Marketing Blagger

I recently took up the mantle of organising the London Bloggers Meetup Group and we had the first session last night. I have to admit I was a little apprehensive before hand, but it seems I shouldn’t have been as it went really well!

I was a little surprised by the interest on Meetup and even more surprised by how many people actually turned up. It seems blogging is no longer a past time for geeks, more a mainstream medium for fantastic people to wax lyrical, or for talented illustrators (see Blog Mouse below) to pick up book deals, or photographers to write about their passions, or for expats to stay in touch with the folks back home, or probably for most of you reading this, a source of making money. In fact you could say it was quite a colourful bunch who turned up - a representation of the rich tapestry of the blogosphere.

Blog Mouse by Alex Milway

If you want to check out some of the bloggers who came along you can find most of their URLs below. Sorry for those who are missing or if I’ve mispelled your details - drop me an email and I’ll happily correct them.

I learnt some really interesting stuff last night. For example social review sites like Qype and We Love Local are the next big thing coming to a town near you soon. Most encouragingly I found that the blogosphere still has an awful lot of potential for whatever you want to make out of it - money, friends, a career, whatever. It seems there’s also still money to be found for online and Web 2.0 ventures for anyone that’s looking for funding.

A special thanks needs to go out to We Love Local’s Dan Bower who helped a great deal in getting the word out about the meetup. So, Dan, thanks! Hope you like the photo..

Well anyway, here are the bloggers that turned up:

Peter Marshall
Mark McLellan and Gullible’s Travels
Katie Lee and Gemma Cartwright of Shiny Media
Rob Hinchcliffe (founder of Londonist)
Dan Bower, Helen Evans and Max Jenninsg of We Love Local
Cate Sevilla and Dolly Mix TV
Stuart Waterman and My Chemical Toilet
Mirona Iliescu’s Gorgeoux
Tim Dickinson’s Plummet Onions
Keith Brand’s Housing Panic
Bronwen Dekke’s Work Blog
Alex Milway
Jonathon Melhuish
Oliver George
Improbulus
Chris Jackson
Iain Buchanan
Andrew Bulhak

Thanks to everyone who came along last night, I hope you enjoyed yourselves.

For anyone that’s interested, there will be a Christmas Meetup on December 18th. More details are on the Meetup page where you can also find a few more photos from last night. The groups open to everyone and anyone who blogs.

For anyone interested in attending the London Bloggers Meetup, it is now confirmed for Tuesday 27th November. The venue will be the Camel and Artichoke pub in Waterloo - where I enjoyed a few beers and some cracking food last night.

For more details head over to the Meetup homepage at http://blog.meetup.com/395/?gj=sj2.

If you use the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) plugin , you’ll know that it’s a fantastically easy way to tag your posts with specific keywords. Great for making your posts friendly for search engines on specific keywords.

Once you install and activate UTW, you can start to create a master list of tag keywords for your content. Of course, these tags are the same as the keywords your content is targeting. So for example, if ‘Internet Marketing’ is a keyword you’re competing on, then you would also tag your posts with ‘Internet Marketing’, along with a number of other supporting keywords.

Now I’ve been doing this for a little over 6 months, adding several tags to each posts using UTW. Hence you will see at the foot of each post a list of tags relevant to each story (see below).

But unfortunately, rather than seeing the usual 2-6 tags per post, you will now only see 1. That 1, being the same as the category name.

The reason for this is that I accidentally deactivated the UTW plugin when playing around with a new plugin. It’s taken me a week to realise but as quick as a flash I lost all of the tags I’d added since installing the plugin. Obviously this is far from ideal. Unfortunately the only solutions I can think of are to reinstall from my backups, but this sounds like it could be extremely problematic, or to ‘re-tag’ all of my older posts.

So I’m putting the call out. Are there any Ultimate Tag Warrior experts out there who know of another way? Or are my only options to restore the backup, or go through every post again and ‘re-tag’.

Your help appreciated. As a reward anyone who comes up with the solution will get a free link and a blog/product review (OK I know that’s a fairly small reward..)

I’ve just taken over the running of the London Webloggers Meetup Group and would love to hear from anyone interested in, well, meeting up.

From what I can see the previous events haven’t quite gone with a bang, which is surprising when you consider how many of us there are living and blogging in London.

Click here to check out
The London Weblogger Meetup Group!

The next meetup date isn’t set yet, so you’ll have to keep coming back here or head to the group homepage to find out more.

Please, if you’re a London blogger, get in touch. Say hello, join the group (it’s free) and come along to one of the events. They should be a great place to learn some blogging tips, monetisation strategies, develop joint ventures, or to simply meet some like minded individuals.

All are welcome, as long as you are a blogger. It doesn’t even matter what you blog about!!
Cheers,
Andy

PS if you are a blogging consultant, coach, or professional, or want to come and present about what you’re up to, please drop me a line.