Tomorrow is Lynchburg’s first ever Blog Competition at 9am @ The Muse Coffee in Wyndhurst. Our judges are each offering a small token of gratitude for participation to the winner with the most blog points! Here are the prizes:

SEO Assessment & Consultation from Phil Tucker, Tucker Consultancy 

• 1 hour
• Creating the Baseline
• Define Business Goals
• Keyword Brainstorming

FIVE Tickets to a ‘Night Out with ShoutOut!’ from Andrew Potter, ShoutOut LLC

Blog Usability Coaching and Training from Jennifer Bailey, Marketing-helper.com

• 1 hour
• Help on upgrading the look and feel of your blog
• Help on using WordPress or other blog tools
• Help on installing a customized theme

Social Media Training from Nannette Saunders, NannetteSaunders.com

• Twitter
• Facebook LinkedIn

For the Central Virginia blog owners who are submitting a blog to Friday 2.0’s first ever “Blog-Off” Competition (to win a great prize OR to get free feedback) – here is our next set of criteria:

Our judge for Blog Sexiness (Look and Feel) will be Andrew Potter of ShoutOut Marketing.

Andrew will be judging on a combination of your blog’s aesthetics and also it’s content, asking the question: is your site “sticky” (does it make people stay?).

1. Does your blog have a good color combination?

Following conventional rules of good design, your colors should be both complimentary but also contrasting. If you don’t know what good color combinations are, look it up in Google!

2. Does your blog use attractive and complimentary fonts?

Beginners should start with 1 font, playing with the sizes and the different font styles like Bold and Italics. Ideally, however, you should have two font types: one serif font and one sans serif font (look em up if you don’t know what they mean). Again,they should compliment but also contrast. 

3. Does your blog have bells and whistles? 

In other words, does it use nice pictures, videos and other forms of media?

4. Does your blog have good content?

Make sure your blog’s content is separated in a hierarchy of important information, using bolds and font sizes to break up the text. Also your text should be relevant to your target market. Is your content properly edited? 

5. Is your blog sticky?

Does it make people want to stay? Does it make people want to come back? 

—-

Our judge for Blog Usability will be Jennifer Bailey of Marketing-Helper.com (that’s me!).

I will be judging on the visitor’s ability to understand, comprehend and interact with the website without frustration or anxiety.

1. User’s ability to find the site’s main purpose upon first glance

Most websites only have 3 seconds to introduce themselves to a visitor before they click the “back” button. Is your logo is visible, usually upper left hand corner at all times? Do you have a slogan or website title that is visible with a short and to the point description of the site’s purpose? Do you have a description of purpose or services on home page and easily visible on the navigation bar? 

2. Does the information flows in such a way that you can find what you are looking for without having to think about it?

Do you use H1 to H3 tags, bold, different color contrast, etc? 

3. Is the navigation consistent, simple and visible?

Is it conventional? (Across the top of the site). Does it go more than 3 levels deep?
Does it stay the same on every page? Can you click on the logo to get back to the homepage?

4. Website accomplishes functional goals

What is your end goal for the user? What information do you want to take away, what action do you want them to take at the end? Do the applications work?

5. Newsletter Signup, contact, or other Convergence method

Do they work and are they easy to find and use?

—

You can enter the Blog-Off competition here >

Friday 2.0 is hosting the first ‘Blog-Off’ Competition for blog owners in Central Virginia and Roanoke. 

77% of active internet users read blogs. 900,000 is the average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period, according to Business Week.

LYNCHBURG, Virginia. – May 5, 2009 – A ‘Blog-Off” competition will be held on May 22nd at The Muse Coffee in Wyndhurst at 9:00 in the morning. Local business networking group, Friday 2.0, has put together a panel of four judges to evaluate the main criteria that makes an effective blog. Submission deadline is May 15th.

Lynchburg Blog-Off

The purpose of the event is to evaluate the effectiveness of local bloggers, while educating local business owners that those who fail to embrace social media technologies for business will be left behind. Through the month of May each judge will get a chance to share their criteria for blog sexiness, usability, search engine optimization and community engagement.

In a Coleman-Parkes Research study, companies currently using Social Media reported the following:

• Improved Feedback 78%
• Improved Customer Satisfaction 66%
• Improved Customer support 71%
• Increased Sales 40%
• Improved public perception of company 75%

The panel of judges include ShoutOut LLC’s director of marketing, Andrew Potter, Marketing-Helper.com’s Jennifer Bailey, BrowseLynchburg.com’s Phil Tucker, and Nannette Saunders from RE/Max. 

“More and more companies are using social media and blogging to position themselves as industry leaders in their fields,” said Marketing-Helper.com owner Jennifer Bailey. “A lot of companies are afraid of this thing called social media, but the truth is that if we can learn how to adapt in an effective way then we can not only cut our marketing costs but increase sales leads.”

Those interested in learning more about the competition can visit The Blog-Off Fact Sheet >

About Friday 2.0
Friday 2.0 is a local Virginia networking group who meets on Friday mornings at 9:00 a.m. at The Muse coffee shop in Wyndhurst. Friday 2.0’s goal is to get educated about social media tools and opportunities. The most passionate and curious professionals attend this un-meeting as a way to connect with like-minded individuals and discuss the topics and trends relevant to technology, social media and the future of social media. Everyone from the freshly-minted twitter-er, to the tech-advanced executive managing 500 people are encouraged to attend and participate. All voices are equal and welcome at Friday 2.0! Join our Facebook Friday 2.0 Group.

Other Resources:
Coleman-Parkes Research Findings
Definitions of Social Media

I just finished putting up a site for speaker and coach David W. Mills.

Goals: 

1. Gain site traffic from churches who want to grow

2. Sell some Needs Assessment Kits

3. Get speaking and coaching engagements

How to Designed the Site to Meet our Goals:

• Got professional photos and put them on the homepage
• Created a logo and a brand
• Made his bio visible
• Highlighted his speaking topics in featured articles on the homepage
• Used key word research to target users
• Created a press page for speaking and coaching topics as well as a press contact
• Created an easy convergence method (a way for people to buy products)

For those Central Virginia blog owners who want to participate in Friday 2.0’s first ever “Blog-Off” Competition (to win a great prize OR to get free feedback) – here is our first set of criteria. 

Our judge for Search Engine Optimization will be Phil Tucker of Tucker Consultancy. 

Criteria for SEO… do you have good:

1. Content … is king! Not only is this where you plugin solid and useful content that make people want to read, but it is where search engines are fed and how they rate you on relevance and popularity. 

2. Incoming Links. The more links you have the more often Google is going to visit. 

“The easiest way to gain quality links from other sites is to link to sites to let them know your site is there and hope for a reciprocal link.” – Phil Tucker

3. Website Title. Is your website topic going to be understood by Google? What are the key words used in your title and domain name and are they relevant?

4. Heading Tags. Are your headings in H1 tags? What does this mean?! Hmm, maybe you should do some research on basic HTML and heading tag structures. 

5. Internal Linking. Of course, you want to use relevant content throughout your site… but if you are using relevant content, it should be easy to link to other relevant content within your site. 

Read what Phil Tucker has to say about his ‘Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Tips” >

Lynchburg ladies filled the Liberty room at the Hilton Garden Inn this last Wednesday for our first ever Women, Influence and Social Media luncheon. Cheryl Smith and I tried to empower women on ‘How to Make a Frikin Difference’ and how to use the social media tools to take relationships to a higher level. 

Check out Cheryl Smith’s report and our powerpoint slides here >