A few days have passed since I presented my standing-room-only Blog Smart Business Blogging workshop here in Colorado, and I’m still astonished at how many people showed up. It was terrific, lots of great questions and comments, free NewsGator Online accounts preloaded with top business blog feeds for all attendees, and much more.
As I reviewed the feedback from the workshop, however, one thing was quite clear: as much as everyone knew that they needed to learn about why their business should be blogging, everyone also wanted to learn how to blog! With a three hour presentation, there just wasn’t anywhere near enough time to step through even a simple example, but I’ve taken their feedback to heart and am please to announce my new How To Blog hands-on workshop, June 2nd, here in Boulder, Colorado.
Here’s what’ll be covered:
- A Survey of Weblog Solutions
- The advantages of Typepad for your first blog
- Signing up for a Typepad account (hands on)
- Configuring your Typepad account “just so” (hands on)
- Picking a template from the many available and installing it to customize the look and feel of your new blog
- Using Technorati and Google to find existing Web pages on your topic and how to figure out their “permalinks”
- Writing your first weblog entry!
- Including a link to another Web page in your blog entry
- Uploading pictures to Flickr, and integrating Flickr pictures into your new weblog
- Publicizing your new weblog
- Questions and Answers. Lots of them.
Why focus on Six Apart’s Typepad product? Because it’s built atop the same platform as the industry-leading Movable Type (which powers this very weblog), it’s industrial strength, powerful enough for professional users (for example, you can map your existing domain name to your new Typepad blog), but easy enough for anyone to get started with and, most importantly, it runs on its own server so you can jump right in.
FURTHER BIG IMPORTANT NOTE: The How To Blog workshops are limited to 30 attendees. That’s about half the number of people who attended the Business Blogging workshop, so if you’d like to actually build a Weblog of your own with expert assistance and some fun networking too, please do sign up ASAP so as not to lose out on a spot and end up on the waiting list.
Not sure about whether this kind of workshop would be of value to you? Thinking that maybe you can just muddle through getting started with Typepad on your own? Before you decide this isn’t for you, read through a few of the testimonials I received after the business blogging event:
If you’ve been thinking of dipping your toe into the blogging pool, whether professionally or just as a hobby, this four hour workshop will undoubtedly be the smartest, fastest and most enjoyable way to get out of the pit and onto the racetrack!
There are four distinct how’s for blogging: 1) the mechanics of operating the blogging software, 2) the process of deciding what content to post, 3) the style with which the content is posted, and 4) how to deal with user comments (interaction).
I would suggest encouraging people to read lots of blogs that have the same nominal “thrust” of their blog to get a handle on what a reader will see over a considerable period of time.
The level of content will gradually take on a “feel” over time. An approach might seem rational when planning a blog, but in practice it may accumulate a sub-optimal “feel”. So many other people have learned the hard way, so we might as well learn more quickly from their mistakes.
The actual style of the blog may be a matter of personal or corporate taste, but once again we can learn a lot from the mistakes of others rather than make all the same mistakes over again.
The core idea here is to pick a couple of relevant blogs and use them as your “mentor” in your own blogging.
If I were being trained to blog, I’d want to see the following syllabus:
1) How to Blog: The Mechanics
2) How to Blog: The Content
3) How to Blog: The Style
4) How to Blog: Coping with Reader Comments
— Jack Krupansky