Extreme value

I went to a seminar today that delivered way more than the price of admission. Mike Sansone offered a ton of value during his business blogging seminar in Des Moines. As Mike toured the blogosphere and built his story about conversations, all the participants started thinking he needed about 12 hours instead of six that he planned.

I've read blogs for a year or so, and I've only blogged for a couple of weeks, but I thought I knew enough to be an adequate blogger, and was getting everything I wanted out of my blog experience so far. I went to the seminar to see if I can pick up one little nugget because, given the state of most seminars and conferences these days, I only hope for at least one item of extreme value in exchange for my time. After learning from Mike, touring dozens of highly relevant websites, and hearing the questions of other newbie bloggers, I realized I was only scratching the surface.

Some of the key suggestions I picked up:

• Be passionate about your blogging - Whether your doing it for fun, doing it to make a little money or doing it to make a lot of money, make sure you're passionate for your subject. The blogosphere is littered with blogs populated with a few dozen posts, evident of a petered out passion for blogging.
• Be ready to change - Blogs are a dynamic tool for communication so they are ideally designed to change as you change. You topics may take on new focus or migrate into a new direction completely. That's fine because we learn, we change, we have new things to say.
• Don't use time as an excuse - Blogs are conversations, so shouldn't you want to make time to converse with customers, vendors, prospective employees and others? If you don't have time to blog, you don't have time for business.
• Get noticed - There are several strategies to get your name out - comment and link on other, relevant blogs; link your blog to other blogs; learn to write good copy with paragraphs and complete sentences; take advantage of feeds; and ping the aggregators. Mike also outlined the power of the aggregators for monitoring the blogosphere on behalf of clients.

I hope to incorporate these strategies into my blog and into my company's website in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, I'll be carrying on the conversation with Mike because he's a great source to learn more about these specific subjects. If you want to learn more, drop him a note at his blog.