Phil Gerbyshak Speaks at SOBCon

Author of 10 Ways to Make it Great, Phil is known as The Relationship Geek.

What is a geek? Smart, conversation, funny, expert, passionate. If you are those things, you are a geek. How can you take your blog to the next level and be a bigger SOB? Not to our families, but to the blogosphere. 🙂

Phil started with a Blogger blog and wrote quotes and junk that wasn’t himself. Someone called him out on his blog and told him it sucked…it wasn’t him! No one was reading, commenting, or anything that blogging gives you back in return.

Blogging is not meant to be done alone. We need to have a relationship to have fun. There are 75 million blogs, and 110 people here. We can build relationships and a community here to take our blogs higher.

Core competancy: know yourself first. What is your message? Even if others don’t agree with it, your goal should be to get comments and to get conversation going. Links are nice, but not the goal. Troy Worman has 1,200 links on his blogrolls. He doesn’t have relationships with every link he puts out, but he knows his strengths in connecting the unconnected. He considers himself an “unblogger.”

Where are your strengths? Share that. Don’t share other people’s stuff. If you pass on other’s stuff, add your thoughts and expand on that. Engage people. When something pops in your head, write it down and share it, because you’re not going to remember it.

Visit other blogs. Comment. Expand your knowledge. Look a little deeper. With RSS feeds, people don’t have to go to your blog to get content, but make them want to go there anyway.

If you don’t have a picture of yourself on your blog, you should consider doing so. How can you have a relationship and take it to the next level not knowing who you are talking to?

Think of taking your business to the next level, and your readers are your customers. Grow your network and look at your stats. It’s not about how many numbers you have, it’s about meeting new people.

Q&A

Q: How much has your blog impacted your day job in regards to networking?

A: 18 months ago, his manager went from thinking it was weird to being interested in how he is really writing articles.

Q: It is not what you do..but “what are your thinking?”

A: It’s what is most important to me…to help people. I think of my blog as an advice column for me. My focus is on the person, not on the mechanism or the technology.

Q: What do you do when people in your life don’t like your blogging?

A: My wife has met some of the people I “meet.” It’s not a chat room. You can send letters, cards, or money. You need to put a face on the person online and make it real.

Q: My comments and community are taking off now. How do you track the relationships when that happens?

A: Keep the 80/20 rule in mind. 20% of those people will take 80% of your time. Take car of who you can. Ask them what they expect out of you, if you feel like you need to.

[tags]SOBCon07, SOBCon[/tags]