Dear Wrists,

Please don’t make me take you in for therapy again. I know I abused you, but promise I’ll treat you better next time. The insurance won’t pay for any more visits to that nice hand therapist that you like so much. I won’t stop liveblogging, but will share what I learned liveblogging my first conference with other liveblogging newbies.

Prepare before the conference

Laptop Batteries

A spare battery is great to have, as you won’t always have easy access to power. I lucked out, and found a second battery for $5 at a local electronics fleamarket. It doesn’t have the full capacity of a new battery, but I also didn’t spend $130.

When a blog becomes a community destination it is more than writers writing and readers commenting. Readers get to know the names and avatars of blog authors, and check to see what they are thinking and reading. Readers who have questions may feel that the blog’s collective expertise is available to them, and use it as a great place to refer others - a smart jump start for a business with aspirations of establishing authority.

Grow a team, grow a blog, grow a community? Of course it’s not that simple. These steps may help.

For more than 7 years now, I’ve been working with websites based on popular applications such as WordPress, Vbulletin and PHPnuke. When dealing with such popular applications, words like ‘hacking’ or ’security hole’ will become something that you’ll get use to either dealing with or worrying about.

In the last 2 years, there have been some major developing concerns. Today, Hackers are much more familiar with the importance of links and, since some may be SEO’s, are using hacking as a link building strategy or as a negative link building tactic targeting the ranking of their competitors. Regardless of the intention of the Hacker, your website’s ranking may be damaged to some degree.

So I don’t know if you recall in the past when I mentioned that I believed Live to be the branding where Microsoft planned on competing with Google.  (See Virtual Reality - Microsoft Office Live).  Well, we should look at some of the things that they are doing from the User perspective.

Nice and clean, free of advertising, and links to other Microsoft places of possible usefulness. It’s very familiar, don’t you think?  Ever seen anything like it before from any other extremely successful search engines?

Your client is thrilled with the new blog. It provides a SEO friendly CMS, it’s Social Media friendly, your client loves the opportunity to participate in the conversation, etc, etc.

but

despite how cool their new blog is…. despite the increase in readers, traffic, comments, etc.

at some point,

your client is ultimately going to turn to you and ask

“What about sales?”

Because unless your client is running a CPM model or is really big into branding, at the end of the day; the only thing that really matters to your client is conversions.

Now that you’ve forged your Foundation Friends, and are beginning to expand your authority by continuing to write excellent quality blog posts, while securing new friends and fans through the previously mentioned tactics, the concepts ‘Spheres of Influence’ and ‘Influence Ripples’ become tremendously important.

Source: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/

Spheres of Influence & Influence Ripples … the Concept:
David Armano introduced the concept of Influence Ripples in 2006. His post Influence Ripples 2.0 shows how numerous bloggers with varied spheres of influence interact. Ultimately, networks become evident.

The concept is this, each person’s authority can be viewed as a circle (see above) on a 2-dimensional grid:

There is no sales tip in the world that will make your blog convert if it’s not a quality blog.

Next week I’ll write about How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert (part five in a 5 part series on Blog Strategy with a focus on clients). But before we can cover that, you must follow these basic principals if you want to your blog posts to convert:

The 10 Golden Rules of Blogging:

1. Start with an SEO friendly infrastructure. Word Press for example has so many useful plug ins such as Netconcepts SEO Title Tag 2.1 that make life (and Marketing) easier.

What are realistic measures for your clients blog?

You’ve sold your client on a blog and you’ve developed a Blog Strategy. Plus you’ve made the blog much more implementable by coming up with 30 to 50 Blog Post ideas. But for this Blog Strategy to be really successful, one of the most important things that you can do is to manage your clients expectations.

Metrics without some point of comparison are just numbers. What turns that meaningless data into useful information is having a point of comparison.

Blog Benchmark figures are difficult to find.

Some industries appear to lend themselves better to blogging than others. In our field I’ll always have far more blog post ideas than I do time to write. But what about more challenging industries?

How do you come up with 30 to 50 compelling blog post ideas for Plastic Products/ Rugs / or the Petroleum Industry <insert challenging client industry>?

This is the third in a 5 part series looking at Blog Strategy with a focus on Clients. In this post, I’m going to discuss How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries.

When you’re new to online marketing, where do you start when you want to build authority on a given subject?

In reality, Authority Building is a process … a linear process for the most part. This means that there are steps and stages, and perhaps even a natural evolution of actions. Within each stage, there are some tactics that will typically work much better than others.

The key here is to look for a process that can be replicated … and will consistently produce great results.