Sessions

The Blog Advantage: What Blogs are and Why They are Taking Over

9:00am to 10:00am

There’s a reason Business Week magazine said “blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate” and it has nothing to do with personal diaries. In this session we’ll cover the basics of what makes a blog a blog and why blogging platform technologies provide significant advantages to businesses that leverage them.

How to enhance your search engine presence
Saving money through inexpensive database-driven Web pages
Working with multiple site authors
Driving readership through RSS and syndicated feeds
Viral marketing benefits from community

RSS and Feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz

10:15am to 11:15am

What tools and techniques are best for finding out what’s being said about you or your company? This session covers Web hosted services along with desktop applications that automate the gathering and analysis of blog, discussion group, and search engine content. See how to get the latest info without flipping through hundreds of sites or wading through too many feeds.

The best RSS feedreaders
Turning google searches into RSS feeds
Scraping utilities that convert static sites to RSS

Smart Blogging: Essential Blog Design and Critical Features

11:30am to 12:30pm

Good content is a requirement, but there’s a lot more to a good blog than just the posts. There are critical features and technologies you’ll want to investigate. Standard designed templates are fine, but there are a myriad of reasons why you’ll want to customize and enhance with a unique layout. Proper blog design can insure your branding, position, and message are optimally projected. Beautiful, cross-device, navigable, and fast loading sites that search engines love are a must. This session will cover what top bloggers do to get the best of all possible worlds.

Lunch 12:30am to 2:00pm

Getting started: Choosing a Platform

2:00pm to 3:00pm

There’s more to a Blog engine than just price. Once you’ve made your choice, transitioning can be a challenge — so you’ll want to pick the optimal platform. If you have chosen, it’s not too late to move to a more robust environment. This session will cover all the major issues in selecting and migrating to the best system. Molly and Byron will cover:

Insuring scalability
Spam prevention
Workgroup options
Feature sets
Pinging, publicity, and broadcast features
Extendibility, plug-ins and upgrades
Being “orphaned”, and how to prevent it.

Blog Promotion: Posting isn’t Enough

3:15pm to 4:15pm

You’ve got a fantastic blog. The design is beautiful, the content rich and relevant. But your stats are showing that only three people have visited since last July. What can you do? In this session, you’ll learn some of the best ways to build blog traffic quickly, increase interest in you and your product or service, and improve your bottom-line results.

The pros and cons of comment systems
How to use Trackback and Pingback to rapidly extend your blog’s reach
How content aggregation technologies can quickly get your blog content to a wider audience
How to improve blog ranking with both standard and blog-specific search engines
Tips and tricks to keep your visitors coming back for more.

Blog Management: Strategies and Tactics

4:30pm to 5:30pm

Before you flip the switch and encourage employees or partners to blog about the business, it’s critical that you set the stage for responsible and effective posting. In this session, we’ll delve into the realities of workflow, policy, and content generation experiences to help those new to the game learn what works, what doesn’t, and what traps to avoid.