Elise has tons of traffic – Simply Recipes and the Moveable Type Tutorial site .  Three pillars – content, community, technology.

Community brings your site alive.

You need to be useful, entertaining or timely – or all of the above in order to build traffic.  Be "useable".  Build something that has legs.  Value a year from now.  Build an asset or a database.

If you can’t write like Dooce then don’t try that.  Think about the skills you have.

Stay focused – if you want traffic, stick to your focus. 

You don’t have to post daily, just make sure you are compelling or posting quality content.  (101 cookbooks is an example)

Use images and photos.  Visual medium.

Write well – concise (keep your paragraphs short) , spell check, consider headlines (witty or boring SEO ie search engine optimized)

Polls, top 10s, contests, interviews, controversy.

Post what you’re proud of.  Write something you’re passionate about to avoid burn-out.

Link out, link out, link out.  The MOST important thing. 

Leave comments! 

Join online events, carnivals.  Connect with a community. (Kalyn’s Kitchen weekend herb blogging, week 43 – go Kalyn!  Now it’s so popular she only writes every other week but she STILL gets linked to every week.)   Be generous with your community of bloggers.  Put time into other people’s blogs, into your community.

Technorati this, email this, delicious this.  She emailed the Sacramento Bee about her food blog.  She got a cover article in the food section. 

Page Rank – algorhythms for search.  (GOOD: Links from other sites.  Links from sites with a high page rank. Text based content, not flash or images.  Use keywords in text, page title, subject lines.  HTML and header tags.  BAD: Links into spam, 404 errors)

Site Design – make it easy to load, easy to read, easy to find.  Page length and size under 100K.  Reduce clutter.  Colored backgrounds.  Eyetracking – focus on upper left corner, search bars, categories, check multiple browsers.  Careful with font size (and type and color)  Screen Resolution 800×600 is what more people are using. 

RSS – Personalized google (Elise likes it, I don’t.  If you’re gonna do it, there are better personalized homepages to use.  The only thing I like about the google one is that it’s better at picking up various TYPES of RSS feeds.  Netvibes is better even than google, I think.  )   Feedburner gives great stats.  Feedblitz, publish via email.  Turn your blog into an email newsletter.  Promote your feed with buttons.  Tags!

Don’t forget search engine bots are included in your bots.  1000 visitors doesn’t mean 1000 visitors, some of those may be search engine bots.

Number of subscribers, number of click thrus, individual page views  – in technorati, she cares about who is linking to her.  Server referrals also good.

~~Time for Questions~~

Heather at working moms dot com? or mommies.com?     (I didn’t catch the url clearly)  feedburner?  does it screw up anyone if I switch to feedburner?  Yes you need to redirect your original feed.  Typepad makes it easy.  If you are using something else, then you really need to follow the directions carefully otherwise you get this continuous loop. 

Ausha from parenthacks search engine recommendation to find blogs?  Elise doesn’t use google blogsearch – oh wait, when you want to search your own blog, put up a search box.  Elise likes google search bar. 

Amy Gahran (OMG CONTENTIOUSSSSSSSSSSSS – OMG!)  Leave comments is important and she has a good strategy on her Right Conversation.com or Write Conversation.com – no blog is an island.  (that was Amy’s way of building traffic and she’s a pro at this)

Kayln Denny – she sends people a list of recipes, by hand, every week.  Can she use feedblitz to do this?  Elise says yes.  That costs money at feedblitz, $10 a month.  Toby says put those recipes into categories but she’s on Blogger.  101 cookbooks uses a newsletter software thingy.  Constant Contact is what it is. 

Links to Elise’s presentation, as posted on Blogher: Intro, Content, Community, How do people find your blog

Technorati Tags: blogher, blogs, buildingtraffic, audience

So… You have this crazy idea…. community blogging with Nancy White – (OMG NANCY WHITE!  Heh.  Sort of live blogging, sort of not – depending on connection and whether I get so crazy listening to Nancy that I can’t concentrate. )

Get ready!  (Heh!  Flickr feed will have photos. ) Blurb blog books sponsored the panel – 5 minute presentation, gave us a sample book.  They need Typepad beta testers.  Contact them.

Buzz Marketing w/Blogs – Suzanna is talking now.  Introducing herself.  Talking about "tools". 

Nancy White handing out chocolate.  ’96 is when she started.  Interested in how people get together and do things they want to do online – over-passionate, is there is such a thing.

Lauren Gelvin – Center for Internet Society  – privacy, free space – Yale.  Answering any legal questions.  Working with women law students, creating a website for women law students. Women not being treated well by the guys.

