This session will cover the technology behind membership sites.
A lot of people get hung up on the technology involved in packaging their expertise into a membership site. After last year's talks from Baker and Ramit many bloggers are interested in offering something of their own but often don't know where to start.
People have a lot of options, ranging from a simple service like Ruzuku to more flexible but complex self hosted software like aMember. In between are alternatives like WishList and Digital Access Pass that require you to self-host but have a pretty simple user interface to get things setup.
This session will also cover the pros and cons of the different types of membership software options: how they integrate with tools for delivering email (aweber, mailchimp) and publishing video (easy video player / flow player) since those are key parts of a membership site.
To make it more practical, rather than just a theoretical discussion, a case study will probably be presented.
WordPresss security; hardening and best practices to help you secure your site.
You might know about Google's Panda initiative, which attempts to reward quality content with higher search rankings.
But you may not know that Google has made other moves to promote quality content and quality writers -- in other words, your fellow #FinCon12 conference participants.
The "rel=author" tag and other parts of Google's new initiative are designed to help it sort out who the quality authors are, so that it can associate quality authors with quality websites, make sure original authors -- not copycats -- are recognized, and ranked them all accordingly.
Is it a big deal? Yeah. Google is looking for specific signals that you're high quality, and we'd like to help you create those signals. Whether you're a solo blogger or a contributor to multiple blogs or news websites, this presentation will break it down for you and give you tips on how you can make it all work to your advantage.
This talk be focused on the concept and why it's important. Matt Schulz will go light on the (modest) coding required, but for those who want to take the leap Matt will create a step-by-step how-to on creating author pages and Google profiles, using best practices, and make it available online in a location reserved exclusively for conference participants.
Really basic SEO 101 theory and how-to application.
Eg., get links, and here are good ways to do it; watch google referrals, and here are the tools and stats to pay attention to.
Format -- hands-on to fit the "workshop" format. Aimed towards pretty novice bloggers, who would have their laptops and blogs available in the workshop, and we would actually walk them through doing basic things like downloading plugins, suggesting specific design tweaks, finding specific link partners, etc.
