If you’ve never heard of BlogHer before, it’s one of the most influential blogging networks for women online. They are so influential that presidential nominees in the United States have sought their approval and influence in the past two elections. Besides its political influence, BlogHer is a great resource for women both seasoned and new to blogging. BlogHer provides community, collective bargaining power, exposure and advertorial magnetization resources to its members. Founded in 2005 by Elisa Camahort, Jory Des Jardins and Lisa Stone, BlogHer has grown over the past decade to an astounding reach of more than 100 million visitors a month.  It’s fair to say that they are kind of a big deal and the crowd you want to be in with. This year, they held their tenth annual conference appropriately in Silicon Valley, where they held their first conference and started as an organization. However, this year brought over 5,000 attendees.

I attended the BlogHer ‘14 conference on behalf of Web Hosting Hub to further our commitment to women in online media.  It also made a lot of sense, as we share many of the same values, and these values can be seen in our commitment to provide quality, reliable, affordable and socially conscious hosting. As Web Hosting Hub continues to grow, we will continue to strive to be a company that meets the needs of the mom blogger, dad blogger, citizen journalist and any blogger or small business looking to get online.  At Web Hosting Hub, we promise to make it easy and affordable without the hassle or having to compromise with the morally objectionable behaviors and marketing ploys of certain other hosting companies.   It’s values like these and our commitment to staying employee owned, valuing the family, the customer, the environment and being socially conscious that makes us different.  It’s what makes us better.  Add in our outstanding customer service and up-time, the majority of the other hosting companies fall bar behind.

BlogHer and Web Hosting Hub share a lot of things in common and it’s why I believe companies could be doing a better job at representing women in technology.  Web Hosting Hub is one of those companies and as I said earlier, we will strive to be the number one choice in web hosting among women.  At Web Hosting Hub, we value the relationships we have with our customers and partners across the web and this is one of the reasons why we furthered our commitment to women in online media by attending BlogHer ’14. On a personal level, I wanted to get to know the attendees who make this organization so great, meet and interview some of the key speakers, and to connect with as many bloggers as possible.

We sponsored bloggers to attend BlogHer ’14 on behalf of Web Hosting Hub, which was awesome, because I ended up making many friends as a result of their connections and willingness to include me as one of their own.  This is what relationships in business and life are all about.  Thanks again, Julie and Ellie.  Finally, like blogging, I believe the marketing approach needs to be soft, personable and independent of your traditional marketing tactics you would expect at a conference in order to achieve exceptional results. (Left: Julie DeNeen of FabulousBlogging.com, Ellie Petrov of CreativeGeekery.com & myself.)

I’m not going to share all of my marketing secrets with you, but one aspect to this “non-traditional” marketing tactic is that a concerted effort was made to find the most compelling information for our customers and the community at large.  So, I conducted interviews with Elisa Camahort Page, the Co-Founder of BlogHer, Melissa Barnes the Head of Global Brands at Twitter, Charlie Capen and Andy Herald at HowToBeADad.com, Julie DeNeen at FabulousBlogging.com, and Peg Fitzpatrick the Head of Social Media at Canva.  Each one of these interviews can be found on our blog and they are aimed at covering the most important topics bloggers will be looking for when starting their next blog or website.  We’re doing this at Web Hosting Hub because we believe in building relationships and welcome conversations between bloggers, brands and industry leaders.  This is an aspect of our social consciousness at Web Hosting Hub because we are built on transparency and thrilling the customer.