Tuesday, January 11th 9-11:30 AM

What if you knew exactly what you needed to write about for your blog on any certain day?

How would it feel if your topics, ideas, and content were all mapped out for you ahead of time, making easier and straight forward to publish on your blog?

Join us on January 11th and our featured speaker Peter Young will show you his ‘Content Mapping’ methodology that he’s taught to 1000?s of people – students and executives alike! Plus he’ll share his tips on creating a winning writing style that flows and is easy to read — VERY important to your blog visitors and prospective customers!

As an Adjunct Professor of New Media at San Jose State, Peter is also a sought-after social media consultant, and travels internationally to assist large media companies get a handle on their online and social networking strategies.

Peter is also the brilliance behind the successful scholarship resource blog, Scholarship-Options.com, which receives 1000?s of hits every week. You also might want to check out his 2nd very helpful and informative blog on social media called MarketingAndSocialMedia.Wordpress.com

Register here.

Fee: $35

Today’s Bloggers’ Support Group was a bit chilly due to a broken furnace, but we were pretty excited to meet and make progress towards our end-of-year blogging activities.

There are 20 days left to finish our 10-post Blogging Challenge. How are you doing?

Wanda suggested looking at past success. What have you accomplished in the last 12 months of blogging?

As for technologies, we discussed a couple of useful tools:

• Print-on-demand books, which are available from a number of places.  The link takes you Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site, which aggregates and reviews a number of choices.
• For Mac users, there is a community of iWork template creators (iWorkCommunity.com).  You can download great templates for Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes for things like books,

Anca taught us about Jing – a tool for Screen Capture and Screenshots.

• Uses Jing to annotate screenshots
• It’s good to rehearse to get it just right
• Likes to specify the size of the screen grab – you can shoot an entire window, or just a little bit.
• Now it can do webcam recording, too!
• Great for working with clients– showing them how to do things.  Anca uses videos to teach people how to do technical stuff with their sites.
• Does image capture
• Can annotate images
• Upload to YouTube, Flickr, and other sites.

An alternative to Jing is Skitch, which does screenshots, annotations, and uploads to your favorite sites as well.

Both of these tools have a hosting service where you can upload your files and share them with others.

Ted’s favorite plugins this week:

Google Ajax Translation – puts a link into your blog posts that connect them up to Google Translate, so your readers can get your content in something roughly resembling their language.

Ajax Plugin Helper – Sets up your WordPress installation to activate and deactivate plugins via Ajax, saving you time when it comes to configuring your blog.

Social Grid – produces a grid of social networking sites that you connect to your blog.

This week’s suggested exercise – Top 10 Lists

One thing that many sites are doing at the end of the year is creating top-10 (or more) lists.   This is a great way to produce something of value for you readers (and maybe a bit simpler for you to write).

Send us your Top 10 list and we’ll post it for everyone else to read.