Our Savvy Blogging Summit Experience

This past weekend we were blessed to participate in The Savving Blogging Summit in Breckenridge, CO.  We were thankful to be selected to attend the conference and could never have imagined what we were about to encounter.  The speakers were incredible and gave us more than we could chew.  Our fellow blogging participants were truly savvy and many have become dear friends.

We wanted to share with you just a small sample of what we learned so you will know what to expect in the upcoming months.  Our commitment to make this blog an amazing resource for you and your family was always on our mind as we attended – we love what we do and we want to make it that much better!

• Continue to tell our story – On first glace, this sounds corny.  Doesn’t it?  But really this is what we love.  We want to share with you our story on where we’ve been and on who we are.  We want you to rejoice with our successes and to grieve with our falls.  We have heard that many of you know exactly where we were, are, or going to be – so we want this story to help you no matter your financial goals.  We don’t know the rest of the story but we know we want to share it with you.
• Continue to tell your story – Just as important to us we want to hear your story – and we want others to know it as well.  As we make this journey together, learning more about your dreams, joys, and pitfalls will help us and others too.  Keep sharing with us – we love your story and love to share it!
• Quality photographs and images are important – Thrity Cas and I know that our photography skills aren’t stellar.  We still laugh at some of the pictures we’ve taken of recipes or simple dates and have realized that we just couldn’t share something that “inedible-looking” or laughable.  However we are working on those skills and have learned some great tips to make our pictures better.  Maybe we’ll have to share those bloopers with you one day; just promise you don’t laugh too loudly.
• Tips for a better site design – We met some designers that helped us understand concepts to improve our look-and-feel of the site and your usability.  And, in a couple of months we are looking forward to revealing a brand new, improved site design of our own!
• Found new tools that will help your user experience – Along side the amazing bloggers and speakers, we had some great companies tell us about some new and improved products for our blogs.
  • Improved search capability – This week we will be giving a small face-lift to the way you can search on our site using Lijit.  Every little way that we can streamline or improve the quality of the site will just make your experience that much better!
  • Streamlined email subscriptions and RSS feeds – We are extremely excited about this feature!  We were randomly selected as the one blog to get a FREE lifetime, premium subscription to FeedBlitz which will continue to make our daily digests that much better and enhance our RSS feeds!  We are still learning the power of this tool, so bear with us over the next few weeks.  Oh yeah, sign up for our daily emails if you haven’t done so already.
• Building community – As we stated above, we want to hear your story.  We really think that part of that is by hearing you in our comments on the site, on The Thrifty Couple on Facebook, and through talking with you via Twitter (@thriftycouple).  Keep us informed as how we can facilitate more discussion.  We really love hearing from you and love it when we see random discussions break out by you all!  We can’t wait to know you more.

Our brains our full and we are working through our to-do lists.  But we cannot close without thanking The Savvy Bloggers for putting on this amazing conference.  They executed flawlessly, the speakers were brilliant, and the accommodations were stellar!  Who would have guessed that this was their first conference – definitely no one that attended.

We loved beautiful Colorado – what a beautiful creation our God has created!  We don’t usually post many sweepstakes, but was hoping that one of you might win if we did. We couldn’t believe how beautiful the mountains were nor believe how clean the air. The sweepstakes require you to answer a quick question about Colorado (think Google ;)) and then submit your basic information. Let us know if you win!