Wayne Sutton of TriOut

Wayne Sutton gave a seminar entitled “Using WordPress to Build your Brand and Telling your Start-Up Story” in the Power Users Track. Wayne is the business development and marketing strategist for TriOut and Partner of OurHashtag.

His suggestion for bloggers was to talk a bit more about yourself in the beginning, to use shamless plugs in fact. This was in direct opposition to what many bloggers had to say in the way of self promotion.

Wayne suggested having a content strategy for your blog. Set goals and know before you start why you are blogging and what you hope to get out of it. Sit down and come up with a list of topics you can blog about and plan time to write about them. Wayne has a strong marketing background and he talked about building a marketing strategy for your blog. Building your brand by word of mouth is still the number one way to get the word out and blogging is the perfect venue. It’s all about networking and building relationships, so you have to be willing to interact on other blogs as well as provide valuable content for your own blog. Tie your online social profiles together and have all of them link back to your blog. Use your blog as your home base online. And, don’t forget to put your blog on your business card and in your email’s signature line.

Sutton suggested building a community around your blog. He also likes email newsletters and had a great suggestion for changing around blog posts and sending them out as an email newsletter (let’s face it, your community is probably not going to read every post, so this method keeps them up to date).

Sutton also predicted that blogs are going to be going geo. That’s geographic…even more so than they are now. Location is an easy way to connect with people with a common interest. You’ll be seeing more and more content based on location.

Wayne also talked about a startup he was involved in, TriOut.com. TriOut let’s you find things in your community, similar to a Yelp or FourSquare. He suggested setting up a website with a teaser page and a blog months before they were ready to launch their new business. For the TriOut startup, he also developed an iPhone application as a first step. He started building the brand through blog posts, Facebook, and Twitter. It allowed him to build relationships and use word of mouth to promote his new business.

Good suggestions from Wayne Sutton and overall an informative session at WordCamp Raleigh 2010.

Individual Session Blogs:

Tracy Needham – “It’s Easy to Create Killer Content for Your Blog” Jeffrey Cohen – “Business Blogging Best Practices”