An Interview with Debbie Dubrow, of @DeliciousBaby, about TBEX '09

it's the researcher in me - I love to find the backstories of everything!

we interviewed debbie dubrow, one of the founders of TBEX '09, about her experiences with TBEX '09, goals, and ideas for next year.


WE: Please tell us about the idea behind TBEX...How did you and Kim decide to found it?

DD: Last year, when I went to the BlogHer conference in San Francisco, I experienced first-hand the tremendous community that the mom-bloggers and food-bloggers had built up. It was easy to see how their support of one-another made the entire community stronger. New bloggers could improve their skillset and visibility by interacting with more established bloggers. Furthermore, by joining together smaller bloggers had a large enough voice that readers, PR pros and marketing all took notice. Both the emotional and technical support were attractive to me, and as someone who earns an income from their blog, so was the idea of creating a community that would interest marketing and PR.

Then I went to the travel birds-of-a-feather at BlogHer. It was well attended, and many of the women there were doing really interesting work, but nobody knew eachother. I thought that was disappointing, and I came home with a resolve to help build a stronger community of travel bloggers. There were some other steps along the way, starting with publishing a list of the people who attended, starting Photo Friday so that we could become familiar with each other's work, and helping found the Passports With Purpose fundraiser for Heifer International.





WE: What was the impetus for sponsoring a TBEX conference?

DD: I have gotten so much out of our local meetups in Seattle, that I wanted to extend them further and to have a chance to continue the conversations we have here on a larger scale.

Our original idea was to do something very small, cheap, and grassroots. We were absolutely blown away by the interest in both Kim's Travel Blog Exchange community and the meetup itself, and pretty quickly realized that we needed to expand things a bit.



you can read the rest of the interview here:
http://www.wanderingeducators.com/best/traveling/interview-debbie-d...