You can find out more at Mom Blog SEO.

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Morning Agenda

9 a.m. Blogging Panel

10 a.m. IRL Networking

10:30 a.m.: Breakout session #1

11:15 a.m. Breakout session #2

Noon: Break for Lunch

After lunch, the hands-on stuff begins. Find out more on Dave’s blog.

Blogging Panel – 9 a.m.

The day will begin with all speakers hosting a blogging panel, and the general subject will be the blogging revolution. Each speaker will introduce themselves and speak briefly on that subject and how they believe blogging has changed the way we write, communicate and receive information. Then the floor will open to questions from the audience. The idea behind this is to be sure the audience gets a chance to hear and interact with every speaker.

Breakout Session #1 – 10:30 a.m.

You can choose one session below to attend:

Track 1 – Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media

When it comes to promoting your blog, social media can be a highly effective means of increasing your reader base. But, there is a right way and a wrong way to use every service. The right way can grow your traffic and enhance your brand – the wrong way will have people thinking you’re a spammer and dismissing everything you write. In this session, we’ll tackle some of the dos and don’ts of five forms of social media: blogging, microblogging, forums, social networking and social bookmarking.

Speaker’s bio: Bio: Patrick O’Keefe is a writer, web developer, and community administrator. He is the founder and owner of the iFroggy Network and the author of “ Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online forums, communities and social spaces. He writes for multiple blogs, including YanksBlog.com, ManagingCommunities.com, and Bad Boy Blog.com, and maintains a personal blog at patrickokeefe.com.

Track 2 – Finding your Voice, Blogging your Heart

This session will be a discussion (with hand-outs!) on finding and refining your blog voice. Part of our goal will be to examine why we blog, what we want our blog to reflect about us, how to do it well, and how to get what we really want from blogging (once we’ve figured that out). Developing a consistent blogging voice will help you communicate more effectively, gain readership, and win readers over to your point of view.

Speaker’s Bio: Anne Fitten Glenn has been blogging about parenting, beer, politics, books, and other topics at edgymama.com for almost four years. She writes a weekly parenting column, also titled Edgy Mama, for Asheville, N.C.’s alternative newsweekly, Mountain Xpress and a weekly business profile for the Asheville Citizen-Times. As a journalist, photographer, and educator, she has closely watched the media change and evolve during her 22-year career. Glenn spends her free time mothering two kids, one husband, two marmalade cats, and one Dorkie Poo mutt. She rarely gets enough exercise, chocolate, sleep or beer.

Track 3: Creating Online Communities or Your Site is Not a Billboard

Communities are a dynamic asset that can be encouraged with positive interaction and transparency. Cultivating conversation both on and offsite creates interaction and a feeling of investment between the author and audience. Methods and guidelines for developing communities will be discussed.

Speaker’s Bio: Heather Solos is co-author of Home-Ec101.com and recently launched LowcountryBloggers.com with the help of Daniel Tennant. LowcountryBloggers.com is a site dedicated to promoting community and interaction between Charleston area bloggers.

Breakout Session #2 – 11:15 a.m.

Choose one of the following tracks:

Track 1: Seo for Bloggers

No, SEO isn’t a dirty word. Yes, you really do need to know at least a little about if you want to find success in the blogosphere. Guess what? It isn’t that scary or even that hard. Get a crash course in the basics of driving search engine traffic to your web site, from simple tactics while you write to basic plugins that can make a huge difference in your traffic. Best of all, you can still write for people while appeasing the Google gods.

Speaker bio: Kelby Carr is a freelance writer, SEO expert, foodie, social networking chick, travel junkie and former biz-cops-political-investigative newspaper journalist turned hardcore mommy blogger. She is the publisher of a network of parenting web sites. She’s been geeking it out on computers since the age of 10 (and you had to use an audio tape to run software), and web publishing and networking since the early 1990s (when she had to create pages from code in Notepad). She is also the host of the morning session.

Track 2: Hyper-Local Reporting with Multimedia

Jared Smith will demonstrate how he makes Charleston Weather, a live and interactive weather show for Charleston, SC residents during times of severe weather, a reality using little more than ustream.tv, a webcam, and a couple free or low-cost tools.  The techniques Jared uses aren’t just limited to weather broadcasts, either — any genre of webcast can benefit from his techniques and ideas.  All you need to bring is an appetite for multimedia and your own creativity to pull it all together.

