Blogathon Panel Take 1
A group gathered in the talkathon room and chatted about different bloggy topics. This is a quick and dirty rundown of what was discussed.
If you're starting a company/corporate blog, here are some of the things you want to do:
- Find other, relevant blogs. Read them, comment on them and provide links back to your blog.
- Follow people in similar fields on Twitter.
- Get your name other areas. Do it organically if you can. Get out there in the general space as well as in your specific business area.
- Find someone in your expertise area with a larger following and do a guest post.
- Interview an influencer/someone in your field for your blog. They will send the link to family, friends, etc.
- With a company blog give each person a personal brand and community. Go into the community and comment on other blog posts, promote blog - but do it organically - make sure promotion isn't all you do.
- Find "juicy bits" to share with others. It will get people talking
Random ideas and topics discussed:
Give it at least six months to see if its working. Use google keyword tool to measure. Also use It's imporant to understand your audience. Find out how many people are retweeting, commenting, count page views, visitors, etc. Get in the mind of your customer.
It's important when dealing with clients to build relationship slowly. Could take a few months, could take a few years.
Engage and understand. Instant gratification won't happen and companies don't understand that.
Tools to use: Google alerts (not real time), socialping, activechat, Radian 6, Google Real Time search, Scout Labs
Put industry related blogs and people you aspire to be like in your RSS feed. Do search within feed.RSS feed – go to industry related blogs, people you aspire to be like – put in RSS – do search within feeder
Creating content: Figure out what your goal is. Why are you blogging? What is your ultimate goal? Also need to know who your audience is. Emotion only gets you so far.
Blogging needs to be organic. But at the same time, come up with a 6 or 12 month plan of posts. Social media, blogging and others are PR tools. Figuring out your audience and your theme will help leave time and space to be flexible. Respond to trending topics and have a plan.
Use your blog as a portfolio. White a piece you'd like to see in a magazine you admire. Make calls, include photos, etc.
Stop using your blog as a repository of random crap. Be intentional about blogging. Even though blogging should be spontaneous, write something others would give a damn about. If you want to be aware of audience and message, must be aware of planning.
Ideas: Designate certain days for certain subjects to help sement out ideas. Treat writing like a business. Turn off phone, set timer, if you can't work at home, go to a coffee shop or somewhere else where you can work.
Being social and writing don't overlap on a venn diagram.
Break writing up into 90 minute cycles. Write 90 minutes, then take a walk or get coffee. Go back to writing later. Let it out in tiny bursts.
The death of the dialog – people are only using quick posterous posts instead of long-form posts
You can't sit down and predict which posts will get the most traffic.
The writing process never gets easy, you just have to do it. You edit yourself when you say you have writer's block. Just start writing whatever, whether it's "I don't know what to write right now" or something else that's random. Evenutally you will get to what you want to write about. Don't worry if you're grammatically correct.
An idea: Leave censors at blogathon for the month of September. Reconvene in October and see how everyone did.
Another idea: Use blogathon blog as a blogging community for Austin bloggers. Would be broad with a broad range of topics. Would get people to meet each other, comment, hopefully encourage others to write more. Others would be able to learn something from posts.
*Hope I didn't leave anything out!
-Kristin
