Increasing the readership of your blog is something every blogger strives for. Yet, it can often be one of the most difficult and daunting tasks to accomplish day in and day out. Attracting readers through your content, search engine traffic, and other ways you may not have thought about are all part of what it takes to build your base of loyal readers. If you want to greatly improve your blog in these areas, be sure to check out some of these sessions that touch on this topic.

Build Your Blog Readership, led by Joseph Kerschbaum

Blog Etiquette and Ethics, led by Renee Wilmeth

Also, Writing for Blogs led by Eric Deckers and Between the Blog Posts led by Brad J. Ward will also touch on these topics and can be found on the Sessions page.

One area we really wanted to cover at this year’s conference was the legal issues many bloggers can run into during the course of running their blog. We are happy to have Andrew Paradies from Photrade.com speaking on just that subject.

Here is an excerpt from the session description:

This session will cover the do’s and don’ts of using other people’s photos, videos and quotes and how to handle attribution. Furthermore, an overview of copyright laws, your rights as a journalist and the legal implications of misuse will all be covered. There will also be a discussion about Creative Commons…

Read the rest of the session description

Based on early feedback, we’re sure this will be a popular session and well worth your time. Don’t miss out, the conference is in 3 weeks!

BBC News has a great article on the potential social networks present to busniesses worldwide (”Firms ‘miss’ social site success“):

Researchers for Gartner found that huge opportunities for improving the management of large firms exist.

“Businesses which harness how employees use these sites stand to increase savings, productivity and profits,” said Gartner researcher Jeffrey Mann.

He told the BBC the challenge was how to apply this to the corporate world.

The Gartner survey discovered that social networking sites, instant messaging email, chat and file sharing are attracting significant levels of interest online. (More at news.bbc.co.uk)

Is your business tapping into the social network trend? Heck, does your business even really understand what a social network is? BlogIndiana Conference 2008 can help you learn the ins and outs of web-based communities, from building your own to effective social network marketing practices. Reserve your seat today.

This is a question most bloggers wonder–especially when they are first getting started. While there are plenty of ideas on exactly how often you should blog, we wanted to know how often you actually are blogging.

As we close in on 100 bloggers having completed the 2008 Indiana Blogger Census, I thought it would be a good time to share a little bit of the data we’re collecting. As you can see from the pie chart, Hoosier bloggers are blogging much more than I had anticipated.

With 35% claiming to blog every day, that’s a lot of fresh content. And perhaps even more impressive–more than half of Indiana bloggers are posting new content on at least a weekly basis. We could probably put together some kind of statistic at the end of the census proclaiming that every XX seconds, a blog in Indiana is updated.

If you are interested in learning more about the results of the census, we’ll be releasing a more comprehensive report at the Blog Indiana conference.

We’d also like to thank FormSpring for creating such an amazingly easy to use web form builder that powers our census.

During the early planning phases of the conference, a unique idea was put forth on a way to have a little fun with all the networking that was bound to happen over the course of two days.

The concept is that each attendee selects 2 or 3 tags (or keywords) that identify a specific area of knowledge or expertise that they have. Then, throughout the conference, everyone wears their “PeopleTags” so others can clearly see where their specialties lie.

The purpose being to promote spontaneous conversation between two or more people with questions about specific aspects of blogging, social media, marketing, writing, SEO–anything!

We call this PeopleTagging!

As the conference gets closer, we’ll be sending out a brief survey to all registered attendees asking them to select a few tags that represent their areas of knowledge. We’ll be creating baskets of buttons representing the various tags that are the most popular among the group. As everyone checks-in on the first day, you’ll get to select your buttons and wear them.

We’d like to think of this concept as a constant networking opportunity with everyone you see at the conference. Plus, the buttons will make for a nice token from the conference.

Oh, and please ignore the tie in the photo above–ties are definitely not required at Blog Indiana!