KLCK Bloggers Network was set up by Spiderworking.com and Garrnedenny Lane in 2010 to bring together Irish bloggers to share knowledge. It’s been more successful than either myself or Lorna could have anticipated in the beginning and we’re almost a year old now.
The first meeting, linking live with the UK over an internet live stream features a panel of blogging and social media experts on both sides of the water ready to answer all your Blogging and Social Media queries. The diverse panel can answer anything from technical WordPress questions to finding inspiration, increasing readership and marketing through Social Media.
The Panel
The Irish panel features Niall Devitt, co founder of Bloggertone and advisor to Social Media Today, Amanda Webb (me!) Social Media consultant and co-founder of KLCK and Bloggers International, Beatrice Whelan from Website Extrodinaire, website developer and WordPress and SEO expert.
The British panel includes Social Media Expert Shaun Fagan from Black Dog New Media and to answer your techie questions Chris Hogan amongst others.
Ask The Panel
If you’d like to put a question to the panel you can submit them in advance by completing your details below or you can tweet them at @bloggersint2011 using the tag #BI11. Follow #BI11 on the night or join our Facebook Page for details on how to join the live stream.
The Time and Place
And of course you can attend an event in person. In the UK, Chipping Norton Social Media Club will be meeting in the Chequers Pub. In Ireland KLCK Bloggers network will meet somewhere in Laois (venue tbc).
So if you are a blogger, a wanna be blogger or are just interested in networking with other businesses around the world join in on Wednesday 29th of June at 7.30pm (BST), and give us your questions!
Oliver Dempsey from Tradesmen.ie got over 14,000 views of his ‘Funny Cow Video‘ on YouTube. The video wasn’t just about getting views, it was designed to help him to get votes for the 02 Ideas room sales pitch competition. He went on to win netting €5,000 worth of prizes. We were delighted to welcome him as guest speaker to this months KLCK Bloggers Network meetup in Portlaoise this month.
Oliver’s enthusiasm is viral in itself. He showed us his videos and talked us through the process of making them, how they evolved to adding sound effects and music and how they became so addictive he even made one when on holiday.
Daisy the cow is his top viewed video and he credits this to the title ‘Funny Cow Video’ the keywords he included and the power of Facebook. It was his Facebook friends that helped it go viral, sharing it with their friends who shared it again. Not only was it a funny video but it was short (1 min), amusing and included bloopers. Other videos that got lots of hits also included ‘funny’ in the title.
The big question is did this campaign bring business to Tradesmen.ie and Oliver believes it has, it has spread the word about the business, leads and even friends have found out more about his business because of the campaign.
Oliver recommends the Flip camera for making simple videos and the free Movie Maker software for windows for editing. If your on a Mac iMovie is good too. He also recommends investing in a good tripod and credits much of his success to Daniel Beere his Intern, camera man and quality controller. Working without him has been more challenging. I’m pretty sure we’re going to see some more video coming from members of KLCK in the future. I might even try and do something a bit more creative myself soon.
RSS Feeds and converting WordPress.com to WordPress.org
Our round table discussion started by talking about RSS feeds.
What is a RSS Feed?
RSS or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ often called a ‘Feed’ is, in simple terms, a link that is attached to a website that has regularly updated content (blogs etc). This link can be used to distribute content to other sites. Doing this allows sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc to automatically post your blog content when you add a new post. Users are also able to subscribe to your feed using tools like Google Reader. This means that instead of having to visit your site to check out if you have posted recently they can check their reader for updates from all the blogs they follow. It’s a great tool for both keeping up with blogs and sharing your own content.
How do you find your RSS feed?
There are lots of ways of finding an RSS feed, some sites publish a link on their sidebar or at the bottom of a page. My personal recommendation is to use Firefox to surf the web.
When you are on a site that contains an RSS feed a little symbol appears in the address bar.
If you click this it will display the RSS address rather than the web address and you can cut and paste this into any RSS reader.
