10 Things I Learnt from #NoNNB

There was a huge blog conference for Australian bloggers in Melbourne yesterday. It was called the Nuffnang Blogopolis. All the cool bloggers were there – Darren, Bree, Mel, RetroMummy, Michael, Nikki, and lots of others.

I wasn’t there.

But I wanted to be! So when I came across #NoNNB on Twitter on Friday night, I was excited. (Yes, I know, computer nerds get excited about twitter hashtags…) Anyway, the people who wanted to be at the conference but couldn’t be were talking bloggy things and more, too. All the other cool people were there – Kelly, Kellie, Kate, Sarah, Jane, DrBron, and more.

On Saturday morning I set up two columns in my Tweetdeck – one for #nnb2011 and one for #NoNNB – and followed the stream for a while. Wow! So much of the good stuff was being shared. Then on Sunday morning I read the summaries from Bree on The Blog Stylist. She was “live blogging” the sessions. So here’s a few things I learnt…

1. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc) are really useful for bloggers to get connected to their readers, but look for where your readers hang out and don’t try to be everywhere at once. Also consider where you are comfortable. For me: I’m comfortable on Facebook so I’m sending my updates from there to Twitter where I’m less comfortable.
2. That great big Facebook widget in my sidebar helps encourages people to like my page and chat on Facebook – Kelly pointed this one out – thanks, Kelly. For me: Remember to update my page status regularly so that it appears in my widget as well.
3. Use social media to give extra to your blog readers and have discussions. Your blog should still be your focus. For me: Try to think of questions related to each blog post that I can throw out on social media after the post is published.
4. Send your full feed out rather than a partial feed. Your readers want to read your whole post and may not click through to read the rest. For me: I do this already so it was good to have it confirmed by “experts”.
5. Establish friends online to share each others’ blogs. For me: Think about how to do this more.
6. Seasonal blog posts can draw lots of traffic. Plan them in advance. For me: I need to start planning more crafts that relate to Christmas and other holidays.
7. Add a RSS Footer plugin so that you can send extra things out with every blog post. For me: I had been wondering how to do this so I was excited to find this one. Added one called TentBlogger’s RSS Footer Plugin.
8. Use text captions on your images. It helps the search engines find them. Here’s an example – again thanks, Kelly For me: Start adding these.
9. Change the “alt text” for your images. It also helps the search engines find them. (Hat tip to Kelly again – that Friday night session was super helpful!) For me: Start doing this.
10. Check out all the goodness around the blogosphere. The link to Bree’s live blogging is above and other bloggers are sure to write up their experiences so take the chance to read and learn.

Did you go to Blogopolis? Can you share one more tip with us?