#IFBC17 is finally upon us! We’re looking forward to meeting all of you in Sacramento. Attendees: Make sure to check out the brief reminders at the close of this post.

Get Your Hashtag On – Live Food & Wine Blogging

Taking place Saturday, September 30 from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Live Food & Wine Blogging is one of the premier experiences of the IFBC. Attendees will have the opportunity to try different food and drink products in small-group encounters over a 50-minute period, all the while live blogging, Tweeting, and using other social media platforms in real time.

A 5-minute timer begins the session with different sponsors at each Live Blogging table. The sponsors will introduce what they are serving or pouring to attendees. As the seconds pass by, bloggers and attendees will share their thoughts on the product via live blog posts, or social media blasts. Bloggers can create one blog post published at the end of the session while taking notes via social media, use a WordPress Live Blog Plugin, or even publish multiple posts in 50 minutes, one about each sample.

No matter how you decide to document the event, Tweets will be flying so try and keep up! And don’t forget to tag the sponsor and follow along with #IFBC17.

Live Food & Wine Blogging begins at 4:30 p.m. sharp on Saturday – don’t miss out!

Confirmed participants to date:

• Allergen Inside   @AllergenInside
• Amador Vintners Association   @Amadorwine
• Avocados from Chile   @avocados
• Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, the Original   @theoriginalbv
• BREAD SRSLY   @BreadSRSLY
• California Strawberries   @CAStrawberries
• Capay Valley Ranches   @capayvalleyranches
• Chocolate Fish Co   @ChocFishCoffee
• Classy Hippie Tea   @ClassyHippieTea
• Citrus from Chile   @fruitsfromchile
• Endorphin Chocolates   @endorfinfoods
• Fish People   @fishpeoples
• Ironstone Vineyards   @IronstoneWine
• Lindsay Olives   @lindsayolives
• Maison de Monaco   @MaisondeMonaco
• Mighty Kong Muffins
  
• Nash’s Kombucha   @nashs.kombucha
• Naples Drizzle 
• Nima Sensor   @NimaSensor
• Preservation Company @PreservationCo_
• Spice Mama   @spicemamasf

#IFBC17 Attendees – A few brief reminders:

• Don’t forget your three required #IFBC17 blog posts if you registered at the discounted blogger rate. You can share your posts here and even register to win a return trip to Sacramento!
• If you have questions for our Hot Topics in Food Blogging panel, please submit them here. We’re looking forward to a lively discussion! All questions and topics welcome.
• Get to know who’s coming here.
• Connect with us on social here, here, and here and use the hashtag #IFBC17.
• Lastly, make sure to give #IFBC17 sponsors a lot of social love – they help us to put on a great event and none of this would be possible without them. (Attendees: see your registration packet for a list of our sponsors’ social handles.)

Cort Tafoya is a Google Analytics and SEO expert. His website is ClearMarketingAnalytics.com and he’ll be sharing his Google Analytics expertise with us on Saturday, September 30 at #IFBC17. If you’re looking to begin using Google Analytics, or wanting to learn how to make it work better for your blog, check out his session! Not yet registered? Click here.

Roughly six years ago I got my first ever login to a web analytics software. It was for a comedy site I was running and I wanted to know more about how we were doing.

Pageviews, total visitors, number of return visitors, our sources of traffic, events taking place on the website – all of these metrics held real value to the company. I jumped right into our top traffic sources and our most viewed content and what I learned helped define our editorial calendar and content distribution strategy for the next two years!

From that experience to now, web analytics has been a big part of what I do. As a digital marketing consultant I help companies employ tactics to build targeted web traffic, and then measure how that web traffic performs. Google Analytics is my go to web tracking software of choice. From its release until now dozens of new features have been added, addressing numerous pain points for bloggers, e-commerce companies, content sites and more.

With Google Analytics you can learn what city your visitors come from, what device they’re using, what page they landed on when first visiting your site, and what page they exited from. You can learn what source brought them to you – from Facebook and Twitter to Google or Bing and every referral website in between. With Google Analytics you can also track how many of these visitors subscribe to your newsletter, share your content on social media, download documents or play videos.

Lastly, from a user experience standpoint, Google Analytics provides everything you need to get information automatically. You can setup, share and export reports. You can even set automatic alerts that go to your phone if your content goes viral, or if your website goes down.

On September 30th at the International Food Blogger Conference I’ll be talking about these Google Analytics features and much more, providing a live overview of the software using Google Analytics’ free demo account. Once you’re equipped with the skills to find real insights about your data, taking the next steps and acting on that data will be easy.

All of those attending will be encouraged to access this same, free demo account, and follow along with me during the presentation. For people relatively new or unfamiliar with Google Analytics, this session will be incredibly valuable, and is sure to help you view your data in a completely new light.