If you’ve been waiting for a local event to help you learn more about blogging, greatly improve your blogging skills, or to effectively use blogs in your business–your wait is over! Blog Indiana 2008 is a 2-day conference on blogging and social media happening at the IUPUI Campus Center in Indianapolis. If you are new at blogging, a seasoned veteran, or want to learn the best ways to harness the power of blogging in your business, you will not want to miss this conference.
Split into three general categories (Basics, General, and Business), Blog Indiana has something for everyone. The best part is you can attend sessions in any category throughout the conference. With amazing local talent such as Chris Baggott, Jennifer Wagner, Bil Browning, Sarah Robbins, Scott Abel, Ruth Holladay, and many others. Topics covered will include legal issues, corporate blogging, brand consistency, building readership, making money with blogging, politics and blogging, and much more. Check out the sessions page for the complete list.
The conference is taking place at the IUPUI Conference Center in Indianapolis on August 16-17th. This is the first local conference like this and it looks like it will be a very useful and memorable event. Over 25 sessions featuring some great local talent, networking with hundreds of other local bloggers all for $49 makes this a conference you won’t want to miss.
If you register using the special discount code BLOGDISC, you’ll get 15% knocked off the price!
Check out the conference website for more info.
Hope to see you there in August!
If you find yourself having difficulty blogging regularly, I’ve found that sometimes the key is to make the technical part of the act of blogging easier and more convenient. Integrating the ability to blog into applications or websites you normally use can not only make blogging easier, but encourage it.
flickr
My favorite photo sharing website makes it very easy to make a blog post using either one of your photos or someone else’s that is marked as reusable. At the bottom of the “Extending flickr” tab of the “Your Account” page there is a section to add details about your blog (or blogs). If you’ve never done this before, read the simple directions to set things up properly for your type of blog and you’re all set. Once you’ve added at least one blog, a new “Blog This” button will appear above the photos you look at on flickr. Clicking on this button lets you write a blog post about that photo and post it (and the photo) to your blog all from within flickr.com. Once your done, you’re right back to looking at photos on flickr.
Google Docs
I’ve been using Google Docs since it was called Writely and I love it. I store all kinds of information in Docs and having access to it from any computer is very convenient. Today, however, was the first time I noticed that the “Share” button also allows you to post a document as a blog post directly to your blog. There is a similar set up process like flickr and then your able to post. If you already use Google Docs, this is just another reason to keep using it. If not, using Google Docs in this way can allow for more structured storage of drafts (using folders), a more robust WYSIWYG layout interface for your blog posts, versioning and collaborative sharing/writing of your blog posts–to name a few reasons.
There are other great tools that let you interact with your blog such as Windows Live Writer and ScribeFire, which I’ll cover in a future post.
This past weekend, I participated in Bloomington Startup Weekend. And, while I’m not yet allowed to talk specifics about the resulting company/product we created that weekend, I can share what an amazing experience it was. 100 technologists from around the area gathered together to bring their experience, expertise, and talent to produce a company and community in one weekend. Developers, Marketers, Business Developers, Project Managers, Designers, Lawyers, and more spent 52-some hours at City Hall in Bloomington, Indiana working towards the same goal.
It was a truly unique experience that I would highly recommend to anyone with even the slightest interest. It really does give you an idea of what it’s like inside a startup company, only much condensed. There are highs, lows, excitement, tension… it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been describing it as the only time I’ve enjoyed being annoyed. You kinda have to experience it to know what I mean. Hopefully, I should be able to give out the details of the product and company we’ve created in the coming weeks.
With that said, I highly encourage anyone in the Indianapolis region to head over to IndyStartup.com to proclaim your interest in having a Startup Weekend in Indianapolis. That site will also direct you to the Startup Weekend City Vote project where you can vote for Indianapolis to be one of the next locations (very important).
To celebrate 1,000 blog posts, 1,000 daily unique visitors, and 1,000 feed subscribers, Doug has decided to put together a $1,000 giveaway on his blog. For the past month or so, he has been gathering sponsorships from various companies in the form of cash and valuable services. With quite a prize package gathered, the contest is open until November 25th. You can check out posts about each sponsor by looking in my archives for this month.
The first sponsor of the contest was Doug himself. His blog, The Marketing Technology Blog, is a very active and informative blog about the latest trends in not just marketing technology, but new media, blogging, SEO, social networking, web design, and so on. He is a local blogger that I check out several times per week.
Who are they: Search Engine People
What they do:
Search engine marketing and search engine optimization firm.
Why you care:
The Search Engine People is a search engine marketing and search engine optimization firm that can help your business with every aspect of search engine marketing. They can help improve your rankings, traffic, and conversions. They also focus on tracking your actual return on investment. It is worth noting that they are an Adwords Certified Company which lets you know they have met certain requirements set by Google to provide such services.
To celebrate 1,000 blog posts, 1,000 daily unique visitors, and 1,000 feed subscribers, Douglas Karr from The Marketing Technology Blog, has decided to put together a $1,000 giveaway on his blog. For the past month or so, he has been gathering sponsorships from various companies in the form of cash and valuable services. With quite a prize package gathered, the contest is open until November 25th. The above post is describing one of the generous sponsors for the contest.
Who are they: PPC Hero
What they do:
Informative website about Pay Per Click advertising.
Why you care:
PPC Hero is a resource for anyone looking to improve their Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns. Their site contains regularly updated information which helps everyone from beginners to experts. Their goal is to provide highly useful information for beginners while also making it worthwhile for more advanced users.
To celebrate 1,000 blog posts, 1,000 daily unique visitors, and 1,000 feed subscribers, Douglas Karr from The Marketing Technology Blog, has decided to put together a $1,000 giveaway on his blog. For the past month or so, he has been gathering sponsorships from various companies in the form of cash and valuable services. With quite a prize package gathered, the contest is open until November 25th. The above post is describing one of the generous sponsors for the contest.
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