BlogWorld Recap

What a fabulous day here at BlogWorld! If you want to follow all the action, I would recommend following the tweets by doing a search on #bwela.

Grandma Mary does BlogWorld

Grandma was out and about at BlogWolrd. She connected with Kylie and Pace who are speaking on How Your Blog Can Change the World. Find them at http://connection-revolution.com/

The other fantastic part of the conference is the Expo. I spoke with two gentleman from http://www.sysomos.com/ – check out their social media analytics solution. Tweet them @sysomos

And finally I talked with a person I’ve followed for a long time, Calvin Lee from http://www.mayhemstudios.com/ – @mayhemstudios online.

I went to every session I could today and just took notes on some nuggets shared from the speakers.

Tom Webster

Tom Webster is the Vice President, Strategy of Edison Research and his blog is the Brand Savant. His topic was Drowning in Numbers: Turning Social Media Data into Insight. Loved his speech – he was funny! But also lots of great content and a good message about the numbers being tossed about in social media. Follow him on Twitter @webby2001. The main points of his talk were:

Know what you don’t know. Find out off line – don’t just do research on Twitter
Ask better questions. Questions in multiple areas that will leave you with better answers.
Prove yourself wrong. Don’t jump to conclusions just because you have some data
Do your own work. If you copy someone else’s work, you will not learn the material. You need to know what works with your brand or your product.

Other nuggets:

The question is not what day is the best day to tweet, it’s whether time or date has anything to do with success.

Klout is not going away, because it’s an easy answer.

Factors of Influence

Relevance of message
Content of message
Credibility of author

Peter Shankman

Founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO). Find him at @petershankman and http://shankman.com/

Fantastic keynote with great stories about his journey. He peppered it with points that we can all use including:

Your only job is to generate revenue. If you’re creating “buzz” you aren’t doing it right if that doesn’t translate to revenue

Everyone tells you to have a backup plan for when you fail. Here’s a better plan: have a backup for when you succeed.

Own your screwup.

Two free months of the premium version of HARO – use 2moadv56737 code Thanks!

Relevance is the only the way you get an audience.

Having an audience is a privilege, not a right.

If you are relevant to your audience, they will do your marketing for you.

If you don’t have haters, you aren’t doing enough to shake the world up.

Ric Dragon

Ric is the CEO and co-founder of Dragon Search Marketing and can be found at @RicDragon.

He talked about SEO for the Rest of Us which was a great talk on how to look at SEO very basically so you wouldn’t be afraid of the SEO Monster.

Three fundamental things to do with SEO

Research. Some SEO tools to help you do research are Google Trends, Google Insights and http://collectiveintellect.com/
Doing things the right way – best practices.
Making connections – links

Google has said that they don’t pay any attention to Meta tags (Title, Description, Keywords) but Ric says that they do matter because those are things that come up in searches.

Typically he keeps the Title tag the same as the actual title of the page or blog post unless your Meta title could be a little more interesting to someone doing a search. Sometimes the blog post title is more “sexier” to get more shares but the Meta title is more straightforward.

The H1 header is the most important. You can have multiple H2 headers.

Lists are not only important to SEO but makes your page more readable.

The most important thing with SEO is to just do the right thing that makes sense for your site. Don’t try and “trick” Google.

CSS Zen Garden is a site that will show you lots of different style sheets.

Create a Back Link Portfolio of Easy links (but may have low value) all the way up to High value links that may be more difficult to get.

Test your links to make sure they open properly so that you don’t have broken links.

Laura Roeder

Online at http://www.lauraroeder.com/ and @lkr.

Her talk was on How to Not Do Everything Yourself which is great advice for solo-preneurs. Her points were:

If you want to hire someone, start them out part time. See how they work. There are people out the who are looking for flexible part-time work.

Do not be a micro-manager – let people take control of a project. Let things happen in your business that are not exactly the way you would do it.

If you are doing a job listing, focus on talking about your culture and talk about the exact type of person you want. You can train someone on a tools but you can’t train them on personality.

Don’t pay people hourly – pay on a project basis because in the hourly model, you want things done as quickly as possible and they want it done as slowly possible.

Panel: Promoting Your Blog in the Age of Social Media

Moderator: Dave Taylor: @DaveTaylor – http://AskDaveTaylor.com

Panelists:

Brett Greene – @BrettGreene – http://BlindInfluence.com

Doyle Albee – @DoyleAlbee – http://Metzger.com

Jeannine Crooks – @Jeannine_Crooks – http://Buy.at/us

Joshua Dorkin – @JRDorkin – http://BiggerPockets.com

Just because something can be automated, doesn’t mean that it should be. @Jeannine_Crooks

Twitter has jumped the shark. @DaveTaylor

Make sure you own your content by having it on your own blog @JRDorkin

Understand what you are trying to accomplish with your blog. Your tactics will be different if you are looking for a million uniques so that Google can give you a big check for adwords than if you are blogging to establish yourself as a thought leader. @DoyleAllbee

If you want to talk to someone – walk over to where they are. Same online as in real life. @DoyleAlbee

For new bloggers, there is nothing you can do that is more effective than guest posts on other bigger blogs. @DaveTaylor

Amber Naslund

Wonderful closing keynote for the day. Amber is the VP of Social Strategy for Radian6 and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Find her online at Brass Tack Thinking and @AmberCadabra

Here are some of the musings from her talk:

Change is not an event but a constant.

Embrace the fluidity of change.

We are terrified of blame. We don’t want to be responsible for something.

We have no reward system for contemplating.

We are taking the measurement systems for existing systems and using it in emerging business models. That won’t work.

Ask yourself “What’s the worst thing that could happen? And then what would we do about it?”

We need to be:

Philosophers
Builders
Navigators
Ambassadors – build a case for why we need this and rally people behind them.
Polymaths – people who are a good at a lot of things.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea”

Our systems aren’t set up to reward uncertainty.

Ask What? So What? What Now?

Find out the why behind the what? When you find out the why behind the what, you uncover hidden bias and ulterior motives.

Stagnation is death. When everything is changing, being able to change is everything.

“When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.” – Walt Disney

Sometimes you need to take a step on the path before you see where it’s going to lead. (LOVE that!)

Question WELL. Never settle

Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies

It has been wonderful connecting with so many people here. I’ve enjoyed having in-person conversations with people I haven’t met and re-connecting with people I’ve met at other conferences. And especially my co-author Amy Porterfield. We were happy to see our book for sale at the Barnes and Noble kiosk. Phyllis we wish you were here!