WordPress.com & Blogger v WordPress.org
A common topic at KLCK is what blogging platform to use. The most common amongst our members are Blogger and WordPress however some people want to move from WordPress.com (hosted by WordPress and with limited customisation options) to WordPress.org (self hosted and fully customisable). Some members were worried about how hard this could be but luckily we had a WordPress expert in our ranks. Beatrice Whelan assured us that it wasn’t that difficult a transition. It is possible to move the whole database of blog posts over from .com to .org and although it would require a small bit of technical knowledge it is quite simple if you have the time to put into it. I found this handy article online that could help the transition.
Next Meeting
The next meeting is in Kilkenny on 14th March 2011 at 7pm. Our guest speaker is Keith Bohanna who will be talking about commenting. How to get more comments and how to comment on other blogs effectively. Keep an eye on the KLCK Bloggers Network Facebook page for more details. We’ll be announcing the venue etc. over the next few days.
Thank you
Finally a big thank you to all the people who made the Portlaoise meeting possible. The Portlaoise Enterprise Centre who opened up their facilities to us. The room was fantastic and they even provide tea and coffee, a big hit with our members! Food was provided by Laois based marketing company Aos Si, I’m still dreaming about the chocolate cake I managed to resist! and of course the members who attended. You can see our meeting blogroll here.
It’s hard to believe that KLCK is four months old now, back in Kildare for the first time since our initial gathering it was great to see how this ‘thing’ that we created had grown. Lots of new faces this month with some great blogs and info to share.
The first section of the meeting was presented by John O’Connor from Red Oak Tax Refunds who talked about how to measure the success of a blog, not just how much traffic you are getting but, for those of us in Business, are these site visitors translating to sales or hard leads? One of the strongest messages to come out of John’s presentation was to set objectives for your blog and measure their success. Initially this could be traffic or bounce rate but as your blog progresses you may want to see blog readers using your contact form, subscribing to your newsletter or Liking your Facebook page. We discussed the use of forms on blogs or websites. Two of our members have experience of long forms not getting the expected results. John had one amazing stat; since changing his standard contact form to an ‘apply now’ form and has found it 80% more effective.
We then opened the floor up for a round table discussion. The amount of knowledge in the room was phenomenal, some brave volunteers showed us their blogs and asked for and gained some great feedback. We talked about finding inspiration for blogging and discussed some useful tools to help with the process.
There was no live feed this month due to technical issues but I did try and keep up with it all via Twitter. You can click here to view the archive.
A big thank you to Johnstown Business Centre for hosting the meeting and filling us up with coffee, tea, biscuits and mini muffins
The next meeting will be in Carlow on the 8th of December, we will post details on our Facebook page and Linkedin group when we have them. You can also join the KLCK mailing list and we will send you out details of all further meetings.
I believe that blogging should be the hub of your social media campaign. I’ve seen the results that blogs can bring both for driving traffic to your website and as establishing you as an expert in your field. But it can be hard to get started and even the most proficient bloggers are always learning and growing. It was for all of these reasons that earlier this year with the help of Lorna Sixsmith of Garendenny Lane Interiors I set up the KLCK (Kildare Laois Carlow Kilkenny) Bloggers network , with the aim of sharing knowledge and become better bloggers together.
Monday night was our first meeting in Kilkenny and we had two excellent speakers. Marie Ennis O’Connor whose blog ‘Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer‘ attracts massive amounts of traffic talked about how to get more people to read our blogs. There was something for everyone to learn from her presentation including me! You can view here slides by clicking here.
Ken McGuire followed on the theme from last month covering some of his favorite WordPress Plugins, a great selection that would enhance any blog, most of which I will be adding to this blog soon. You can view his presentation by clicking here.
The meeting this month was hosted by The Pembroke Hotel in Kilkenny and we were blown away by the facilities a big thank you to everyone there for their hospitality.
The next meeting will be on the 8th of November somewhere in Kildare, speakers and venue TBC.
Last week saw the third meeting of the KLCK Bloggers network and our first outing to Laois. Once again it was well attended and although there were technical difficulties with the live stream to start with we got them fixed and 8 people joined us online.
