Saturday, 30 September 2006

Gaining Readership

Brian Goetll from conservativeedge.com focused on three ways for growing your readership and make an impact.

First thing you have to do is your research. Places like kentuckyvotes.org are great resources to do that research. Call people involved in the stories and try to talk to them. You get better information and get them to read your site.

Secondly, you can use the MSM to get the information. You can take a story and read between the lines to view the issues from a conservative perspective. You can raise points that aren't being raised by the main stream media.

Lastly we need to cross link each other. Help each other out to make the entire community stronger.

David Adams from KentuckyProgress added to Brian's comments by saying that we as bloggers need to work with the media and help them to get out stories they may not have otherwise covered.

It is about contacts. Reaching out to people on both sides of the isle to get the story. You need to make it fun to blog on a daily basis.

And that is the key to gaining readership. Blogging on a daily basis is the promary way to getting people to come back again and again.

Posted by elendil at 2:47 PM in Political Issues

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kentuckyvotes.org

Caleb Brown from kentuckyvotes.org gave a presentation about his web site that tracks the voting records of politicians in Frankfort. His site has all votes (or lack of votes) by politicians in Frankfort.

Great way to find facts about politicians. Allows journalists/bloggers to fact check politicians that they cover. Excellent tool that all bloggers should utilize to hold politicians accountable for their actions.

Posted by elendil at 12:58 PM in Political Issues

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Are We Journalists?

Leland Conwway from Conservative Edge was next. His talk focused on "Are bloggers journalists?"

One of the problems with bloggers is that they can be very vitriolic in thier attacks (I know I have been known to do that occasionally) and in the process you limit your audience.

The downside to new media is that it allows people to insulate themselves from seeing the other point of view and thus it is difficult to grow your readership.

What Leland talked about was using the blogosphere as a way to convince people to your side. By being more fair and rid ourselves of the name calling and to try to be more journalistic in our approache we can engage more people into the process and win people to our cause..

By backing up and presenting facts you can gain credibility and allow you to sway other people's thoughts and gain readership outside of the "conservative camp".

One of the ways to do that would be to take some time to show people how you got to your opinion instead of just thowing up opinion. Show people both side along with your reasoning for your beliefs and you can win converts.

Interesting points.

Posted by elendil at 12:29 PM in Political Issues

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Blogging 101

The first presenter was Johnathon Gay.. He presented on on blogging 101.

He began the speech by giving us a short history of blog-o-sphere..Next he moved into the basics of web journaling (blogs)

Interesting points he made about running a bloging for people to remeber.

You can be sued for the content you create. So be careful what you say.
Need to publish in Internet time. This can be very difficult to do when you are working on a blog part time..

Posted by elendil at 10:56 AM in Political Issues

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Blogging Live

Today, conservative bloggers in Kentucky are gathering for the second annual bloggers conference in Lexington. I will be blogging it live. So stay tuned today to learn what happened.

Posted by elendil at 10:52 AM in Cultural Events

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