Did you November is National Novel Writing Month (hence, NaNoWrimo). NaNoWrimo is an interesting approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1 and end November 30. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word).  This requires you to write a minimum of 1,667 words a day which can be very daunting.  This is why using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for NaNoWrimo would take some of the pressure off. I know my sister would love to write a novel one day.  It is honestly her lifelong dream.  She went to college and majored in English, so she could do it.  However, she is super busy (and this is before she even has kids!).  When I learned about Dragon Naturally Speaking, I knew this would be a perfect fit for her.  This can definitely help her blogging (of course, she is a blogger too!).  However, I personally don’t think she thinks she has the time for something of this magnitude.

If you want to see how this would help you, you have to take the Dragon’s typing speed test! I tried it with Will (my 16 month old) hanging on me (so I really do type faster, but this is what my life is like normally. That is why blogging usually takes me all day. LOL  Here’s my test results:

Let me tell you, I couldn’t believe how fast the speaker was compared to my typing.  Granted, I could have typed faster without Will, but I still couldn’t have kept up with the speaker.  There is no way.  I think I know what I am buying my sister for Christmas.  She has some big changes coming her way and this would allow her to both continue blogging and to write her novel.

I may not be writing a novel, but man, I can see so many uses for myself with this software.  Since I have five blogs and two little kids, I could definitely get more work done with this versus me typing out my blog posts (see score up above - lol).  This would make it much easier to write posts for my travel blog when we are on the road, and I could write my posts for my cooking blog while I am cooking the recipe I am going to write about.  I could take the time I save and spend it with my family instead of working.  It would be nice to be able to go to bed before midnight.  Do you want to see how easy this is to use?

As you can see, anyone can use this software. It is that easy.  Don’t believe me?  Read some of these Dragon Reviews. I actually know people who have this and they absolutely love it.  I am still working on getting my hands on one of these, so I can save some of my precious time.

For any of you who I normally drop Entrecards on, I missed you all yesterday with all my blogs.  The first time I attempted to drop, the entire system was down.  When I tried to do it last night, I messed up big time.

During the day yesterday, I had downloaded a Windows Update.  All day long, it kept wanting me to reboot which I did not want to do.  I went grocery shopping last night, and while I was gone, my laptop rebooted itself.  When it did that, it installed the updates.  I think it installed Service Pack 1 for Vista.  No biggy, I thought.  Boy was I wrong.

The updates took over an hour to install which was the time I needed to drop my cards. I would have put on my Dansko shoes if I thought it would have made it faster. Trust me, a lot of swearing was going on here. The crazy thing is that I think my laptop is slower now. Aren’t updates suppose to make it faster?  Needless to say, I apologize to anyone I missed dropping on yesterday.

We learned on Day 1 that we had to get there bright and early to make sure that we got a plugin for our laptops.  Without that, day one didn’t have a lot of blogging or twittering going on.  Well, at least not from me.  Day 2 started with a keynote speech from Merlin Mann.  I have to say that it was one of the best keynote speeches I have ever heard.  His speech was about “don’t be a dick”.  Everything he said was true.  He even asked the audience to disagree with what he said, but no one did, because he was right.

The next panel was Social Network and included Michael Brito, Sean Bonner, Etan Horowitz, and Lena West. This was another panel that really wasted my time. First, we had Lena West stating that she was too busy to actually do it herself. My first question was then why are you on this panel? Then she managed to offend half the room (google: Lena West and mommybloggers to find out why. Trust me, there was no
airbrush do over. The more she tried to explain herself, the worse it got). They pretty much said to use Twitter and Facebook.  Umm, yeah, knew that already. Now, tell me how to use them to help me, because I really don’t get Facebook at all. There are also dozens of social networking sites out there — and nobody even mentioned them.

Next, there was Loren Feldman. I love Loren Feldman. He speaks his mind, and he makes awesome videos! It was almost breathtaking to hear what equipment he uses. We learned that you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to do good videos on your blog.

Next, we had the plug-in panel with Loren Baker, Jonathan Dingman, and Erik Hersman. This was definitely cool, because I learned I am using a lot of the wordpress plugins that I should be!

Last, there was the Blog Design Makeover Panel with Scott Allen,Matt Blancarte, and Christopher Schmitt. My only complaint with this is that they were very rushed. Also, the designs were nice, but way out of the price range of us normal bloggers.