I’m always bowled over by the atmosphere at our meetings, everyone has knowledge to share and questions to ask. Everyone, newbie or experienced blogger can learn something. I’d never heard of some of the plugins that our first speaker Eoin from Istech told us about but all were useful. ’Old Post Spinner’ in particular provoked some debate. Spinning blog posts means recycling old blog posts – changing them slightly and re-posting them ‘Old Post Spinner’ automates this process.
Our second speaker Niall Devitt talked about Bloggertone, many of us were inspired to think about submitting content, he was also a wealth of information on blogging in general, and our questions kept him busy for quite a while.
If you want to view the stream recorded on the night click here (quality not great). You can also download Eoin’s notes by clicking here.
Our next meeting is at The Pembroke Hotel, Kilkenny on 11th October 2010 at 7pm. You can RSVP on Facebook or Linkedin or by leaving a comment on this post.
To keep up to date with our events join the KLCK Bloggers Network page on Facebook or Linkedin.
This month at the KLCK bloggers network we’re going to be talking about WordPress plugins. Some of our favourite plugins including Askimet, a spam filter for your comments require you to have a WordPress API. If you have a WordPress.org blog (self hosted) this can be quite confusing so this week we are giving you a step by step guide on how to get one.
Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for an account (even if you already have a wordpress.org blog)
Click ‘Sign up now’ on the right hand side of the page
Fill in your details and tick the box ‘just a username’ at the bottom
Click ‘Next’
You will receive an email from WordPress including a link that will confirm your email address.
Once you have done this log in.
Click the ‘My Account on the top left hand side
On your profile page click ‘API Key and other Personal Settings’
On the next page WordPress will provide you with your API key.
Next week I will be showing you how to use this API key to add a profile picture to your WordPress.org blog and to activate the Askimet spam filter.
Today’s blog post is slightly different as Amanda tells us about the second meeting of the KLCK Bloggers network:
It was a busy day for Spiderworking.com and the KLCK bloggers network yesterday. I was invited along with Lorna Sixsmith from Garrendenny Lane Interiors to go to the Edwina Grace show on KLCR96fm to talk about KLCK. Edwina was great and we couldn’t have felt more relaxed chatting to her.
I only just made it back to the office in time to grab my computers and head straight back out to the Talbot Hotel, the venue of the second KLCK Bloggers Network. I couldn’t believe how many people were there when I walked in the door. 22 Bloggers in total from all areas of blogging, some business bloggers, some personal bloggers and some who hadn’t started blogging yet but were keen to get going.
Participants were truly nationwide with people traveling from as far as Limerick to join in.
For those who couldn’t make it in person I livestreamed the event via webcam and Twitter, we had 4 viewers on the night, if you missed it you can view the recording by clicking here. Paula Sheridan from Candle Designs gave us some great tips on using Flickr and Ruairi Brown from Kro.ie took us through the steps to set up a WordPress hosted blog. You can download Ruairi’s presentation from his blog.
After all the formalities we retired to the bar where we did some more relaxed networking. It was a great evening and we’ve had so much good feedback that I can’t wait for the next one. Photographs from the night can be viewed on the Flickr group. If you would like to know more about the KLCK Bloggers network join our dedicated Facebook Page.
The next meeting will take place on Monday 13th of September at 7pm in Portlaoise (venue TBC). We’ll be talking about ‘Plugins’. It’s free to attend and all are welcome whether you are blogging, thinking about blogging or just want to know what a blog is.
01 442 9410
How do you get a WordPress API key?
This month at the KLCK bloggers network we’re going to be talking about WordPress plugins. Some of our favourite plugins including Askimet, a spam filter for your comments require you to have a WordPress API. If you have a WordPress.org blog (self hosted) this can be quite confusing so this week we are giving you a step by step guide on how to get one.
Next week I will be showing you how to use this API key to add a profile picture to your WordPress.org blog and to activate the Askimet spam filter.