Blogging While Brown was a true blast. I got to meet a bunch of people face to face for the first time. Some were facebook friends. Others I had touched base with on the phone before and finally put voice to face. It was also a pleasure to make lots of new friends including many bloggers I hadn’t heard of before.

I missed the key thing that I really wanted, the beginning blogger boot camp, on Friday June 19th. That was the hands on, how to do everything blogging workshop. Things didn’t work out logistically or financially to fit that in this time but I’m making it a priority for next year.

There are lots of things that were a part of the regular conference on Saturday that stood out to me. I took in so much over the course of the day that I’m going to have to share just a little with you day by day as I continue to reflect and review my notes. Today I’ll tell you about Milt Haynes’ presentation, “The Competent Blogger”.

Milt covered a wide ranging variety of tools we can put to use in our blogging repertoire. He talked about Pod casting for iTunes and YouTube. He gave us some features of the Black’s Gone Geek web site including the Careers In IT page (check it out). Blacks Gone Geek will begin doing research on social media careers. The site also has an Online Community Start Up Guide. As well, Milt recommended that we also have a regular website to match up with our blogs.

There are a few other interesting concepts he introduced as helpful tools for blogging. He touched on the e-mail blast. If you get a lot of those unsolicited emails that you have to unsubscribe from, that’s an example of an email blast. Of course you also receive them from groups that you do want to stay informed of. Another tool is MindMeister, a site which allows you to do online mindmapping. You can also collaborate with others and share your mindmaps. HootSuite gives metrics for who’s twittering you. It’s billed as the ultimate twitter tool suite.

You can also generate reports of your blogging activity. MicroSoft Office Live and Google Analytics are prominent options.

A couple of good traffic tracking tools are Hubspot and Inbound Marketing, two sites that help your site get more traffic and more notice. Inbound Marketing also has what’s called “Inbound Marketing University” which includes a certification exam and a webinar from their marketing guru Mike Volpe.

Milt gave us a lot to chew on and I could spend an entire week just checking on his tips and seeing where they could lead me. I bet you could too so go ahead and check into some of these knowledge nuggets and I’ll share more conference gold with you tomorrow.