Search and Blogging Reporters Forum

This live forum was pretty cool and extremely entertaining.

Speakers: Andy Beal, Rand Fishkin, Michael McDonald, Lee Odden

Some great things I learned from this forum:

1. Advertising money is going away from print and towards online ads.
2.  More than 7,000 journalists have lost their jobs in the past year due to blogging popularity.
3. The NYTimes print sales are going way down, but their online ad sales are very expensive.
4. It is best to pick a niche to blog about.  When you are passionate about a topic, it makes you more of an expert in your field and easier to monetize.
5. SEO blogging needs to be done timely and carefully because it is so saturated and dangerous.
6. Look for opportunities to write similar posts to your most successful posts.
7. Contests are a great way to pull rank,
8. Multimedia is great for branding but does not improve readership.  Many people choose not to watch videos because they are at work (sound) or they are mobile browsing.
9. People in the SEM/SMM/SEO industry do not click on ads, blogging more in a niche opens up these ads to a different vertical.

There is more on the Search Engine Round Table.

There is also a really in depth coverage of the forum done by GrayWolf. 

There is also a great recap of the whole day , as well as this one by Lisa Barone @ Bruce Clay.

Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Search