Playing Spider: Enticing Your Web Audience

Session Overview

A website is more than pretty pictures. Like the spider draws the fly, use the internet to pull an audience into your interactive world.  Home page, author bio, cover art, couple of blurbs, blah, blah, blah… A basic website is like the first shovel of earth at the groundbreaking for a regional shopping mall. This workshop will talk about the ways to create a web presence that will provide an interactive world for your visitors, a world that can be as irresistible as that in the books you write.  This session also includes an follow-up on-line tutorial that displays many of the tools presented in the workshop -- www.playingspider.com (some parts require registration information presented during the workshop)

Basic Conference Session: (~55min including Q&A)

• Social Networking… we’ll discuss the phenomenon of blogging, discussion boards, mySpace and the other key ways the internet is bringing people of common interest together… and ways YOU can play!
• Multi-Media… consumer generated content. YouTube, podcasts, RSS feeds… all ways of allowing web visitors to fully immerse in the experiences you are working so hard to provide through your writing.
• Cheap, Fast, even Free!... Hundreds of low cost hosting solutions and FREE open source programs allow you to create your socially interactive, multi-media packing web world quickly. We’ll talk about sites you can put up in less than two hours.
• Hide and Seek… ways you can help the search engines find YOU!
• Additional Tips… use e-mail without being a spammer… build a members only HIDEAWAY for your die hard fans.

Expanded Conference Session or Short Workshop: (~120 min)

• Basic session plus more detailed discussions on blog options and discussion boards
• Open discussion on Social Networking and its implications

Half Day Workshop

• Hour 1: Basic Session
• Hour 2: Blog Options, discussion boards, and social networking
• Hour 3: New Media - video, audio, animation, interactive characters
• Hour 4: Syndication and Q&A

Full Day Workshop

• Hour 1: Basic Session
• Hour 2: Blog Options, discussion boards, and social networking
• Hour 3: New Media - video, audio, animation, interactive characters
• Hour 4: Syndication, YouTube, Podcasting
• Hour 5: Open Source software, what is it and how does it work
• Hour 6: Search Engines, Links, Advertising
• Hour 7: e-mail CAN-SPAM act of 2003;  Q&A wrapup

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