Blogging for Dollars My Presentation to the IIMA - Wednesday March 9, 2005

[Cross posted from my Bryght blog. Powerpoint version.]

Here is my presentation for the IIMA, Blogging for dollars.

1. Who are you?
   • Me:
     • Blogging since 1999
     • VanEats.com - Vancouver's best and first food blog
     • UrbanVancouver.com - Vancouver's community blog
     • Canada's 1st blog consultant - started in late 2001
     • One of the Bryght founders and its Chief Blogging Officer - I
       was the first CBO :-) !
     • Bryght is a Web 2.0 service that enables individuals and
       businesses to simply build powerful and dynamic hosted
       websites including the best of blogs (easy to update, RSS),
       community features like an events calendar and forums and
       content management.
   • Who are you?
     • How many of you have blogs?
     • How many of you have email? How many have an assistant who reads
       and writes your email for you?
     • How many of you resisted email? How many of you can do business
       without email?
     • Remember how people used to worry about company secrets escaping
       via email? Where did those concerns go? If you can trust
       employees to email externally, why couldn't you trust them to
       blog publically?
2. The link is everything
   • Blogs pioneered two concepts (in addition to being easy to update through a web browser without HTML knowledge):
     • 1. Permalinks - a permanent link for every piece of context
       (text, audio, video)
     • 2. RSS - a message to search engines saying you have updated
       and what you have updated (uses permalinks)
   • These two low tech innovations power blogs (not really a blog without
     permalinks and RSS no matter what they say!).
   • It's the link economy. Google cares about links and so should
     you.
   • Link to your competitors, link to your friends, link to
     yourself, link to everything and write cool stuff. Linking
     and creating compelling content constantly establishes you as an
     authority on your market, product or service.
   • This and other techniques that Arieanna will discuss are vital to
     getting people's attention.
   • The more compelling your content (which includes links) the
     more people will link to you which means the higher Google
     rank which means more money.
3. The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
   • Blogging and social software are new.
   • Blogging is a new mainstream medium that complements but does not
     replace old media.
   • Being new, it is maligned and criticized by many and the impact
     is overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long
     term.
   • It's the best time, because it's young and therefore you can
     quickly establish yourself and be heard.
   • It's the worst time, because we have a ways to go before true mass
     adoption and the tools are crude and new but again it's very
     similar to email with respect to adoption.
4. The Cast
   • This is not an exhaustive list! It's a Vancouver-centric list. If
     anybody knows of an exhaustive list please let me know. Apologies in advance to those I inadvertently omitted!
   • Local (Vancouver and BC Blog Consultants) - in no particular order
     • Arieanna Foley
     • Kris Krug - Event Blogging
     • Tris Hussey
     • Will Pate - Education vertical; designed and deployed weblogs@UPEI
     • Shane Birley - Vicious Bunny Creative
     • Susannah Gardner - author of Buzz Marketing with Blogs
       for Dummies to be released very shortly
     • Travis Smith - Hop Studios co-founder, former Variety web
       editor and web master
     • Darren Barefoot - Inside Blogging
   • Hosted Services
     • Blogger from Google (not recommended for business but free
       and a great learning tool)
     • Blogware from Tucows (best solution for individual bloggersIMHO but of course since we resell it! Out of Toronto)
     • TypePad from Six Apart
       100, 000+ users in Asia, Europe and the USA; has the most hype
     • Bryght - when you need true multi-user blogging and community
       features, like calendars and discussion forums and more
       advanced RSS syndication and aggregation!
     • Manila from UserLand software
     • Flickr - social photo blogging tool from Vancouver's Ludicorp
     • LiveJournal
     • many, many, more
   • Blogging Software
     • MovableType - "the Windows of blogging software"
     • ExpressionEngine
     • many, many, more
     • Open Source
       • Wordpress
       • Drupal
   • Blog Writing Tools
     • Qumana from Qumana Software of Vancouver
     • BlogJet
     • MarsEdit (Mac)
     • Ecto
   • Blog Reading tools aka RSS readers aka RSS aggregators
     • Hosted Services
       • Bloglines
     • Applications
       • FeedDemon
       • NewsGator (plugin for Outlook on Windows)
       • NetNewsWire (Mac)
   • Blog and RSS search engines
     • RSS enables almost real time indexing of the blogosphere
       which means you can have almost real time conversations
       with your blog readers.
     • PubSub
     • Feedster
     • Technorati
     • Blogdigger
     • many, many more
   • RSS ad and RSS slicing and dicing companies
     • Feedburner
     • Pheedo
     • many, many more
   • Other Social Software
     • SocialText - hosted wiki (website anybody can edit,
       don't need to register)
     • Jot - hosted wiki
     • Del.icio.us - hosted social bookmarking, aka a hosted
       bookmark blog
     • Wists - hosted visual social bookmarking service
     • many, many, more
5. It's all about $, ain't a d*mn thing funny
   • You probably won't make your money from the act of blogging
     (exceptions Chris Pirillo, PVRBlog, or other people who blog
     about i) things that people will pay large amount of money for
     clicks e.g. VoIP, Tivos ii) things that people buy on the
     Internet ii) things that people actually will click through on
     ads
   • By creating compelling content constantly on a blog, you will
     have a high Google rank which means you will reach non bloggers
     which means money!
   • PLUS you will reach the influential and rich and connector rich
     blogosphere which means money.
   • Use it as a channel or as a mechanism to making money
   • Some companies will make money from blog related tools and
     services. Even more will make money from other social software
     like wikis, etc.
   • Blogging is just the first popular social software. It (and the
     two way conversational web) will be everywhere as part of software
     applications just like VoIP will be everywhere and email is
     everywhere.
     Next 20 years is about social software (thanks Jon), not about automating
     Victorian era work flows
6. - SEO, PR and Brochure Websites are dead
   • SEO is dead
   • PR is dead
     

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