My Blog Journey - MediaMensch.com and Leatherheads

May 17, 2007 In the beginning of the year I made a determination that I wanted to set upon a journey to become a world class blogger. As in all my journeys, I work hard to find the top people in this area to advise and mentor me. I found blogging to be someone tedious when just having to write about technology. Although it was my interest. My passion was about the creative side also where I had worked in radio, television and movie distribution.

I was tracking the movies being produced in North Carolina (where I live) for my daughter who has a strong interest in singing and acting. I noticed late last year that a film called Leatherheads, written and directed by George Clooney would be coming to the Carolinas and my home town Charlotte.

I ended up at an casting call at a large regional mall and submitted a profile and headshot. A few weeks later, I received a call to be an extra for 7 days on the film.
I decided that this would be a great opportunity to blog my experiences as a "first timer" on the film set of a major motion picture. At the same time, I also had decided that it was time to learn how to upgrade the technology within my blog to work toward making it as professional as possible.

Through this journey, I connected with a very talented blogger community from around the world mostly from the social network called www.linkedin.com. Many of these bloggers all started the same way, working to build an audience and produce interesting content on a consistent basis.

A few of the areas or sites they told me about were Feedburner, MyBlogLogs, Google Analytics, Picasa, and a few others.

Over the past month, I have worked hard to keep up with my goal to blog daily (reality is probably more like 3 to 4 times a week). Most of the work was on the mediamensch side on my experiences on the film, plus other projects. As I begain to write an interesting thing began to occur. As much as I wrote, (just like this posting), 3 or 4 related story ideas would pop into my head.

The next phase of my blogging will be to build an audience. The best advice was to find a way to post on popular blog sites related to your own content wth a link back. It also occurred to me to seek out other media such as radio and magazines to promote the blog.

This journey is only about 6 week old to become a top blogger. I will detail as much as I can some of the tips and tricks and people and companies I meet along the way.

LinkedIn - Two Years later

it was about two years ago, I read about LinkedIn and decided to sign up for the service which is known as a "social network". Most people refer to this network as "7 degrees of separation" - meaning we all live in the small world and are interconnected.

I am now connected to about five hundred people directly which gives me access to about 250,000 to my contacts' "direct contacts" and over 3 million of contacts to levels away from me or on linkedin what is shown as third level contacts.

I have always approached my time on LinkedIn strategically from the start. One of my goals was to build contacts and relationships with senior executives and company founders in silicon valley involved with "eWarrior" products and services such as blogging, social networks, crm, and podcasting. I also wanted to re-establish my contacts in both traditional media at companies such as HBO, MTV and others where I had worked in the past and with new areas of digital media in this case happening in New York City.

In addition, I set out to find people with specific skill sets in branding and marketing who could help me. In addition, I have a goal to connect with some of the top bloggers to share ideas and learn their "secrets" for attaining high visibility.

This journey has allowed me to meet and connect with people at Sirius Radio, Lime.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, and with award winning business plan gurus and founders of www.innersell.com and www.equipmentpipeline.com.

Throughout the rest of this year, I intend to blog more frequently on subjects around the usage of LinkedIn and also to profile some of the interesting people who I met along the way and those that have transformed themselves by joining.

LinkedIn is now becoming competitive for job seekers who want to find recruiters and companies to work for. It is a much stronger model I find than posting blind resumes at Monster.com or Careerbuilder. You can actually see the background of people working at the companies you want to pursue and can invite them to make contact.

I will also be discussing a new powerful feature called LinkedIn Answers which has allowed attraction of some very smart people to provide me with answers and resources for my business and career plans.