This post is long overdue. I have what I think are some very good reasons. One is technical, the keyboard on my laptop decided it was a good time start flaking out. You never realize how important the ‘v’ key is until you have to use the virtual keyboard every time you want to paste something. If you remember the book “The World According to Garp” you may remember that Garp got his name. Slowly, one-by-one, the keys would stop working. Next came the ‘t’, then the ‘5’…you get the picture. So I had to buy a logitech bluetooth keyboard which I am still adjusting to.
On Sunday night, after the Blog Elevated conference ended, I wrote some of the main takeaways from the conference regarding my talk. Things to work on, questions I got from people, and so on. So that was my writing for that night.
But the real-time kill take-away came from the speakers themselves, and the people I met. All the speakers were real pros and it an honor to be selected to talk at this conference in their company. Each one gave you a lot to think about and how to improve your blogging game. You can take blogging as far as you want to go. The tools are there, and they are numerous.
Finally…it just so happens that this has been Linked-In‘s week of learning. All their courses are free this week. There are over 5000 of them from Lynda.com and others (i believe). And the dozen or so I’ve taken since Monday are great. I got Lynne signed up on Linked-In and she has been taking them also. You may notice the great graphics she is adding to our tweets.
My goals after leaving the conference were to learn to write a proper business plan and up my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knowledge. I found some courses that were great for both of these. Lynne and I both have done courses together on Intellectual Property (IP) and Advertising. And these were short courses, anywhere from about 90 minutes to 3 hours. They also have full blown 30 hour or more in-depth learning. I will revisit these after I sign up for Linked-Ins for the 30 day free trial. I suspect I will become a regular of these classes tho and go ahead and pay the subscription. They are that good!
This new thirst for knowledge and learning was the result of the inspiration I gained at the Conference. it was very inspiring to meet the everyday people of all kinds who have taken to blogging and achieved success at some level. It is true grass roots entrepreneurship. After being immersed in the atmosphere for two days, while shopping at Costco, I found myself looking at the people and thinking, she could be a blogger, or her, or him etc, etc..
Big thanks to Lisa Stauber and Bobbie Boyd for all their knowledge, energy and efforts in putting this all together. They are amazing women. As were the people who spoke and attended this Blog Elevated Conference. By the way, did I mention I spoke on using Flipboard for blogging. Here’s a link to the magazine I created for the conference. Enjoy…http://flip.it/U2GB1t or you can see the magazine embedded in our blog as one of the exercises from my talk. Leave a comment if you’d like….Mark