Speaker’s Bio: Jared Smith is a 20-something web developer and weather nut in Charleston, SC.  Jared has been blogging since 2000 (age 15) on a variety of topics, but he is most recently known for his efforts in blogging and reporting tropical and other severe weather that affects the Charleston area, beginning with a live blog of Tropical Storm Ernesto in 2006 as it took aim on the Lowcountry, and continuing into 2008, when Tropical Storms Fay and Hanna posed a threat to the region.  In times of severe weather, Jared hosts Charleston Weather, an interactive weather show complete with real-time chat and live radar.  He is in the process of launching a standalone weather blog to compliment the show at charlestonwx.com, which is scheduled to go live full-time in 2009.

Track 3: Speaker Selected, but Still Finalizing Session Theme

Rest of the Day’s Conference

After we break for lunch, the day is far from over. Get down to real nuts and bolts learning with Dave Slusher’s hands-on sessions.

How to Attend

So if you are interested in going, you can either RSVP at the Facebook event page or comment below. We look forward to seeing you there! Also be sure to attend the ConvergeSouth conference the day before at the same location (and I am a speaker, so stop by and say hello!), and be sure to register for that separately.

Get Your Conference Badge

OK, so I threw these together. They suck. Hey, I’m pressed on time and I don’t have Photoshop that I’m used to. But if you’d like to have a badge, feel free. Also feel free to create your own less sucky badge and use it instead.

Get the code:

<a href="http://kelbycarr.com/independent-blogger-conference-greensboro"><img src="http://kelbycarr.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/greensboro-speaker.jpg" alt="" /></a>

Get the code:

<a href="http://kelbycarr.com/independent-blogger-conference-greensboro"><img src="http://kelbycarr.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/greensboro-attendee.jpg" alt="" /></a>

I was working on a couple of articles mentioning or focused on Disney theme parks. I wrote this article about Halloween events and included mention of some very cool sounding festivities over at Disneyland and Disney World. I was hoping to get a picture, so I went onto the Disneyland media site. I completed the registration to get access to media images and even just press releases (since when are those a secret?).

I was annoyed to have to wait 24 hours for approval to access the media site, but Disney certainly isn’t the only organization to make someone wait to access materials, although that, too, is stupid in my opinion. Many members of the media, both online and *gasp* print journalists, need this information immediately. But I digress.

I sit on the articles and wait. This evening I was pleased to see an email saying my login was approved. I skimmed it just enough to see I was approved and logged in. Then I clicked photos. Then I got this message:

This area is reserved for members of the news media. If you qualify, please update your user profile. Please include any notes in the “Supporting information for media credentials” box. We will notify you of your status via e-mail of your account status.

I checked, and I had filled out that portion of my profile. Confused, I went back to the “approval” email. That’s when I noticed this part:

Your current credentials do not provide access to editorial photography and videography section of this website. This is reserved for members of approved media outlets only, and subject to review on a case-by-case basis.

One of the sites I write for is owned by the New York Times, but whatev. Regardless, there is obviously some list of approved news agencies and I didn’t name one that triggered it. This is what I can only refer to as PR web bigotry. It isn’t the first time I’ve encountered it. I can’t tell you how many times I have had to justify my existence as a web writer or blogger ten times over. The funny thing is I never got that kind of grilling when I wrote for print.

The good news is I emailed a nasty reply, and I cc’ed the person with Disney World’s PR department who assisted me when we visited. Then I got an autoreply and it included the information for logging in to the Disney World media page, which is far better. They also have a cool social media site, the Disney World Moms Panel.

Shoot, they even have a Twitter profile (although they might consider, like, following a couple people back). Still, impressive considering their west coast cohorts don’t even allow web writers to access images for, essentially, free advertising for Disneyland without jumping through hoops and getting reviewed on a “case by case basis.” Shudder. Methinks it’s time to write about Universal Studios instead.

It’s not like Disney is the only organization that doesn’t get it.

Just recently, we went to Carowinds outside Charlotte to do some coverage of Charlotte for Kids. I went through all the normal channels to arrange media passes to Carowinds beforehand. Then I arrived where I was told to pick up the passes only to get grilled by the front line person there. She was very confused about my media outlet. Her exact words were, “I’ve never handled one of these for web before.”

Really? The web? You’ve heard of it before, right lady? Extremely popular with, well, almost everyone? Yeah.

So I will give the PR people a freebie here, a no-fee consultation. I will save you an awful lot of time, money and hassle. Next time you think about blowing off a web writer, blogger or someone who does their writing through the internet, consult this list. In fact, why don’t you just print it and paste it next to your computer (you do have internet access, right? Thought so.) Take it to your next board meeting. Because it’s important.

