Carolyn Sonnek will give an overview of the WordPress.com features available to self-hosted blogs via Jetpack, and will highlight a couple of the bigger/newer ones such as the Jetpack Manage tool for managing multiple blogs from one dashboard, and new security features. Anne McCarthy will wrap it up with an overview of using VaultPress to protect your site, and Polldaddy to embed polls and surveys into your blog.

Mary Laura Philpott started with an anonymous blog to share her quirky sense of humor and wound up with a book deal. She’ll discuss the pros and cons of putting yourself out there in an authentic way.

Grace Park will provide an overview of the upgrades included in the WordPress.com Premium plan that all attendees receive, and answer questions to help you make the most of your blog.

Join Sheri Bigelow as she walks you through using the WordPress.com dashboard, including lesser-known features that make blogging even easier.

Eight years ago, Christine Lee survived a stroke in part due to the concern of commenters on her anonymous blog, and more recently experienced the comment flood that comes with a post going viral. She’ll talk about online connection and keeping up with comments.

Mike Dang, an editor at Longreads, will talk about finding a broader audience for your content by working with  bigger online outlets.

Portland grain-free food blogger Kelly Bejelly will share her experience growing her blog into a Paleo powerhouse.

Carolyn Sonnek will give a short overview of what’s involved in creating a podcast and distributing it using WordPress.

Kathy Cano-Murillo, the force behind craftychica.com, will share her crafting journey from personal passion to big business.

Josepha Haden will share SEO tips & tricks she’s picked up over the last ten years as an SEO and marketing consultant to help you you improve your blog’s performance, and Marjorie Asturias will cover the basics of how to promote your work, both through social media tools and more traditional means such as creating a press kit.

Ananda Leeke, founder of the Digital Sisterhood Network,  began blogging for personal reasons and evolved into a social media leader for the White House. She’ll share her story and talk about making the most of opportunity.

Most people start out blogging for themeselves, or maybe friends and family. After a while, the ones who find themselves spending more and more time on their blogs always seem to wind up asking, “How can I find someone to pay me to do this?” In this panel, several of our featured blogger speakers return to discuss (and take your questions about) going pro with blogging, and professional opportunities that have come their way through their blogs.

With more than 300 themes available on WordPress.com, and thousands available to self-hosted bloggers through the WordPress.org theme directory, choosing the right theme can be a daunting task. Professional theme wrangler Michelle Langston will talk about different types of themes (both free and premium) and what to look for when making a choice, and will show lots of examples to help you find your best theme.

How does someone go from neon-haired raver to overseeing a successful wedding and lifestyle site business? Find out as we sit down with Ariel Meadow Stallings, the founder of Offbeat Empire, and ask her everything we (and you!) ever wanted to know about going from to book to empire.

When you get as many comments as Christine, how do you keep up with them? Grace Park, who handles thousands of comments as a moderator in WordPress.com’s Blogging U, will give tips on managing comments, dealing with jerks, and keeping spam at bay.

Kelly Bejelly has multiple revenue streams coming from her site. Join Marjorie Asturias as she gives a brief overview of how you can use ads, affiliate links, and ecommerce on your site to monetize your blog.

Erick Prince-Heaggans will share how blogging about his travels led him into a successful career as a photojournalist and travel blogger.

Joe Boydston will give tips for taking better iPhone photos and demonstrate how to use the WordPress mobile apps to document your own travels, even in your own neighborhood.

After an international career, Cecilia Gunther found herself on a Midwest farm with a new husband, a camera, and the dream of milking a cow.  Learn how starting a blog created a community that helped her build an old fashioned farm in her new environment and provided mentors and friends to keep her company along the way.

Join Kathryn Presner as she walks through a variety of widgets, shows how to use them, and demonstrates how the widget visibility feature can give you greater control over the pages of your blog.

Ananda Leeke, founder of the Digital Sisterhood Network,  began blogging for personal reasons and evolved into a social media leader for the White House. She’ll share her story and talk about making the most of opportunity.

