good design (like effective use of font, white space, thinking about the readability of your blog, your post-dividers, and your color palette).

After a short break I then took the podium and presented my talk on How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog. I also announced the top secret project I’ve been working on for awhile! (I’ll be sharing the full announcement here tomorrow!!)

We then had a final wrap-up with a number of questions from our fellow bloggers: where to find technical help resources online (Answer: Google is best for a specific question, and the Help/Forums for your specific platform, but W3Schools is always helpful for coding!), whether to start on Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, or Squarespace (Answer: keep your end goal in mind; if you want to turn it into a money-making business and are okay with a learning curve in the beginning, I’d recommend WordPress, but if you’re blogging as a hobby or want the simplest interface, choose Blogger, Tumblr, Squarespace, or Wix), ways to add text to images or edit graphics (Photoshop, PicMonkey), where to get on-brand social media icons (the answer to that TOMORROW!), how to ensure color consistency when printing your logo vs. how your logo looks online (choose CMYK color profile in creating your for-print logos/branding; try to choose PANTONE colors whenever possible).