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Northern Voice Blogging Conference

Posted on May 17, 2012 · Leave a Comment

For its seventh consecutive year, the Northern Voice blogging conference will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia this June in an effort to bring bloggers, social media enthusiasts and marketers and SEO professionals together in order to gain and spread fresh, new ideas.

With a focus on fun and partying alongside blogging and marketing, the Northern Voice conference works hard to show its visitors a great time, integrating learning opportunities with social shoulder-rubbing in order to create a fun, relaxed atmosphere that encourages relationship building and inspiration. With all topics related to the web welcome and open for discussion, this is one conference that offers something for absolutely everyone!

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WordCamp Montreal Coming Soon

Posted on May 15, 2012 · Leave a Comment

August 18 and 19 will see the beautiful city of Montreal, Quebec play host to the Canadian edition of WordCamp, a gathering of WordPress enthusiasts, from casual bloggers to core developers, intended to help further the platform and the things we do with it.

If you’re a blogger, social or search marketer or a coder looking for a new platform on which to focus development efforts, consider paying a visit to one of Canada’s most interesting urban centers this summer and cozy on up to the absolute best website and blog CMS in the world.

While I would love to attend – I’ve yet to make it to a WordCamp event – work and family obligations will be keeping me busy throughout the summer but I’ll be keeping a close eye on the results of the conference, from lectures to new ideas!

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The Power of Guest Blogging

Posted on May 10, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Tired of adding posts to your blog to have them read only by friends, family and the odd web surfer? Building an audience for any new blog can be an uphill battle given the many competitors that invariably occupy every niche, leaving you a nameless blogger without the foothold necessary to launch yourself and your writing upwards.

Enter guest blogging. Guest blogging involves submitting your article for publication on a competitor’s site in return for attribution and, usually, a backlink or two, exposing your talents to a fresh, new audience. Given the quid pro quo involved, most bloggers are happy to publish guest articles, presenting you with a wide pool of potential platforms.

If you’re ready to increase your blog’s traffic and unleash your talent by guest blogging, here are a few quick steps to get you started:

1. Determine your target.

The first order of business at hand is identifying a blog, contacting the owner and ironing out a plan for your guest post submission. Be sure to focus on sites that match your blog’s own niche, ensuring that you are writing for an audience that will have a genuine interest in your topic.

2. Engage your audience for maximum results.

Now that you’ve got a soapbox to stand on, very carefully choose an interesting (and preferably trending) topic to write about, keeping your article engaging, informative and opinionated in order to inspire the same in your readers.

3. Edit and then edit some more!

Grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, poor sentence structure, bad HTML formatting; all of these things represent easy excuses for your would-be readers to find comparitive content elsewhere. Before you submit your guest article for publication, edit your offering to perfection in order to ensure that you’re giving your new audience the very best that you have to offer.

While there is certainly more to guest blogging than is mentioned above, these tips represent exactly the positive, can-do attitude and plan that will lead you to the best possible results when you add guest blogging to your marketing toolkit!

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Classic Retweet vs. Official Retweet: What’s the Difference?

Posted on May 8, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Twitter

Click to visit me on Twitter!

With Twitter’s 2011 launch of the “official” retweet, the community-created retweet method has been falling out of favor, infuriating the Twitter users who originally began using the term in 2007.

Whether you like it or not, the latest retweet method is here to stay and we’re left with only one important question: what exactly is the difference between the original, classic retweet and the official Twitter retweet? Here are three helpful points to allow you to understand the difference and better decide when to use one or the other:

1. Need to edit or add content? Use the classic retweet.

If you want to tag yourself or additional users or add a quick opinion on the content you’re retweeting, the classic method is necessary; the official retweet only allows for content to be retweeted to your followers exactly as originally posted.

2. Add credibility with an official retweet.

Because the official retweet method doesn’t allow additional editing, you can be sure that it won’t be abused in order to spam followers with links. If you want to provide your followers with information, news or a third-party link, using the official retweet helps to give add credibility in your intentions.

3. Get indexed, get searched.

One of the big drawbacks of the official retweet is that the post is not given its own page, meaning that it cannot be indexed by Twitter or Google as an individual tweet; using the classic retweet method gives your post its own page, meaning that users can find you when searching for that topic as opposed to just the original poster.

Use common sense when deciding which Twitter retweet method to use under different circumstances, leveraging both for the best possible results.

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BlogWorld and New Media Expo New York

Posted on May 7, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Blogging has come to be an umbrella term for writers, marketers and web developers of all kinds and the BlogWorld and New Media Expo coming in June 2012 to New York City recognizes this fact by exposing its attendees to new knowledge in all aspects of being a successful blogger. From the utilization of new technologies to being a more effective marketer, a series of keynote speeches, workshops and vendor showcases are aimed at helping even the most well-rounded blogger become better at everything that they do!

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