Like many people, Ananda Leeke had an older website in addition to her blog. Join Michelle Langston as she shows how they combined two sites into one that would truly express Ananda’s personality and meet her online goals.

Join Jerry Mahoney, author of Mommy Man: How I Went from Mild-Mannered Geek to  Gay Superdad, as he describes his experiences in publishing, including how he mobilized his blog’s community to shoot his book to the top of the Amazon charts.

“My blog would make a great book!” Would it? We have a handful of featured speakers with published books to their credit. They’ll return to the stage to discuss the various ways blogging was involved in their becoming published authors, and to take your questions about how to get published. The publishing experiences among this group range from self-publishing to getting a multi-book deal, so if you’d like to write a book someday, this panel is for you!

With more than 300 themes available on WordPress.com, and thousands available to self-hosted bloggers through the WordPress.org theme directory, choosing the right theme can be a daunting task. Professional theme wrangler Michelle Langston will talk about different types of themes (both free and premium) and what to look for when making a choice, and will show lots of examples to help you find your best theme.

Sheri Bigelow, longtime Automattician and photographer, will share photography tips, walk through how to use WordPress media features, and show you how to optimize  images.

Mark Armstrong, founder and editor of Longreads (now part of Automattic & WordPress.com), shares the story of how Longreads went from a Twitter hashtag to a global community or readers and now a publisher of original stories. He’ll share what he’s learned about how people read in a mobile-centric world, and why storytelling still matters.

There are a lot of ways to post video content online. You can create original video content for your site using a tool like VideoPress, or you can pull in videos from other sites like YouTube and embed them in your blog. Jerry Mahoney does both of these things on the Mommy Man site, and Joe Boydston is going to show you how it’s done.

Bloggers often look at their stats even more than they look at their comments. Carolyn Sonnek will walk you through how to read traffic stats, using the WordPress.com/Jetpack stats as her example. She’ll also give you tip on a tool that can help you increase traffic, the Publicize tool that shares your blog posts with your other social media accounts.

Have you ever noticed how some blogs and sites have just a headline and a block of text, while others have posts and pages are so polished that they look like they could be in a magazine? Formatting is what makes the difference, and we’ll teach you some simple tricks (beyond bold and italics) to make your posts prettier.

This session will cover finding content, getting inspiration for content, and connecting with other bloggers using the editorial tools and communities available on WordPress.com. such as the Reader, Freshly Pressed, The Daily, Post, and Blogging U.

One of the most important things when trying to grow a blog — posting regularly — can also be one of the greatest challenges. What if some days you don’t know what to say? Or don’t have time to write? We’ve got your back! In this class we’ll take a look at some of the programs on WordPress.com aimed at helping you get the creative juices flowing, like Blogging U, Daily Prompts, and weekly Photo Challenges, and we’ll help you set up a posting plan for your blog. We’ll also create a few draft posts and learn to use the post scheduling tool, so that you can put your plan into action!

The first thing people notice when they visit your site is how it looks. In this workshop, bring your laptop or tablet and begin the process of making your site feel more like you by using the customizer to update things like taglines, fonts, and theme options.

Dig deeper into customizing your site. In this session, you’ll use the WP Admin screens to set up custom menus for your site navigation, and widgets to bring more shazam to your sidebars. And yes, you’ll even try out the custom menu widget. Worlds collide!

How many times have you heard, “You can change that with custom CSS,” but you didn’t know how to get started? In this half-hour class, learn the basics of working with CSS as our teachers walk you through the process of making some simple CSS changes on your blog. You’ll want your laptop with you for this one!

You understand the basics of CSS, like how to change a color or the size of your headlines, but what about the more complicated stuff? In this open clinic session, come prepared with your CSS hopes and dreams, and our teachers will walk through how to make people’s dreams come true in a classroom setting so everyone can learn together. What kind of dreams can be solved by CSS? Move your sidebar to the other side, add a new border around all your photos, hide elements from being displayed — dream big.