Blogger Goes To Conference, Expects Everyone To Care
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to get stock tips or have investing ideas delivered to your email. I'm also on The Twitter.Thanks for visiting!
Spearfish, ND – Personal finance blogger Mary Todd, 24, is extremely excited about attending The Financial Bloggers’ Conference this year. The conference will be held in Denver, Colorado from September 6th through the 9th.
“Oh my God” Todd said, “you have no idea how much fun it’s going to be. We’re all going to get together and talk about blogging and money and ways to monetize our blogs and get drunk and eat together and it’s GOING TO BE THE GREATEST WEEKEND EVER.”
Mary isn’t alone. Approximately 500 other people will attend the conference, and most seem excited to do so. “I’m so excited” she continued, “to meet up again with all my friends! And we’re all going to have so much fun!”
Todd’s blog, genericpersonalfinance.com is an ongoing testament to how excited she is about this conference. In fact, she has talked about little else for the past 8 weeks. A recent search on her blog for Fincon12, which is the commonly used short form to refer to the conference, returned 1,920,482 matches.
When asked whether she was getting a little out of control with mentioning the conference, Todd was adamant. “No, because my readers care about the conference too. I mean, sure, they come to my site for financial advice, but they stay because my life is interesting and awesome. They totally care about me going to the conference.”
Todd doesn’t just plan to mention the conference on her blog ad nausem. She also posts consistently on Twitter under the username WhinyRamblings, and she plans to increase her Twitter activity level during the conference. “Everybody needs to know all the cool people I meet and all the cool things I do at the conference” Todd explained. “Why wouldn’t everybody want to hear about that? Everything is all about me.”
Todd burst in again. “Have I mentioned how excited I am? Because I am super excited!!!! Make sure you put four exclamation marks, I want everyone to know how excited I am.” Needless to say, Todd is quite excited about the conference.
She hasn’t limited her incessant mentioning of the conference to her online world, either. Todd regularly tells everyone she meets about this conference, from her mailman to the clerk in the convenience store to that homeless guy she saw yesterday. In fact, according to friend Samantha Robbins, Todd has talked about little else since last year’s conference in Chicago.
“At first it wasn’t so bad,” said Robbins “but after a while I just wanted her to shut the hell up about it and talk about anything else. She doesn’t get that non-bloggers couldn’t give a flying rat’s ass about Fincon.”
Constantly talking about the conference isn’t enough for Todd though. She plans to write 154 posts about the conference once it concludes.
“Oh yes, everyone needs to know just how much fun I had. I’ll mention all the other people I talked to and how I learned so much about blogging. I’ll be all motivated to create products, do affiliate links, and guest post on everyone else’s blog for at least 4 days afterwards, until I just get bored and talk about how much fun next year’s conference is going to be.”
Since this year’s conference is only a little more than two weeks away, Mary’s readers should brace themselves for an onslaught of blog posts, comments and tweets over the oncoming days. This reporter has a couple of ways for non-blogger readers to minimize their pain.
They can stop checking Twitter, especially the weekend of the conference. They can also stop reading the offending blogs for a week or so after the conference, timing that will allow them to miss the majority of the conference summary posts. Or they can just unplug from the whole blogosphere for the offending weekend. This writer suggests any of the books on this list.
Bloggers like Mary seem to think their readers care about their travel experiences and that they want to hear about it. It’s time for readers to stand up and demand better, starting with this article. Stick to writing about money.
PK:
August 22nd, 2012 at 8:17 am
Busted!
Just kidding, since it was more of a passing reference (and I won’t
begrudge your mentions on the weekends).
Consider it writing for the commenters, not the readers – since the
majority of comments on most blogs are other bloggers, the commenters
ARE interested. However, the silent majority doesn’t care a bit.
Joe:
August 22nd, 2012 at 10:15 am
Personally I’m much more excited about the North American Marlon Brando Look-Alikes conference.
Paul N:
August 22nd, 2012 at 11:18 am
Sounds like some former video game creators have become PF Bloggers and brought that whole video game convention mentality with them. Personally I have unsubscribed from sites where their direction changed from a PF themed site to a site which seemed to evolve into something quite different. They became “me” sites or when you read through the lines money generating sites to finance trips that they blog about on the site for example. Pretty smart. But it shows the mentality of the some of the followers as well. (I know harsh – but that’s what I like about this site you can say things like that) When you can feel that the heart of the blogger no longer comes through in the written words, the site has become “commercialized”. Take the right step and unsubscribe. Do you really want to hear about the new latest cupcake recipe? Or a backpack that helps you downsize your life so you can do extreme “frugaling” paid via your blog site indirectly
Mochi & Macarons:
August 22nd, 2012 at 12:10 pm
OMG I’m going to TWO PF conferences. Can I just repeat how excited I am!?!?!?
Not.
I’m actually really not going to any, less so that I missed the cutoff dates to buy tickets at $100 a pop ( a steal I know ), but more so that I no longer really blog about money 100%… unless you could writing about how much I spend on shopping
Plus I truly, never wanted to build that into a career. I know what I blog about is specific only to a certain demographic: Some money, Some men/women stuff, Some career, Some crap …. but that’s what I want to do
Mochi & Macarons:
August 22nd, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Curious, but do you feel the same about bloggers who talk about living with less, but don’t live off the blog money? For instance, I write about being a minimalist on and off, but I have an actual career that I work at as my day job. I don’t (and have never) lived off my blog earnings. I also go on a lot of trips….. but I pay for that out of my savings. Just wondering
Dr. Jason Cabler:
August 24th, 2012 at 6:58 am
I love it! I have never seen the necessity in writing anything about FinCon. That’s not what my readers want to hear about. PF bloggers spend too much time writing for each other instead of writing for the public. Too much preaching to the choir.
Philip PT Taylor:
August 24th, 2012 at 7:11 am
Haters gonna hate. Seriously though, I agree with your overall theme that if you are interested in growing a readership, you should probably keep the focus on them vs a flood of meta info like blogging about a conference or even blogging about others who blog about conferences (like you just did here). I think you should do a session on this at next year’s conference.