I started Wednesday a little earlier than usual. I left my home in Spring Hill at 05:30 a.m.. Google said it would take 3 hours and 18 minutes to make the 180 mile drive the Dyersburg, I made it in 2 hours and 50 minutes. But it was still a long drive in the rain.
Dyersburg Tennessee is just north of Jackson and east of Memphis, west of Nashville, and almost in Kentucky. It 's a small town in every way, but today it had a very big attraction to Active Rain members. Brad Andersohn was here, and he was training bloggers about active rain.
Why would Brad Andersohn fly to one of the smallest towns in Tennessee to teach a small group about blogging? I guess because Mike Frazier asked him to.
By the way, Mike was a little sneaky, and didn't really invite many people. If you didn't see his post on the rain, you probably would know about it. It was a small crowd, and I liked it that way.
When I arrived at the hotel that we were using to have the training, the first person I met was Jan Evett, and as we exchanged greetings, the recepionist approched us to inquire if we were with the rainwater group? I guess we were. It was good for a laugh.
What does Brad talk about when he's trying to teach everyone from newbies who have never posted to bloggers who are very active.
- Video is big and getting bigger. he demonstrated some of the things that you can do with video, any we were all amazed. Keep the videos short. 1 or 2 minutes is a lot for homes.
- Find your voice. Write like talk, and let people know who you are. Sometimes you should write about personal events, but maybe not too personal. Remember that blogs never die, and your grandchildren may be reading these some day.
- Break up you posts into small paragraphs to avoid the wall of words.
- Show your gratitude to subscribers.
- Your blog can take the place of a website. Anything that a website can do, can be done on Active Rain. He has posted several times on this topic, and I think most people still don't get it.
- Localism gets a lot Google juice, and we should take advantage of it.
Unfortunately, Brad didn't get to stay long enough to teach us his entire bag of tricks. I suspect that it would take months to pull that off. But what I do know is that Brad is a great ambassadore for active rain, and the future of the company is very bright when they can attract his kind of talent.
Brad - Thanks for coming to Tennessee. We really appreciate the attention.
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