Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.
This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.
The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:
- Introduction to Blogging and Web 2.0: We discuss the emerging blogging landscape and set up blogs.
- Finding Conversation Partners: Here we discuss the underpinnings of Internet search, examine case studies of finding other blogs, and end with the assignment to flesh out the set of conversation partners for the project.
- Maintaining and Tracking Conversations: Here we examine RSS and its implications using things like the Corante hubs or b5 blog networks as an example. Participants create suprglu sites to tie together their teams' blogs and interactive google home pages to track their conversation partners.
- Increasing Your Findability: Here, we return to the underpinnings of search visibility, links and staying on topic (i.e., relevance). We examine adword analytics to determine relevant, highly searched keywords. Participants are tasked with preparing an analysis of relevant keywords for their projects and a graph of who is linking to them.
- Measuring site visitors: How to determine where visitors are coming from and what they are coming to visit. Participants are tasked with analyzing their referrers and determining how they correlate to: a) their conversation partners; b) their keyword strategy.
- Measuring RSS visitors: How many people are subscribed to the RSS feed? What are they coming to visit? Participants are tasked with analyzing how these visitors correlate with their keyword strategy.
- Project presentations: Participants summarize and synthesize their blog strategy, how well their initial focus succeeded, and the changes they have made during the bootcamp.
We will likely use a textbook from O'Reilly's Safari U. The advantage of O'Reilly's material is that it is of generally high quality and covers the basics well. The fact that you can mix and match it is a real plus over some other publishing houses.
Really cool info ... we're doing something similar, though also much more contained, for our library patrons. We call it the Cyber Six-Pack and our hope is that we can impact the way local content is developed while assisting our users in finding what they want/need. Well done ... Cheers!