For three days starting May 2 next month, bloggers inclined towards online business and marketing will meet in Chicago, United States, for an annual conference dubbed this year as “SobCon08 Biz School for Bloggers.” The conference will be held at Summit Executive Center, popularly known for hosting meetings of most influential international brands. The 48-hour summit will touch various topics concerning social business, social media, business management, and online marketing.

The speakers of the said event are popular bloggers and known corporate professionals who have established their own business brands on the Web. So to speak, these people surely would share their online strategies, experiences and business tactics to the attendees.

• Anita Bruzzese from Gannett Today, online reputation management
• Brian Clark from Copyblogger, an online business models that work
• Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress, which focuses how to put your business on spotlight
• Chris Garrett, editorial management
• Chris Brogan, social media and social networking choices
• Dave Bullock, effective sales model that converts
• Liz Strauss, building an irresistible offer
• Wendy Piersall on success management

Event organizers are expecting over 200 participants to attend the conference. Most of them are professional business bloggers representing their own business brands. The conference would give each of the attendees a chance to share their online business experience. The coalescence of effective business methods and ideas that would be shared by each participant is expected to actuate new strategies towards successful online business. Participants are guaranteed to bring home a business action plan that can be immediately executed for measurable success.

The registration fee costs $450 for new participants and $350 for returnees. This fee constitutes the participation to the whole event and access to giveaways. Hotel accommodations around the venue will be shouldered by each participant, costing around $139 to $225 per night.

The conference is sponsored by the following online organizations and companies:

• WordPress
• Network Solutions
• b5media
• Top Hosting Center
• Chitika
• Wiley
• ProBlogger
• E-Junkie
• Blogger and Podcaster
• Plante Moran Financial Advisors
• Summit Executive Centre

It is good to note that Mashable, a popular social networking news website, has listed the annual SobCon event as one of Top 10 Events for Bloggers.

My Personal Standpoint

Well, basically I wish I could attend conferences like that. It is good place to meet business people. They give connections and open doors to new opportunities and partnerships. If you have the bucks and the will to succeed, attending SobCon08 definitely is not a bad choice.

Becoming a blogger is a good thing. First, you’ll start learning how to write articles properly, then you’ll begin to appreciate doing research that you never really liked when you were still at school. You’ll learn how to promote your blog to various social networks, and then finally decide to monetize it at the same time. The difficult part is, when you immerse into blogging, you can hardly stop.

One thing about blogging is that is it very time-consuming but very satisfying when your published articles are able to make good traffic to your sites and clicks on your affiliate advertisements. Blogging is very addicting indeed. The bonus is that you also get to know with new people from anywhere in the world and befriend them simply because of a popular blog post you submitted on Digg or get stumbled in Stumbled Upon by other users.

Today, to celebrate the Fool’s Day, I’m going to show you the first craziest video I ever did in my whole life that was uploaded in YouTube. I did not make it for nothing, it is for this blog and for other bloggers. The video actually tells bloggers to take a while and get a break from writing or doing tasks related to blogging. And if you want to know what bloggers should do during breaks — well, just do the locomotion!

If you are a blogger and you want to join the “locomotion” phenomena, then just download that song, get your webcam to record a video, and use that dance step. Send it to me after and I’ll weave all our videos to become a global blogger locomotion.

For almost six months, I’ve dwelled and worked alone at home. I used to work in an IT company before where I reported (and even slept for a month) in the office, but I just don’t feel my future there – so I quit. Today, my job is good not just because it pays better than the previous one, but especially because the people whom I am working with, and the person whom I am working for, cares for me a lot.

Well anyway, before I get emotional, if you are wondering where I write my blog articles and do my work in the day, the picture below best describes it.

As you can see, my workplace is not that great. I work outside the house so I could see the nice morning, breathe fresh air, and watch animals and people passing nearby. I tried to put things in my workplace in an effort to make it look cool. As of this writing, it constitutes the following:

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We saw last year how intense the search engine battle was. Big companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google spent billions of dollars in efforts to gain market dominance in their online advertising business. At the end of the year, we saw that Google reigned supreme, with Yahoo, Microsoft, and other competitors closely trailing behind. Proofs were evident of Google’s victory: they acquired 17 innovating companies to call their own and with hopes to extend or penetrate further the online marketplace. If you don’t care, bloggers do – and they predict outright that Google’s glory will begin to fade in 2008.

Last year and until now, Google actively wipes out the PageRank (PR) of many blogs and websites they believed to have involved to link farms and other schemes designed to “artificially” inflate PageRank. PageRank is Google’s view on how important a web page is, thus favoring more important pages in their top Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Many observations reveal in totality that most penalized sites are those who joined networks offering paid reviews or links. For bloggers, PageRank is significant because many ad network companies (major source of blog revenues), begin to follow Google’s standards. Higher PRs somehow contribute to the continuous existence of most blog sites in the Internet.

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