Presenter: Todd Lohenry, @e1evationllc,

Todd Lohenry of e1evation, llc is covering today’s Blogging session. Todd Lohenry is a business development and technology professional with 25 years experience in marketing, sales and technology. E1evation, llc helps small-medium businesses develop the strategy and structure they need to succeed in the marketplace. Todd is an entrepreneur, marketing and sales expert, technologist, journalist, speaker, instructor and political consultant. Todd has developed a global reputation in the high-tech, financial, and aviation sectors.

Todd started out by asking how many have not blogged before. Many raised their hands so he made us newbies all comfortable in knowing we aren’t alone in this overwhelming environment!

A great thing about blogging is that anyone can blog, the bad thing? Anyone can blog!

The reason I came to this session and what I’m excited to learn about: How to change from being a thinker to a thought leader.

Growing blog traffic:
• Publish content and connect it to all the relevant social media channels

Todd mentions some of the pitfalls: He increased traffic 30 fold and in May lost 80% of traffic due to a technology issue. Wordpress plug-in crashed IE every time they went to site. This brings up a great take away: test on all search engines because there are many ways to get there!

Blogging can be done in 5 easy steps, that is comforting!
• Express yourself
• Edit
• Emphasize - take advantage of the many tools available to share and contribute content (see below on a few)
• Elevate - use tools such as Google, Ask and Yahoo that automatically checks for blog updates. You can use tools such as Hootsuite for Twitter that will automatically post those updates.
• Execute! - do this over and over every day. Use the process continuously.

5 E’s, now I can probably remember that, or at least that they all started with E.

Doing blogging is easy and free, but you have to put in the time and energy. Invest in individual tools not all.

Why a blogsite?
Inexpensive, easy to update, dynamic, create dialogue with customers, humanize brand

Blog is a public demonstration of your thought leadership. One of my barriers right now is getting my thoughts out on what is relevant and important to me. This is going to be an exciting tool for me to do that!

Which platform is best?
Consider Wordpress, 32% of all those developing tools use some form of wordpress plugin’s. Wordpress.com is a great place to start and practice. Graduate to a hosted site when you’ve gotten enough experience. This is interesting because I hadn’t gotten that through my experience in social media so I’m absolutely going to take this path. Biggest difference between Blogger and Wordpress- Blogger is just a blogging engine. What does that mean in Simple Sara terms? Blogger ONLY does blogs. Wordpress has much more functionality and flexbility.

Why is WordPress best?
• Plugin functionality- Over 4,000!
• Theme functionality: can easily activate different look and feel themes
• Auto-ping functionality: easy for other people to refer to their content and use in their website. Ah hah! Increasing your inbound links-which helps SEO and Google rankings!
• Trackback
• Overall feeling of simplicity
• SEO ready

Over 28,000 Wordpress blogs created every day! I better be one of those very soon.

Be sure to express yourself. I love doing that!
• Instructional
• Informational
• Reviews
• Lists
• Interviews
• Case studies
• Contrast two options
• Debate
• Link post
• And so much more….

How do you begin? Get a Wordpress site, post some thoughts and ask friends/family what they think about what you’ve written and how you’ve done before launching to the world.

How can you get great content? Google Reader of course! This is an amazing tool to organize and centralize your feeds. Make news come to you, as it should be of course. If you spent your time searching out the millions of pieces of information out there, your boss would have some words because nothing would get done! You can see if your blog has been shared via Google Reader. AND, you can set up your social media accounts to automatically share and send links of interest.  Wow, had no idea. I’ll keep that in mind when I get my blog going.

Must haves on transforming from just being a thinker: Be intelligent, consume news, get a lot of ideas, and beg, borrow or steal content to share on your blog-this all helps in becoming a thought leader. Of course original, well thought out, relevant and intelligent original posts are a must as well!

Shareaholic: allows you easily transfer site links/info and post into your blog. This grows your relevant content and topics of interest that you can comment on to share with readers. This shows others your “smartness and thought leadership”, which drives return visitors.

ScribeFire: I have to admit my weakness here. So much was going on and I missed what this is so here is the official definition from their website: ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

Zermanta plugin for WordPress - it will suggest links for your site and make suggestions for other sites, links, articles and tags. Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts.

By using these three tools, you are building an entire editorial team of other reporters and leveraging their content to build your brand.

Facebook note: Social RSS allows you to get applications to import content on other social media sites into your fan page.

Hear from Todd himself on his thoughts on blogging for those of you who couldn’t make it.