Sort of came as a last minute surprise - like a big affiliate sale that came in last night. I’m going to Vegas this week for BlogWorld! All the big industry names will be there. I’ll get to meet Wendy (thanks for the comment -sorry I missed you in Utah but Vegas will be even better).

I wish my “I’m blogging this” t-shirt wasn’t so shabby looking. I really need a Newspapergrl t-shirt. Anyway, I’m looking at how I’m getting there (anyone from Utah driving down?) and where I’m going to stay. Suggestions welcome. I’ll blog about it probably both here and on Marketing Pilgrim. Our own Andy Beal is going to speak at one of the sessions and I hope to meet a lot of others bloggers I admire. Maybe even the Wordpress Matt.

Flashback a few years ago: my boss hated that I blogged at work, and I couldn’t help it. I would’ve had to buy a Blackberry and blogged in the gardens behind the building I worked in. I haven’t stopped blogging and now it’s my main source of income. I train bloggers and blog for other businesses. My blog on Google is #1 for The Latest at series on Podango and I’m still having a great time at it.

I seriously love what I do. If we’re friends I’ll try to get you to blog. Blogging helps you be a better writer. It’s a history of your thoughts. A blog connects you with smart like-minded people and friends, they can grow your business online, and keep you up on technology.

My next thing is to start affiliate blogs. It’s one thing to make other people money, but it’s rewarding to do it for yourself. I anticipate blog heaven Wednesday through Friday. Hope to see you there - I hear it’s pretty warm.

You really should go to this and/or send your employees to the Blogging for Business Conference 2007. The Utah New Media Conference was canceled and this conference is now the place to be for learning about blogging for your business.
Blogging for Business Conference 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007 - 8:00 am - 6:00 pm   (Mountain Time)

Salt Lake City Downtown Marriott
75 S West Temple
Salt Lake City, Utah  84101

Speakers include greats like:

• David Politis
• Gary Goldhammer
• Linsey Pollack
• Liz Strauss
• Rand Bateman
• Tim Stay
• Wendy Piersall
• Lee Gibbons, Podango

StarFireWeb offers a turnkey business blogging solution that Paul Wilson and I run. We have bloggers who are trained in SEO and they write for businesses of all sizes.
The entire point is to get traffic to your web site. Web sites are stale and don’t change often. Blogs are dynamic and should provide fresh content with one-way links to your site. The blog powers your site in search engines. The best part is you don’t have to know a thing about blogging for it to work. We handle it all and integrate it with your site, both with design and content.

Clients are saving incredible amounts of money on paid search with blogs. They are getting top rankings in search engines. A regular Wordpress blog alone will not do this for you.

Join us this Thursday, September 27 at 6pm for our monthly Utah Blogger Dinner.

Where:
Applebees
123 E. 12300 S.
Draper Utah
(801) 495-4460

Blog it. Invite Your List. Show up.

I didn’t make the presentation on business blogging last week. I was so jealous when I heard he was featured in the newspaper. I have interviewed many people but rarely had articles written about me. Most of the articles about me have been about work I did in my community, not about internet marketing or blogging.

Here it is - the local newspaper article about the presentation he did about blogging. Paul and I blog for other companies and supervise other business bloggers.

Paul and I are presenting at the Utah New Media Conference in October. It’s free and you can sign up on their web site. Hope to see you there.

I don’t know if Wordpress is cracking down lately or I’m just having bad luck. I’ve had this wordpress hosted blog for over a year: www.newspapergrl.wordpress.com. It took on a life of it’s own so I left it. Some of the comments were excellent and I didn’t want to lose them. Now, everything is gone. I didn’t back it up. It had a higher pagerank than this version. All those broken links, heartbreaking.

WARNING: Wordpress will delete your blog with no warning and no recourse. I would remove all ads if I’d known. That’s no excuse according to Wordpress. No mercy. They should have a big warning that says if you put advertising on your blog it will be deleted.

I advise anyone using Wordpress to host their blog on their own servers so this doesn’t happen to you. Especially businesses. You can’t afford to take the chance.

Here’s what greeted me today:

This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service. They say: “We take complaints seriously, but please be aware that unless a blog clearly violates our Terms of Service we will not disable it.” I don’t believe it.

This is maddening. How do I get my blog back?

Get your own blog (not the free version hosted by Wordpress)! Bluehost helps you install it day or night 24/7 - amazing customer service:
Reliable, Affordable Business & Blog Hosting from Bluehost.com.

I am a Utah Woman blogger. I’m on the phone with another Utah woman blogger (Kelly Anderson at StartUp Princess which has startup advice for women entrepreneurs). What other Utah woman bloggers are there?

Dooce is the most famous Utah woman who blogs (even if she’d rather live in LA). There is Laura Moncur who is great. She Twitters and threatened to stop recently. She can’t stop because her twitters are a staple of my life now. I’ll just twitter this (Dooce does Twitter, not often, but she does). There are the buzzbooster women.

I really brand myself as an internet marketing or affiliate marketing blogger, but it’s always easier to rank on local terms. I just noticed that no one ranks on the term “Utah Woman Blogger” so I thought I would, starting hopefully tonight or tomorrow. Let’s see how long it takes.

If you’d like a one hour presentation on how blogging can help power your web site, get in touch with me. Use the contact form above. Also, I’d like to hear Dooce speak in Utah about her life as a blogger.

Update: My experiment worked, it took me less than one hour to rank #1 for Utah Woman Blogger in Google. You have to love blogs.

You’ll hear more about this as the day approaches, but Paul Wilson and I are going to speak at the Utah New Media Conference this October. We’ll cover blogging basics - what blogging is and what it can do for your business. The conference is free.

Save the date: October the 18th from 1:00 - 3:00 at the Salt Lake Community College Miller Campus

www.utahnewmediaconference.com.

If you can’t wait to learn more about blogging (I’m probably hitting the wrong group) you don’t have to. Paul Wilson quit his job as a successful sales/marketing guru at Oracle last week and is now independent. He’s consulting with companies on their blogging strategy, and other SEO techniques. If you’d like to talk to him about your business, please fill out my contact form using the link above (you don’t have to live in Utah).

The Utah bloggers dinner is this Thursday, August 30 at Applebees in Draper, Utah at 6 pm:

123 E. 12300 S.
Draper, UT 84020

Everyone is responsible for their own food and for adding to the conversation. These are a lot of fun. If you’re a blogger you’re welcome to come, even if you’re not from or don’t live in Utah. I’m not sure if I can go this time - but I love going. It’s a loud group and once in a while you get a trade secret or gig. But the best part is hanging out with some of the coolest nerds in the state.

Read about it in his own words: Scolbe Goes Dark…My friend Phil wrote a great post about Scoble.

I was teaching a class to some USVC students, (now Utah State University) with Paul Wilson this evening. I demonstrated what it looks like to make a blog post and made a sample post. Then I deleted it. I made the post at about 9:30pm. At 10:20pm I got a Google alert about the post. That means Google indexed my new post (which is really like a web page since each post has its own URL) in less than an hour.

A regular web site that isn’t updated very often (like most web sites) could take days or weeks to get a new page indexed in a search engine. I love blogs. Can you see how this can benefit your business? More pages in search engines. Since around 85% of your web site visitors will use a search engine to find your business, that’s what you need.

It’s hard for me to mellow out - it’s such fun to teach what you love. I’m on a high.