Here are just some of the reasons why web coverage is the best PR coverage.

• You can often track the results of PR coverage. If the writer links to your site, you can see a direct impact in hard numbers being looking at your own stats to see how many people that coverage sent your way. You will know that those people read that specific article, not the circulation for a specific print edition. And, of course that doesn’t even include the many people who will read the coverage and you will never know it (or, you know, something like the stats you get for coverage in print media).
• Print coverage has a shelf life, literally. Getting in even a major magazine will only get something read for maybe a month or so. Web coverage has staying power, and it will be found potentially for years to come. Yes, you can argue that it means that bad coverage also stays for years to come. Rest assured. Bad coverage on the web is not to be avoided by annoying web writers and bloggers. Engaging and respecting them is the only way to have some influence on that.
• The reach is almost limitless with web coverage. Now yes, it is true, there are blogs that only have a few readers. But there are also blogs and web sites that literally reach millions monthly. Many popular web sites have monthly traffic that dramatically surpasses even A-list magazines and newspapers. But the reach goes far beyond that. Bloggers link to other bloggers and web sites. People socially bookmark articles. People tweet about cool articles. Then web writers read that and write about it. And here. Pay close attention now, because you will love this one: PRINT WRITERS read blogs and web sites. That’s where they get lots of story ideas.
• You get real feedback that you never will from print or broadcast coverage. If someone writes about how great an attraction is, and 20 people comment that they had the same type of bad experience, you can address it. If 20 people comment that the place is amazing, you have people saying great things about you for free. Shoot, contact them!
• Readers respect what bloggers write, and they take it seriously. Blog readers have a much more intimate and trusting relationship with their favorite bloggers than they do with typical inaccessible print writers.
• Coverage is instant, or can be. You don’t have to anticipate what to pitch several months out like you do for mags, or even several days or sometimes weeks out for newspapers.
• A blogger or web writer reaches, typically, a very targeted audience. Print publications are, by nature, typically broad and general in reach. Even special interest publications can never be as niche as a web site or a blog can. So say one day you look at your numbers and realize you’d really love to covet a certain demographic. You can by pitching blogs and web sites who also target that very specific group. And I mean specific… on my Type-A Mom site, for example, you can target a mom editor to write about subjects as specific as bed rest, green parenting, 40-something moms or moms of college-aged kids.
• Here’s my personal favorite as an SEO maniac. Every time someone writes about your site online and links to it, be it a blogger or a web news site or whatever, that is a gift of Google juice. What that means is, essentially, Google looks at which web sites like YOUR web site. If it’s a lot, then that is a major factor in how often you show up in searches. If it’s not too many, you might even get beat out by an SEO-savvy blogger who writes about your company instead. I’m thinking you don’t want that. Print coverage does nothing to boost your Google PageRank, or how cool Google thinks your site is.

If you don’t believe me, read this amazing post that asks Are Bloggers Media? Here’s an excerpt:

“…the question of whether bloggers are media is moot. Bloggers are DIFFERENT from the mainstream media.  They are smart, expert, passionate, independent, talented, and cantankerous.  They have their own agenda, whereas journalists (while they share many of the traits listed above) are beholden to a publisher’s agenda. More to the point: whatever else ya call them, bloggers are influential.”

And believe me, the last thing you want is the wrath of an influential blogger. So when you blow off or snub a web writer, you are rolling the dice that you could be  the subject of a major PR disaster.

_{Photo of web writing, © Ginny Austin}

You may be wondering what blog kharma even is. Blog kharma is doing the right thing just because you are part of a community, and you want to help others. Be a generous blogger. Here is how you get good blog kharma:

• Link to other blogs.
• Don’t just link to other blogs that have a high PageRank and are wildly popular. Link to the little blogs, the ones just starting out. You were there once, too (and maybe still are). Help a blogga out, sisters and brothers!
• Promote other bloggers’ stuff. Stumble (recommend, review or or thumbs-up a post at StumbleUpon), post it on Twitter, Digg it, Propeller it, Kirtsy it, momShare it, you name it. When you see something good, spread the word. You help the blogger, and you help other readers
• When bloggers ask for promotion (such as on a social network, or by sending you a message through StumbleUpon), provide it. You don’t want to be taken advantage of, but if someone is reasonable and only asks for a little help from time to time, then give it!
• Have a blogroll, or a weekly link love post, or some place where you regularly give mention and exposure to other bloggers.
• Comment on blogs to keep conversations lively and active. Don’t comment just to promote yourself (although most do let you make your name linkable to your site).
• If you use Wordpress, use a plugin like CommentLuv to allow those who comment on YOUR site to get an extra boost of exposure.