Melanie Morgan – crazy person (in a cool way)  – started community for people of color 

Audience – examples of community:

Yvonne – lipsticking– marketing to women.  Connect via blogging.

Mommy Blogger Mary Tsao – mommies have come together through comments and blogging.  Daddyblogging?  There are daddyblogs. 

Myspace is a blog community for kids – Nancy’s son met, dated, broke up, made up all on line

Clutter museum – found community of women who blog anonymously in academia.  Graduate students blogging anonymously.

Maria Bennet – wiki – essays about plays. Too much spam in the wiki.  Moved to a yahoo message board and use blogs now.  Wiki as a tool for community. 

Beth! Kanter!  Community! Cambodian Blogosphere/Global Voices.  (I love Beth)  Her kids are Cambodian – she learns about culture through blogging to share with her kids.  Lost tooth story, Cambodian culture.

Jenn ____ – writing exercise, death in the family, post partum writing her way through it.  Offline community friends she encouraged them to start their own blogs to help them get through it.  Why do it? Why blog your way through these things?  To get similar views, to get different ideas and to just put it out there and know someone else was reading it, listening.  Now some of her offline friends are doing it.  Became better friends through blogging than they were "face to face friends" (this is interesting and I think this happens a lot…)

Mary Tsao wants to know how to set a community blog for offline people – you have a club, a blog would work great, how do you set up a blog? Get people started.

Someone wants to know how you get people together, to DO something ie citizen journalism.

How do you define a community.  The purpose.

How do you choose your technology for a group?

Legal aspects of wetting up a community blog around a brand. 

Strategy for seeking out local bloggers – metro bloggers. Jess (I have some ideas for jess, emailing her this week)

Liz Henry (OMG BADGER!  in the back!  I knew we should have sat back there, hehe) she wants people to introduce themselves.

How do you cultivate your community and then not burn out?

Jill Davis – how to encourage productive communication particularly in a controversial topic situation.  us/them.  Here’s the us/them stuff from sxsw

Parents group – things to do for kids.  targeted for non-bloggers.  2nd wave strategy.

Jewish fringe? Friends?  How to get more people involved.

What’s your primary motivation, when joining a group site.

Lauren is speaking – no site, in development.  Stanford law school (didn’t she say Yale first?)  There were problems with the guys not treating female law students well.  Inappropriate touching, guys going out and talking about the women, men speaking out in class and over-speaking the women.  This can’t be just a problem with Stanford.  How do we get in touch with other women, at other schools?    She’d attended Blogher and so they decided to start a group – ran into a lot of problems.  What was it gonna be about, what was the format? group blogs?  None of the women had blogged so it wasn’t as easy – she mentored them through the blogging process. Workshop with 15 different law schools – flew 2 women from each school and walked them through the process.  Laura Scott, Lisa Stone.   Her goal was to be able to walk away from it and be run by the students themselves.  It wasn’t her site, her vision – she wanted to set it up, give them the tools and training and walk away.    Two days – tension and friction about design and goals and guidelines.  Not the goal to be the best women’s politics site but could be the best women in law site.  Set some guidelines so you’re good at one thing, rather than a little bit of everything.   (Ping Vision aka Laura Scott set up forums/blogs to discuss what they wanted the site to be – got use to using the tools before launch. )  http://ms-jd.org  will be the site (it will be non-profit).

~~

New Media Collective – launched at black history month – people of color in the blogosphere. video, audio, photo.  She started because the real people site only had one person of color featured.   

~~

Suzanna inherently flawed community.  Technology questions – newbies.  "We talk, the get their info and then they leave."  Oh can I relate!  A lot of her "community" happens in email.  People ask questions in email, she connects people to each other.  Facilitating connections. 

~~

Nancy – Share Your Story – started as message boards.  These are the second wave people, she wasn’t sure Lee LeFever was right about giving them blogs.  She was wrong.  20K active users in a month.  No story goes unresponded to.  24 hours for a response.  webcrossing blogs. not great software but simpled it down.  community had the power, they told them what to add what to fix what tools weren’t working in the blogs.   

Bloghogs on Share – the community doesn’t like a bloghog, posting really often because they want to read every single person’s blog and they can’t do that if people post a lot.   Some troll-like behavior on the blogs.  They have health professionals who check to make sure people aren’t posting unprofessionally.  They have health professionals to encourage people to seek crisis assistance if they need it.

~~

We’re breaking off into groups to talk about real situations.  We can move to other groups.  Or start our own community.

