Two weekends ago I hopped on a plane with Kristina to go meet Justine, Marissa, Candace, Erinn and a crew of other fabulous creative ladies at Blogpodium! You might remember I went last year and had the most amazing time so I was absolutely thrilled to attend again this year after hearing of some big changes.

I loved that this year seemed to place a focus on how to make your blog a business and give practical advice and tips to put into action to monetize your blog while continuing to stick to your voice and brand.

When we arrived we checked in, grabbed some breakfast and did a little networking before waiting for the day to begin.

The first workshop I attended this year was an Instagram workshop. Instagram is by far my favourite social channel so I was so excited to learn more tips and practice my photography during the workshop led by Alyssa from one of my favourite blogs, Random Acts of Pastel. There were tons of props and goodies and a perfect space filled with diffused natural light so the setting really couldn't be better.

After the Instagram workshop, I attended a panel discussion on working with brands. It was very interesting to hear how different brands feel about being approached by bloggers, working with bloggers and even the pros and cons of bloggers working through agents. In my opinion there's not enough information and open conversation out there when it comes to blogging as a business how to know what to charge and how to go about approaching brands so I really enjoyed this frank panel discussion.

After the panel, I stayed in the main room to listen to Gemma's workshop on monetizing. Gemma has a fantastic blog full of great resources for bloggers and her talk was a great continuation of her knowledge on how to grow your blog from a hobby that you love, to a money making business you love.

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Next up on the agenda was a lunch break (the food was delish!) followed by the keynote presentation from Tiffany Pratt! Now, I love Tiffany Pratt. I think Tiffany is a fascinating woman who has had quite the career spanning in fashion, design, creative art and now into TV and designing clothing and accessories. Her talk was inspiring and motivating to a room full of creatives chomping at the bit to make their creative businesses flourish.

As a bonus, I won one of Tiffany's books and stepped out to briefly speak to her. She's probably one of the sweetest souls I've met in a long time. You can tell she's truly passionate about what she does and she took the time to speak to every one of us who wanted to meet her. She also happens to be the best hugger I've ever met which makes me love her even more.

After the keynote presentation, I jetted off to spend the rest of my afternoon in Speed Networking. I was so excited to have the opportunity this year to get 7 minutes of face to face time with so many great brands to pitch working together. I had a few really great meetings and have high hopes that some really exciting partnerships will come from these conversations so you'll have to stay tuned to see what comes of those meetings!

I can't believe how quickly the day flew by. This year seemed like it went by even faster than the last. I'm looking forward to getting together again with some of the girls to chat more about what we all took away from the conference and swap notes from a few of the workshops I wasn't able to attend while speed networking. At the end of the day we all got together to listen to a few words from the event organizer Jen, then before we knew it we had our goodie bags and were out the door!

I think that this year, much like last year, one of the greatest takeaways was the time spent with so many amazing and inspiring women. I really do strongly believe in collaboration over competition and it was so refreshing to spend time with other women who are running their own creative businesses and supporiting one another in such a beautiful way.

This was Justine's first Blogpodium experience and today she's talking about her time in TO on her blog - go check it out!