On the other hand, I frequently see sites and blogs that have serious bad blog kharma. You have bad blog kharma if you have committed any of the following:

• Mentioned a site but didn’t highlight the name of the site and link to it.
• Held back from linking to other blogs or sites because you were afraid you would leak some of your Google PageRank, send someone away from your site, or because you’re afraid you’ll boost their search engine rankings and not your own, or for some other blog-selfish reason.
• Used nofollow for your blogroll or links inside posts. I don’t believe in nofollow. If it’s worth linking to, it’s worth getting the credit with Google. Also, many bloggers don’t know about nofollow. So it’s disingenuous. They think you are helping them, but you really aren’t. Don’t know what nofollow is, or want to know how you can spot a nofollower? Comment below. If there is enough interest, I will do a post just on the subject of nofollow.
• Not linking at all.
• Not commenting at all.
• Only commenting on other blogs to promote yourself or insert a link to your blog or post. You should talk WITH the blog community, not AT it.

Before you even get all commenting and ranting below, I will address this right here and now: Yes, I know there are reasons for doing the stuff on my bad kharma list. If there weren’t reasons, people wouldn’t do those things. I’m talking about something else, being generous, and being a giver not a taker in the Blog Community.

In the old days, a web site was a self-contained entity, an island unto itself. This is the world of Web 2.0. This is a community people, no different than the one in which you physically live. Be a good citizen. And here is a hint. Good blog kharma does pay off. So you are even being selfish by giving.

_{Image of connecting figurines, copyright spekulator on stock.xchng.}

Find out if you’re in SEO denial with my latest post on Blogging Tips.com. Here’s an excerpt:

I am often surprised how often I encounter writers and bloggers who don’t know what SEO is, don’t want to know what SEO is, or think they don’t have time to learn about SEO. Yes, the writing of a post should be your first priority, as should writing in a clever and engaging manner to hook readers. But those readers need to find you before they can get hooked.

Read it: 5 Warning Signs You Are in SEO Denial

But the funny thing is just how easy the very basics of SEO are. That’s especially true for writers who are writing to a specific medium and are already used to certain terms and rules.

So here, for the reformed newspaper journalists turned web writers (or journalists who are at one of the few newspapers who get that they might actually want organic search traffic… or even know what the hell that means): my journaleze-to-geek decoder on SEO:

Hed = Title

You get this, right? The header to your article. Easy enough. In SEO and web terms, that’s your title. In newspapers, your goal is to grab the attention of some loser walking past a newspaper box while busy buying groceries. So accuracy is kinda sorta important, but grabbing attention is so much more so.

With SEO and web writing, your main goal with the header is to say what the article is. Don’t get clever or cute or creative and (for reasons that go well beyond SEO), don’t use obnoxious puns. Just say what it is. Ask yourself: is anyone on the planet ever going to type this into a search engine? If so, will that person be looking for something remotely similar to what I’m writing about?

Lede = Intro Graph

The lede, or lead (why to journalists intentionally mispell that word anyway?), was once supposed to answer the what, when, where, why, yada yada. Then journalists realized that was pretty boring, and started doing work-up leads and enticing people into stories. I love that stuff.

In web writing, don’t do that. You want to get that term you used in your title into your intro graph. A couple times, if you can do that without being obvious. Then you want to use the term again sprinkled comfortably throughout the copy. If you don’t have the words from your title anywhere in your first graph, please reread the last two paragraphs until you do.

Nut graf = Meta description

The nut graph in newspapers is that paragraph, sometimes the lead and sometimes buried 10 painful paragraphs in, that says what the story is about. It’s for those readers who wonder, interestingly enough, “Why the hell am I reading this anyway?” Sometimes it’s missing entirely. But that’s a whole other issue.

In web writing, your nut graph is your lead. Yes, it is. Don’t argue, damn it. It’s also your meta description, which is the paragraph you tell search engines your article is about. Sometimes they believe you and tell the world that, too. Sometimes they decide you’re full of crap and ignore you. But you should have the description there anyway, just in case.

So there you go. It isn’t so hard. It didn’t even feel like math. I hope you don’t feel too geeky-dirty now.