Parting is such sweet sorrow, so FitBloggin’ sent us out with a Goodby Reception hosted by Nutrilite on the final night of the conference. Besides the yummy food, there was dancing and fun galore.

Chef Jason Roberts opened the dinner with a few words, giving away prizes to lucky attendees and discussing BodyKey by Nutrilite, letting us know that every person in attendance would be receiving a BodyKey Jump Start Kit.

The kit contained a duffel bag, three different diet supplements, a bag of meal replacement shake powder and a shaker cup. They offered samples of the shakes during the reception, which was great to cool down with during all the dancing! During the final breakfast the following morning, there was a “Swag Exchange” table set up for leftover items, and there were products that none of the other bloggers could take home with them because they were flying and had limited space. Because we’re “Local” and drove to the conference, I had unlimited space, and the organizers encouraged me to take whatever was left as they would have to leave it at the hotel otherwise. So as you may have gathered from my Wordless Wednesday photo, I got quite a bit of extra stuff – in fact, a pallet worth – and that included a few extra Jump Start Kits. Super Coupon Girl felt very lucky that day, and since no one else could take it due to weight, I stopped it from going to waste. 🙂 I’m pumped about the meal replacement shake and extra shaker bottles – Jai and I use both of these things on a daily basis anyway, and what I tasted of the flavor (Rich Dutch Chocolate) was very good. I don’t know if we will use the diet supplements or not, so we may give those away, although Jai totally took one of the Slimmetry pills our first day home just because it has some caffeine in it. By the end of the conference, we’d only gotten a few hours of sleep total the entire time, so it was an emergency situation. 😉

Nutrilite also had a table in the Expo Hall that I visited to learn more about their vitamin line. Every swag bag contained a box of Perfect Pack vitamins, which I shared with my family who were nice enough to let us stay with them during our time in Portland – they take vitamins regularly and were happy to receive them!

Next to the Nutrilite Expo table was a computer quiz that would recommend vitamins for you based on your answers. As you can see, it recommended an Immunity Health Pack for me – when I put in how little sleep I got that week, I’m surprised the machine didn’t blow up! 😉

During FitBloggin’, I had a chance to try out a Total Gym XLS for the first time, both in the Expo Hall and during their demo session How Total Gym Can Change Your Life.

I’ve never tried a “Home gym” unit before and I had a lot of fun going through all the different exercises. The Total Gym XLS can be used for pretty much anything, and I loved how I could use it without having to put strain on my knees.

Personally, I’ve always preferred leaving my house to go to a gym. I always figured that home gym equipment would go unused – Hello, ab roller I bought in the ’90s and still haven’t used! – and working from home, I picture trying to do a workout and getting interrupted by the doorbell, phone ringing, 32 unread email notifications dinging my phone…you get the picture! However, in recent months we’ve had to put a hold on our gym membership due to budget and time concerns. I’ve been so swamped that I find myself wishing I had something I could do for 10 minutes in my PJs before taking a shower. It’s become apparent that I need some kind of home routine that I can take up until things calm down and I can pick up my gym membership again; and I must say, I think the advantage to something like this is that you can use it for a whole variety of exercises rather than just one thing (Like my ab roller!). It also folds up to the point where you could slide it under a bed, which was pretty impressive. I got a great workout during the demo and my arms were sore in a good way for days afterwards!

Everyone at the panel who was willing to get up and demo the machines in front of the other attendees was given a fun little gift bag with a shirt and water bottles. Now I have a new tee to work out in!

While I was at FitBloggin’, I attended a panel called Turning Your Blog Into a Business – Key to Monetizing Your Work, presented by Sarah Beeskow Blay of ShareASale, Phyllis Strand of Phyllis4Fitness and Laura Yamin of Joyful Shimmy. This session covered business topics like affiliate marketing, ad networks, and other monetization strategies.

ShareASale also had a table in the Expo Hall – I’ve been in their affiliate network for a little while, so it was fun to meet with them in person. Some of their merchants had provided samples to give away to attendees, so I got to take home a few fun things. One was a grab bag from The Muscle & Fitness Store & Jacked in a Box – this is a monthly subscription service filled with products aimed at the bodybuilding/fitness market, so my goodie bag had things like protein bars and drink mixes. I also received a bag of Crunchy Clusters plus a box of Slender Sticks from PureFormulas – yay for FitBloggin’ snacks!

I was also given this headband from TrailHeads, which has a hole in the back to loop your ponytail through. How genius is this?! It drives me nuts when my headband flies off my head while working out, or gets all tangled up with my hair and headphones. This will be very useful!

ShareASale also had a fun giveaway at their table – when you registered for one of their merchant’s affiliate programs, you were eligible to win a prize from that retailer. Being the sweeper that I am, I naturally said “Sign me up for all of them!” It paid off, and I won this fun bag of bath/body products from Hips And Curves. It stands to reason that the webmaster of Contest Corner would win something at FitBloggin’! 😉

Optimizing Recovery – Maximizing Post-Exercise Nutrition was an interesting FitBloggin’ panel presented by Dr. Wendy Bazilian on behalf of the Got Chocolate? team. This session went over a lot of information regarding the best food choices to make after a workout and why.

Dr. Bazilian said that taste, affordability, and convenience are almost as important when considering an post-workout snack in order to make it accessible and realistic for most people. I personally agree with her there!

Chocolate milk has become a popular post-recovery drink because of its combination of protein, carbs, electrolytes and vitamins. Obviously, this session was presented by the the Got Chocolate? panel, but there was a collection of scientific sources cited. I found it to be very informative overall, so I took a lot of photos of the slides presented for future reference – I wanted to be able to remember everything so I could share it with Jai! I’ve included my photos as thumbnails below, so you can click through to learn more.