Technorati Tags: blogher, bloghercon, blogher06, bloggingcommunity, onlinecommunity, nancywhite

Yesterday, we’d only been checked into our room for about a half hour when the phone rang.  The hotel phone.  It was the front desk and they wanted to know if we were "alright in our room".  Huh?  She asked again if we were ok, if we were smoking or taking a shower.  Huh?  Apparently the front desk was alerted that our smoke alarm was going off.  It wasn’t.  Weird.

This morning, I took a shower and within 2 minutes the alarm started going off.  And it wouldn’t stop.  And it was 5am PT!  I finally climbed onto the computer chair (naked and wet) and unscrewed the bloody thing from the ceiling. 

My apologies to those in BLDG 7 who thought the hotel was on fire.  Next time I turn on the shower, I’ll make sure to disconnect the smoke alarm first. 

Technorati Tags: smokealarm, blogher, hyatt

OMG I MET NANCY WHITE.  I HUGGED HER, A LOT.  OMG!

I also met Lisa Stone, finally! After all of these years and all of that women.com history.  I met doggone Patrick Scoble! (I blogged about him last year, a couple of times, lol)   I met Mir of Woulda Coulda Shoulda and Jenny from Three Kid Circus and Chris from Big Yellow House errr Notes from the Trenches, I mean lol and Sour Duck and Britt Bravo and OMG I met all sorts of people and they were nice. And cool.  And some are short.  And some are really tall – Dooce is so damn tall and Nancy White, tall.  And Grace Davis not tall but has a big personality.  And Jenn Satterwhite and OMG I met all sorts of people and I can’t list them all and I’ve only been here for a few hours. 

I MET NANCY WHITE, I can die a happy woman, now.  (And Jory, well she wanted to rub up against me and stuff which was kind of fun too)

NANCY WHITE!

wow.

I’ll be uploading pictures, unedited to flickr all weekend and you can see them by clicking that flickr thingy on my left side bar.

NANCY WHITE!

Technorati Tags: blogher, bloghercon, blogher06, NANCYWHITE

Technorati Tags: blogher, blogher06, packed, suitcase

I’m feeling pretty good about my lack of things "to do" before Blogher.  Everyone is all bent out of shape over what to wear, what shoes to wear, buying bathing suits and new clothes and which purse to pack and blah blah blah.  Those things are so totally not on my "to do list".  I cannot imagine how I would manage to even get to Blogher if I had to deal with those things.

I will show up in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, maybe badger’s naked woman t-shirt, and my Reboks or maybe my Tevas and that will be that.  I will not have a purse but will have my laptop bag.  I’m considering deodorant though, thanks to Mrs Kennedy.  I’m not going out to buy a "shell" but deodorant, I can do that.

Update 7/25… I’m about to add to the list, darn it.  One word of advice, don’t wait til the last minute to print your business cards (or other fun giveaways) because something will invariably go wrong.  Grrr.  I should really learn to NOT procrastinate. 

 

1) Clean the Eli Wiesel and the Alex Grey and the Catie Curtis and the Terri Clark shows off of the iRiver to make room for recording sessions at Blogher.
2) Track down the charger for my camera.
3) Write 3 pieces for work.  Write 1 for Clubmom.
4) Call Jenn and make sure she knows I will be out of town.
5) Make sure Michelle and Chris have my itinerary and phone numbers (on Protopage and paper)
6) Pack enough books for both me and TW (since we are not currently reading the same books).
7) Email or call Elaine
8) Consider trading laptops with Michelle – her battery is better than mine…
9) Make sure TW’s meds are all re-filled and double check Michelle’s.
10) Get sudafed for TW.
11) Batteries for the bathtub floaty lamps.
12) Print confirmation numbers, itinerary, things to do lists.
13) Buy deodorant because Mrs Kennedy says so.

14) Pack
15) Do a load of laundry

16) Go to kinkos (grrr!)

17) Go to the darn library again, sheesh

18) Take TW to get her bloodwork done

19) Go to the grocery store for trashbags (Oh wait, I can send Christopher!!)

20) Drive the half child to work on a day when I don’t normally have to do that (grrrr!)
21) Print bookcrossing labels! 
22) Go to Office Depot for ink to print bookcrossing labels! (umm do I have labels??) (Can I send Christopher for that? YES! I can!)
23) Housework that I procrastinated all week? Ha, right, I’m such a dreamer.
24) Find an ethernet splitter since there is no wifi in the hotel room.

Technorati Tags: blogher, countdown, todolist