Industry Blogging is Dead

What am I really supposed to write about?

Should I write about how print is dying and magazine blogging has taken over?
…Okay wrote about it.

Now that the magazine world is almost fully caught up to the blog world, where does that leave industry bloggers?

I only read twitter and lolcats.

sorry 😦

Vote for Me to be a Social Media Ninja!

                

I am running for Social Media Ninja over at Collective Thoughts.

Even though I am a baby in the community… I would really appreciate if YOU could vote for ME.

Here are the contest rules:

1 – Please only vote for one candidate.
2 – Votes must be received by Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at midnight GMT.
3 – Candidates cannot vote for themselves.
4 – The decision of the Collective Thoughts team is final.

VOTE HERE!

(What are my chances of winning with this goofy picture!?)

PS: I think it is pretty cool to be best known for Mixx.

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.

Blogging

Tonight I had a conversation with a very close friend who is trying to break into the world of writing.

Naturally, I explained to her it is much easier to blog and get the same response at a quicker rate.

It is the natural progression for very powerful authors to become very powerful bloggers. I have noticed that a lot of my favorite authors have made the switch. Of course it really depends on the style of writing they do. But columnists for the New Yorker are also Bloggers.

I obviously told her to research the hundreds of blogs about SEO and Blogging, because those are the two secrets of becoming a “Power Blogger”. But personally I don’t feel like I have enough experience to guide her.

Is it easier to blog about a niche? I’d think so. What is the best affiliate network to work with? How do you explain PPC to a beginner? How do you convince a talented write to blog? These are my questions. Of course once there is valuable content it is easy to promote on social platforms and various SEO tools/ Content Promotion sites, like Digg and Del.icio.us. But how do you convince a friend to break in?!

I’m sure I will find the answers to these questions when I network @ Pubcon.

Any further advice for my friend would be appreciated!

You can read her blog now here: My Pop Roks