Last Saturday brought us FitBloggin‘s keynote event/party extravaganza, Ignite Fitness. During this event, 14 bloggers gave 5-minute slideshow/speech presentations ranging from inspirational to humorous. You can watch all of the presentations on YouTube, so check it out! I had to take some photos of the meme slides from DubyaWife‘s presentation, How to be Socially Awesome: On & Off the Internet!

Any presentation that includes a slide of Conspiracy Keanu is OK with me. 😉

The party also included a parfait bar with ingredients from Attune and Driscoll’s Berries. This was my creation!

I got some cereals and graham crackers from Attune in my swag bag, so these Corn Flakes have been my “Breakfast of the blogger champions” while I catch up on the mountain of work since getting back from the conference. 😉

Oh yeah, and this happened too! I haven’t sung karaoke in about 7 years – with good reason – but when I saw that they had Maroon 5 in their songbook I resigned myself to my fate. I got up and announced, “I’m about to sing my Twitter username!” I must be crazy to do this at a social media conference, but fortunately I don’t think anyone took a video, so your eardrums are safe for now. 😉

One of the unique spots to be found at FitBloggin’ was the Amana recharge suite. This spacious room had couches, cold water and outlets available to recharge your electronics at – very smart! While I was at the conference I ran down 3 sets of rechargeable batteries and had my iPhone almost run out of power each day, so they knew us bloggers would be needing a place to charge up. 😉 Amana offer a range of applicances, some of which were on display and given away at the end of the conference to one of the attendees – how cool is that? I had fun chatting to the Amana representatives – since Jai and I are just completing our kitchen remodel, it seems like we’ve done nothing but think about kitchen accessories for the last few months! – and checking out their futuristic, body-activated computer station that told you more about each appliance.

One of the workout classes I signed up for at FitBloggin’ was the JumpSport Fitness Trampoline BOUNCE Camp – I’ve heard such great things about trampolines as a low-impact exercise for people like me who are recovering from knee issues and the like. However, my knees were already feeling the strain from the previous day’s bootcamp and walking all day, so I decided it would be best to skip the higher-intensity class and not over-exert myself, since pushing myself too hard at the gym is what caused my injury to begin with. I was disappointed, but luckily JumpSport had a booth in the Expo Hall where I could give the trampoline a try at my own pace!

Such a fun workout and easy on my knees – definitely something I’d like to look into further!

FitBloggin’ hosted a number of snack breaks during the conference so that we could all take 5 and grab a snack. The first of these was held by NatureMade – that’s right, the vitamin company. And no, they didn’t feed us vitamins. 😉

What we actually got were cups of shaved ice in fruit flavors inspired by VitaMelts. These are a new line of chewable – or should I say, melt-in-your-mouthable – supplements in flavors like Mixed Berry and Chocolate Mint. As we enjoyed our shaved ice, we learned more about VitaMelts and snagged a few samples.

I really wish I could take VitaMelts in a time machine and hand them to 6-year-old me, because it would have made my daily vitamin routine a whole lot more pleasant! 😀 I love that they offer a chocolate melatonin supplement – melatonin is something I buy fairly regularly, because I do find that taking it occasionally does help with insomnia. My sleep schedule has been totally whacked since the conference so this was probably good timing!

FitBloggin’ had a great mix of panels focusing on both health and wellness and general blogging topics. I attended two great sessions about SEO while I was at the conference – the first one, Building Your Blog Through Organic SEO And Image Optimization, was presented by Nicole Bullock of Cute Culture Chick and offered great info, regardless of your familiarity with the topic.

I got all kinds of interesting takeaways from this session and also had a chance to run two questions by Nicole that I’ve been mulling over for a while: The first was the debate as to whether or not internal links and links to social media profiles should be “Nofollow” or “Dofollow” – Nicole’s opinion was that a normal, non-anchor-text dofollow link is fine here – and the second was about duplicate content. As I rebrand and make this my primary lifestyle blog, I’d like to start publishing my “Top Ten With…” interview series on this site so that Contest Corner can continue to focus on serving up sweepstakes. However, I don’t intend to move any of the old content over here – the archives on Contest Corner will remain, I’d just like the series to start fresh over here. My concern is that two sites using the same interview questions could cause a duplicate content issue, even though each interview is unique. Is your head hurting yet? 😉 At any rate, Nicole agreed that this is a tricky one and advised that I do some digging into Google’s most recent policies on duplicate content to glean the best mode of action. It was great having a chance to ask these questions in person, as I feel it’s a little easier to explain than typing out a wall of text on a forum or email.

The second SEO panel I attended was Video SEO, presented by Lisa Johnson. Lisa is a trainer who makes fitness videos for YouTube and had all kinds of great tips for making higher quality, optimized videos and how that benefits both your YouTube channel and blog.

You’ll have to forgive the photos – due to crazy circumstances I had only gotten 45 minutes of sleep the night before, so I think the blurry photos sum up my mental state at the time. 😉 Fortunately I took notes and still absorbed all of the info even though I looked like a zombie! I wasn’t articulate enough to risk asking a question at this session, but I wish I’d gotten a chance to ask her more about YouTube comments. Lisa mentioned the importance of “Likes” and comments on your YouTube video, as they make your video appear higher in search rankings, so she said it’s important to reply to every comment you get. I’m wondering how she deals with trolls – I’m not talking about those who disagree with me, but rather people who post explicit comments on my videos. The people who comment on my videos either mistakenly think I’m a “MILF” and go into great detail about it, or they think I’m a total dummy – which is fine, but I don’t really see an appropriate way to respond to either. 😉

If you have an interest in SEO, I’d highly recommend checking out the live blogs which I have linked to for each session – I really enjoyed both of these presentations and filled my notebook with some good suggestions!