Breakout Sessions: Wine Blogging

As we noted in our previous post, on Saturday at the 2012 Wine Bloggers Conference we will have three hours of breakout sessions with three sessions each hour. The nine sessions in total are broken up into three different categories: Wine and the Wine Industry, Wine Blogging, and Wine Tasting. We’ll have one of each category per hour.

Here we present the three Wine Blogging breakout sessions:

Research on Wine Blogging: We are lucky enough to have three Canadian professors (David Cray, Alex Ramirez, and Louise Heslop) from Carleton University in Ottawa who have done research on our favorite subject – wine blogging! The study analyzes opinions from 200 active wine bloggers on why they write, what they offer their readers, and how they interact with the wine industry. They have done additional research with a graduate student on the content of wine blogs and how this affects readers’ impressions. The research will soon be published in the International Journal of Wine Business Research. At least one of these professors will be in attendance to talk about this research and answer your questions.

Monetization: We all know Google Adwords is probably not going to make you rich via your wine blog. However, are there other ways to turn your hobby into an income producer? Hear from a panel that will discuss various forms of monetization including advertising, building a brand to engage in consulting or create events, writing a book or e-book, and more. Speakers include:

• Zeke Camusio owns The Outsourcing Company, a Portland Internet marketing company. He is a serial entrepreneur, marketing speaker, and author of The Internet Marketing Bible. He has even written articles on blog monetization, so is a real expert in the subject.
• Russ Kane from Vintage Texas recently published The Wineslinger Chronciles and will talk about how to go from blog to book.
• Joe Roberts from the blog 1 Wine Dude was the 2010 Best Overall Wine Blog award winner. He has leveraged his blogging success to provide consulting and set up wine events as well as writing a paid freelance wine column for Playboy.com.

Social Media and Your Blog: How can you best use Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube, and other social media sites in conjunction with your blog? We will be treated to a talk on this by expert Ryan Lewis, President of Bonfire Social Media in Portland. Bonfire is a social media marketing consulting firm that does everything from developing social media marketing strategies to implementing them to providing training seminars on the subject.