I recently attended my very first conference on blogging!
IZEAfest 2009 was held in Orlando, FL at Sea World and I won a ticket! Orlando is within driving distance for me, so I was very excited about the opportunity. My wonderful husband watched the children all day Friday and Saturday – he even took them to a Fire Station field trip!
I learned new things about blogging, I was reminded of some things that I haven’t been implementing very well and I got two free meals! How can you go wrong?
There were some absolutely fabulous speakers like Ted Murphy CEO of IZEA, Wendy Piersall with SparkPlugging, Brian Clark with CopyBlogger, Sarah Evans at Sevans Strategy, Aaron Brazell at TechnoSailor, and Chris Brogan among many others!
What I Learned
… About Your Personal Brand
- Authenticity – be offline who you portray online
- Create a concise statement that promotes your brand – a great tagline
- Find a tone of voice and stick with it (vary it on rare occasions to place emphasis on a very important point)
- Tones – sarcastic, happy, naive, mad, intelligent, etc
- Own all the domains – Someone like Problogger.com should also own problogger.org, .mobi, .me, etc. Get all the internet properties.
- Have a logo
- don’t design it if you aren’t a graphic designer – people can tell
- don’t use a photo of your face
- don’t use clip art
- don’t use one that only works in full color
- The Problogger logo is a good example of what to do right
- Aside from the logo, you’ll still need a professional-looking photo, nicely done that captures your essence
- Beginner bloggers make a commone mistake – they build a blog using a little money as possible and say they’ll put some money into it after they make a few dollars. But, you may not make any money because your blog does not look professional enough.
- Invest in your blog.
- don’t use a standard template
- don’t use tons of ads
- coordinate your blog with twitter with facebook etc
- Invest in your blog.
- Write out the mission statement for your blog – two or three umbrella statements that describe what you are trying to accomplish with the blog and then don’t ever stray from it
- Think very intentionally about everything you do in and with your blog business
- Take intiative – no one is going to give you a special invitation to do the next big thing
- Reassess where you are and where you’ve been very often
… About Giving
- Create value for your readers – what do they get by reading your blog
- Focus all your blogging energies on others through your articles and attempts to network with others
- One way to bring value is to promote the cool stuff someone else is doing
- If you want a specific brand, for instance Crocs, to take notice of you, be a brand ambassador before they are paying you to do so. Mention them in blog posts and and other relavant content, then they will find you or you’ll have a track record to show them when you approach them.
… About The Nuts And Bolts
- The headline of your article means everything – take a look around CopyBlogger to learn LOTS more about this topic
- Do not get worried over the number of subscribers or visits – longevity will work for you so just stick with it
- Your underlying code structure matters. Get an SEO expert to look at your theme. The theme you are using can make or break it for you with search engines that need to be able to crawl your site.
- Yoast has the best (and free) plugins for wordpress
- Content is the bait that draws in the audience – produce great content
- Figure out what keywords you are trying to rank for in the search engines and hit those very well and very hard
- Don’t write too thoroughly – leave the readers room to make some comments
… About Networking
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Excellent post with lots of great ideas! Thank you for sharing this with your visitors!
Blessings
Mrs. White (from the crew)