Tessa Horehled | Strategic Marketer, Community Manager, Brand Strategist, Digital Communications Specialist | ATL / NYC

Blog Your Way Out Of The Recession Workshop

The recession is affecting everyone. This is nothing new. What is new? Scores of individuals are now looking to the internet for how they can empower themselves with the tools to self-supplement and sustain income beyond traditional options.

This afternoon, I was invited by the ever-awesome Hollis Gillespie (humor columnist, author, radio commentator, and morethanyoucanhandle) and Mike Alvear (Huffington Post blogger, co-host of HBO’s Sex Inspectors, author) to contribute to their “Blog Your Way Out Of The Recession” workshop. I spoke with a group of about 15 who were interested in starting blogs — about three had already taken the plunge.

I began by discussing blog publishing software such as WordPress, MovableType, Blogger and Typepad. While all viable options, my personal favorite and the platform I recommend exclusively to others is WordPress. This website is powered by WordPress as are many of the biggest news sources online including the New York Times and The Washington Post. WordPress is fantastic for a number of reasons. Among the notable: It is very easy to use for individuals who are not tech-savvy; and it is very robust and pliable. WordPress can be very slick and professional aesthetically or you can opt for a more plug-and-play traditional blog format. Whatever suits your fancy.

I continued to discuss the upmost importance of owning your domain and the benefits you sacrifice when not opting for a self-hosted blog, tracking and analyzing traffic and referral information, recommended WordPress plugins, how search engines communicate in regards to your blog, and monetization options for both short-term and long-term revenue growth.

For future workshops, I am very interested in putting together a presentation that focuses on the meta of blogs. It will cover meta-tagging, post tagging, categorization as well as archiving and sitemaps. This may be my project on my flight to NYC next week!

All-in-all it was a great time. I highly recommend you check out both Hollis and Mike online for some fantastically entertaining reads. Stay tuned for future workshop collaborations between the three of us!

Some quick cheat-sheet links:

• I register domains with GoDaddy.
• I host with A Small Orange.
• I use WordPress for all my blogging needs.

I will be doing a blog post about my recommended plugins and traffic/analytics tools soon — check back.