ChoppedCon Taking Place in Kansas City

Beginning today, food bloggers are temporarily leaving the blogosphere to join their cohorts at ChoppedCon 2015 at the River Market Event Place in Kansas City, Missouri. The conference has a full schedule tomorrow, with speaker sessions covering topics such as building your brand on social media, the power of video, ads and sponsored posts, tips to avoiding blogger burn out, and others.

ChoppedCon brings together different communities of people with a passion for food around the core ideas of love, family, and community, and finding ways to share that via blogging to a larger audience.

The second annual ChoppedCon fills a gap by offering food bloggers a central location to gather and share their experiences and meet with key food-oriented publishers/leaders, speaker and sponsors. “The big
conferences took place on the coasts, and it is an expensive trip for the average food blogger to attend,” says Marly McMillen who writes a vegan food blog called called www.namelymarly.com from the Kansas City area, and organizes ChoppedCon, with sponsorship support from several organizations. McMillen also hosts a weekly podcast called Chopped, featuring food bloggers from around the country.

The idea for ChoppedCon struck McMillen while attending a conference in Virginia. “I thought, ‘I don’t know why there isn’t a food blogging conference in Kansas City,’” McMillen says. “There are a lot of food bloggers in the Midwest. It is an easy drive from many points; you can’t do that with San Francisco or Portland. It is a long drive for a lot of people. And you can reach a lot of places with a direct flight from Kansas City. That made it feel like a more affordable conference for most people.”

Marly McMillen

McMillen says additional inspirations behind ChoppedCon include the fact she “felt like the answers to being good at food blogging were secretive. Also, it seemed like a lot of the conferences I attended had the same speakers. I wanted to shake things up a bit and get some new people up there.”

At the Virginia food bloggers conference, McMillen shared her thoughts about a Midwest conference with people sitting at her table, including someone from Kansas City who was representing a brand at the conference. After the conference, McMillen meet with the person and her organization offered to sponsor ChoppedCon. “I would not have done it if it wasn’t for their encouragement,” McMillen says. “They [Best Food Facts] were amazing.”

McMillen says ChoppedCon is more than about learning about searches and optimization. “It is really about connecting with other bloggers,” she says. “It is a huge value. It is important for bloggers to get out of their offices. Many bloggers have left with best friends for life.”

Other benefits include seeing first hand that writing a food blog isn’t a pipe dream. “If going to a conference takes their hobby blog and helps them put a little bit of water on the seed of the idea that they have, that they could do this for a living and helps that grow, it is very inspirational,” McMillen says.

ChoppedCon continues tomorrow at River Market Event Place.