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Blogging Basics: Managing Information Overload: How to Find Your Blogging Community
This session focused on how to control your urge to be everywhere and using every tool in sight instead of strategizing about your goals. That's the key: know your goal, and you can then figure out which tools to use. Another key is to limit your time using each tool that you decide you must have in your toolbox. How about a low-tech blog-timer? We also spoke about some key tools in our bloggers toolbox.
Featuring:
Sarah Braesch
Cynthia Samuels
AND WE’RE OFF… TO THE SESSION
Many people are feeling overloaded today.
--Overloaded with building community. One women responded that the number of people out there and tools available make it overwhelming.
--Overloaded with what you need to do to build a community
--Plethora of tools
--Some have many sites and hundreds of bookmarks
FOCUS: on tools. You don’t need to duplicate tools. By the way, you can turn twitter off.
RSS feed: is there too much in your reader? You don’t have to read everything. You will never be caught up!
Read other people’s blogs once or twice a week, that’s okay.
RSS reader/feeds: you can’t read everyone everyday. Use folders to help prioritize what to read and when, or even if.
The speakers are looking to fine tune the seminar depending on interests of audience members.
TOOLS THAT CINDY AND SARAH USE AND RECOMMEND USING
1--Google (feed) Reader: use the “star” to keep the articles you want to read later.
2--Twitter: Turn off Twitter and get some sleep. Twitter: it’s instant gratification. Make a resolution to turn it off sometimes.
3--Traffic Stats: look at your blog statistics to ensure that you are not wasting your time and to make sure, too, that you are using your time /writing wisely.
4--StumbleUpon: mark your favorite posts, but if you find a post you like, you can “stumble” it. Then, your friends can find it. (Better than friendfeed.) Similar to deli.cious. This is easier to see what other people have picked. People here seem to have “facebook under control.”
5--Google Alerts: in Google, click to Alerts, and there you can put in keywords that are of interest to you and it will show you the places that are talking about that keyword. This is great if you have specific interests. You could get blog feeds and/or news feeds and this will come to your email.
Find community: find people who you can relate to. This can start with just one person. Use twitter for use. Twitter: you can follow what people are interested in, and this can help you find people too. Look at who the people you like are following; also, look at who your friends are following.
Write on a community blog, BLOGHER is great for this. Start at blogher, post there or read there, go to someone’s blog, and then find other blogs from their comments or from their blogrolls.
DCMETROMOMS is another local DC blog.
Any community blog will bring you to other bloggers writing about things you may be interested in, and this can also help you to find readers for your blog. This is a great way to grow your readership, as well as what you read.
FACEBOOK: How to keep Facebook under control. How to use it efficiently.
--One audience member keeps a schedule for when to access facebook, and even uses a timer, but tries to stick to her schedule; this women runs a group on facebook and so must be there for that.
--Another only uses for people she has met in person.
--To many facebook is a big time suck
--Key to see these tools as MARKETING TOOLS, but you do need to set aside time during the day for when you will access/use it and not go beyond that. You can separate one facebook account for business and personal purposes.
When you update your blog do you link to twitter and facebook? The nods said yes, but this creates a problem of just self-promoting.
Passive updates from LINKEDIN and PULSE.
LINKEDIN: many are using. Business connector: like a Rolodex.
How you use these tools depends on what you need them for. Need to ask yourself what you need from each tool. Ask yourself: what do I need from all of this stuff? Once you have your own agenda, then you can take these tips and customize them to serve you best. And then, customize how you use each of these tools.
Rescuetime.com: analyzes your online internet usage per day.
IM: many
