Do your Readers Care about Your Content?

BlogWorld 2010 Speaker: Andrew Bennett
Content You Care About
Room: Islander G
Tuesday October 05, 2010
Time: 11:07PM to 11:30PM

When I visit a blog I am almost always immediately drawn to any multimedia content that is on the blog. I’m a fan of bloggers who create not only photo content, video content but also audio content. There are a ton of tools online that you can use to to put your content online. There are also a ton of tools that you can use offline to create this sort of content.

The main thing for me is that your content be your own. Sure you can pull photos and videos from Flickr or Youtube that are legitimate to use through creative commons. I even put creative commons on my photos so that other people can use them if they wanted to. I make my Photo-A-Day available on my blog so that anyone can grab the code and post it on their blog and the new photo gets automatically served each day. The content is mine and I’m free to distribute as I wish.

Creating my own multimedia content is very important to me. I have been taking and posting photos on my blog every single day for 5 straight years. People sort of marvel at that commitment and I wonder why. To me, taking photos is a natural extension of who I am as a person. This endeavor started as a challenge to myself to take photos and document a year in my life. I turned 31 and started my journey. When I turned 32 I was completely hooked on taking a daily photo so one year turned into five. Just the other day I passed 2000 straight days of posting photos and blogging about them.

Content that you create is also a powerful way to let your readers get to know who you are and what you stand for. When I do video reviews I often do them in one take where I do not write anything ahead of time because I want the reader to see my authentic reactions to what I am reviewing. Being unpolished, especially when talking authentically is a powerful thing and people can spot a liar.

The latest thing that I have gotten into is creating audio content in the form of a podcast. I am a co-host of Geek Dads Weekly and through that I can pop on a pair of headphones, fire up Skype and audacity and record to my heart’s content. There isn’t anything tremendously fancy needed to get started making your own multimedia content. My session will help you get started in the world of Audio, Video and Photo content creation.

If you are interested in learning what sort of tools are available to you to create your own podcast, videos series and photos then you should attend my session: Content You Care About on Friday at 2:45pm. Not only will I talk about websites for hosting photos, audio and video but I’ll also have some prizes to give away to people who attend. BlogWorld sponsor Kodak has graciously given me a camera and an all new PlayTouch video camera to give away. I’ll also have other prizes from my personal stash of great gadgets.