In a nutshell, that was the conference.  I have one more post about the IzeaHunt that we did, and that will pretty much summarize the conference.  Would I go again?  I’ll be honest — I don’t know.  It is a lot of money.  Did I learn things?  Yes.  However, does any of it help me to monetize?  Not really.  I really thing they need to have breakout sessions, and you can pick and choose what sessions to go to.  That way, you can reach the middle ground bloggers and the beginning bloggers.  What I found lacking was that none of the big name big money bloggers really told us how to get from middle group to up on top.  Telling me what you are doing now really doesn’t help me all that much.

See this picture? A lot of the time, it looked like this. I didn’t know that we needed to get auto insurance quotes before we left, but I won’t tell you how many times we got lost downtown, because everything was one way!  I also won’t  mention how many times we almost turned the wrong way on a one way street!  What a pain!  Next time, Ted, please give us directions to these places!!! There and back!

The theme for the evening was funny hats if you can’t tell from this picture of Heather and Ted. I don’t remember the name of the bar we were at, but the food was excellent, and I got to talk to many bloggers and Izea team members that evening.

We also got a bit silly afterwards:

If you can’t tell, it was a fun evening.

I’ve been meaning to get this online, but you know how real life gets in the way!  LOL I do have to thank Christine for all the great pictures I am going to be using while I blog about this. I got to Orlando and found out that my camera had died. Right now, it is at Sony to get fixed!

Jeremy Schoemaker was our opening keynote speaker. He genuinely looked nervous to be up there. We were able to learn that in 4 short years he went from a nobody to a somebody.  He gave us a lot on insight into his life and how he got to be where he was and possibly what we need to do to get where he is.

Susie Gardner was up next. Her presentation was about content. As a person who has blogged for two years, I personally did not care for her presentation. It was geared towards the beginner blogger, and I have moved well beyond that. I felt like half of us in the room could have given that speech. However, I did talk to some beginning bloggers, and they found her presentation helpful and interesting.

We got to go to lunch from there. We ate at The Globe on Wall Street since it was the least busy. The food was excellent.  However, the service was slow.  Very Slow.  Though, I guess all the places were that way since some of the next speakers weren’t back in time for their presentations.  However, we didn’t know that and ended up almost running to get back in time!  I definitely did not need any weight loss pills for this trip. That walk/run back to the conference burned off my lunch no problem!  In the picture (which Drew took!) is Drew, his wife Allison, Heather, me, and Christine (and yes, in that order).

Next up was the big money bloggers panel and Drew got to moderate it.  We got to learn the tricks of how they all got where they are.  On the panel was John Chow, Neil Patel, Stephanie Agresta, and Jeremy Schoemaker.  This was a very interesting panel.  One of the questions was what was your biggest mistake or surprise.  The answer that surprised me the most was from John Chow — it was the lengths that Google went about scraping his site from their search engines.  He’s a nobody compared to Google, and they went after them the way they did!

Next up was the growing traffic panel with Tony Hung, Lea Alcantara, Brian Clark, Alex Schek, Steve Spalding, and Tamar Weinberg.  I’m going to tell you a funny story that you cannot repeat.  I was listening to these speakers and was seriously confused.  Finally, I leaned over to Christine and asked her what this had to do with what advertisers wanted.  She informed me that that was the next panel.  Whoops!  Needless to say, I didn’t get a whole lot out of this.  Being that I work freelance as a social media manager, I pretty much already knew what they were talking about.  However, what I didn’t like was that they really didn’t talk about all the networks out there.  You can get some really good traffic from sites like stumble, reddit, mixx, kirtsy, etc.  Its not all digg all the time.  I personally don’t get much traffic from there compared to the other sites.

The next panel was the “what advertisers want” panel.  It included Jon Buschlen, Katia Adams, Michael Brito, Sean Jackson, Michael Jenkins, and Randall Richards. It was nice to hear what advertisers were looking for. However, anyone who has done any paid blogging already knew what they had to say.  These were advertisers that “get it”.  Unfortuntely, there is a whole ton of advertisers out there who do not and want 20 links for $5 and can’t figure out why the bloggers won’t do their opps.

After that, we had Ted announcement.  This is when we learned about Cloud Shout, and we got our alpha keys for it!  It was an awesome presentation.  After that, we went to the hotel to get ready to go out!