Haven Design & Blogging Conference Day 3

Today I’m sharing my second and last post that recaps my first blogging conference to Haven. You can find my first post HERE.

Saturday

Haven will definitely wear you out! I was up until midnight and Lauren and I walked down to breakfast at 8:00 a.m. to kick off the day. This is the outfit I wore on Saturday.

We had a really nice view outside our room of the pool. I packed my swimsuit, but never had time to swim.

I wanted to share with you just how much swag I brought back home. I also traded business cards with a lot of other bloggers and the sponsors. So much stuff!!! It is going to be fun to try everything out over the next few months.

More swag.

Another bag of swag. 🙂

We also got a free Charleston Haven tee. Hometalk gave me a t-shirt, too!

Haven really did a good job at decorating the place.

One of my favorite classes that I took was The Power of Instastories. Some of the things they said were that 70% of people watch their Instastories with the volume off, so captions are important and that only 30% of what you post should be something you’re trying to sell. They also said that more people are watching Instastories than scrolling through the regular Instagram photo feed.

The class was taught by 3 blogging friends, Erin Kern, Lauren McBride and Holly Lauritzen. They all shared their own take and advice on Instastories. This was one of the hottest classes at Haven, everyone agreed that it was so helpful!

After a quick lunch, I headed to the Hometalk Orange Tank, because my friend Lauren was in the $500 category. She was pitching a puppy mud room and it was such a great idea! She had so many people come up to her to tell her they loved her idea afterwards.

Nicole from Repurpose Life shared this adorable farmhouse room that she recreated in dollhouse size! SO cute. She was in the $2,500 category.

This treehouse makeover idea was really unique.

The snacks were different on Saturday, with veggie and fruit cups, trail mixes, cupcakes and more.

After Orange Tank we attended the Secrets to Awesome Video class and I grabbed myself some caffeine! I love how Trevor Debth included a little laminated sheet with this class.

I have a YouTube channel and I’ve done some videos, but I struggle with it a lot and videos take me forever to do. I want to learn more and Trevor Debth offered up a lot of great advice on equipment, lighting, settings on your camera, etc.

We also attended a SEO class taught by Sabrina Snyder and WOW. It was chalked full on information. A lot of the instructors are sharing their slides on the Haven Maven group and I’m excited to go back over them. I really can’t wait to try out a lot to things that I learned on my blog. SEO is something I really need to work on!

Lauren and I cut out of the Haven conference an hour early and missed the closing. I didn’t realize they gave out a lot of giveaways at this time and I missed out on a $50 Quikcrete bag of cement! I may contact them later to work on a concrete project, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at doing something involving concrete (but, it intimidates me!). We left the conference early to do some fun and exciting touristy things around Charleston since our time was limited there. We took a historic carriage tour and it was so informative! Our mules names were Bread and Butter, which was so cute.

We saw a lot of historic buildings of importance on the tour. It was really informative!

After the carriage ride, we had time to walk over to Rainbow Row. I really wanted to see it! Lauren took this photo of me with Brian.

Then we walked over to our restaurant for dinner, Poogan’s Porch. It has scallops on the menu and a ghost! Who can resist that?

A little grave marker for I guess the Poogan dog outside the restaurant.

They had a great drink menu at the restaurant. I got a Rose sangria and I can’t remember what Brian got, but it tasted sort of like a pina colada.

We got pimento fritters for an appetizer, they were SO good. The biscuits were AH-mazing! We took 2 leftover biscuits back for breakfast the next morning.