I learned a lot of great strategies and ideas from David Hobby yesterday at HoCo Blogs’ One-Day Intensive: blogging and social media, but my favorite was “If Twitter is a cocktail party, then your Blog is your apartment.” Twitter is like conversations at a cocktail party, and your Blog is your home. Just as you talk with people at a cocktail party to bring them back to your house, you use Twitter to bring people to your Blog.

David Hobby, professional photographer and expert blogger of Strobist and HoCo360, taught us 50 plus bloggers from all over including New York, Toronto and Ellicott City how to effectively set up and write our blog and how to use social media to drive people to our blog. The message was the same whether you’re using Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Foursquare or Vine (David was not a fan of Facebook) – “Be interesting enough to where people want to share” and you do that by “Letting go and Being Yourself.”

I learned that the name blog comes from weB LOGS, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google and people only stay on blogs for about 1-2 minutes. After yesterday’s seminar, I am going to take David’s advice considering he has a zillion followers and follow less people on Twitter, not post the same exact content simultaneously on all sites and get post ideas from the search list of how people found my blog.

The first question David asked was, “Why are you doing this, and what is your goal?” I am blogging because I love to share my passions with others. I love to report on the concert I went to last night, the game I went to yesterday, or the festival I went to in Ellicott City on Saturday – sharing my thoughts and opinions about my experiences. My goal is to become famous for it. I would love DeenasDays.com to be a destination for music and sports news, as well as events in Ellicott City. And it would be even better if somebody actually paid me to do it because like they say “if you find something you love to do, and you will never work a day in your life.”

Thanks to David Hobby for sharing his blogging and social media strategies and techniques in such an interesting and fun way – he really is quite funny! And thanks to Jessie Newburn for organizing the event, as well as for running HoCo Blogs. I’m looking forward to joining all the local bloggers at the next Howard County Blog Party at Second Chance Saloon on November 6th.

Now it’s time to implement everything I learned yesterday to make my blog even better, so I can reach my goal. Please follow me on Twitter @DeenasDays as I do.