ContentRobot

ContentRobot’s tagline promotes us as WordPress experts, and today we were put to the test.

Our partner, Stephanie Agresta, asked us to lend our knowledge as speakers during a round table discussion at Affiliate Summit West 2008. While affiliate marketing was still new to us, blogging was definitely something we could speak about. We weren’t sure what we were in for …

Would affiliate marketers be interested in learning more about blogging? What were their feelings about WordPress? If anyone actually showed up, would we be able to give them the information that they needed? What would they really want to know? We hoped we were ready for anything they could throw at us.
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We landed in Las Vegas yesterday in preparation for Affiliate Summit West 2008. We jumped right into the thick of the conference and headed to the “Meet Market,” which gave us insight to the various affiliate companies and their myriad of offerings.

But Monday started Day One of ASW08, and here is our wrap-up …

Jason Calcanis’ Keynote

Today, the show was kicked off with an interesting keynote by the ever-controversial Jason Calcanis, CEO of Mahalo, which touts itself as a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.

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We have been working hard on performing a Movable Type 4 to WordPress conversion project for our friends at ReveNews.

This has proven to be another project not for the faint-hearted with 10 years of data, 72 blogs, over 2,500 posts and over 10,000 comments! We are on target to go live with their new platform on Friday, in time for them to eagerly show it off at Affiliate Summit West 2008.
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Recently, we shared with our readers some potential
hosts they might consider for their affiliate blogs (well, any blogs for that matter). As we read up on each, we became really impressed with eleven2, particularly with their level of offerings, decent prices, and promise of 24/7 technical support (their instant messenger is always “on”).

Last Friday we made the decision to sign up for an eleven2 account, and hoped to to do the complete conversion over the weekend. Dana diligently handled all the technical aspects of the changeover for the the contentrobot domain, related subdomains, DNS, and email and settings. Despite being in business for only 2 years, we certainly had a lot of data!
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It’s hard to believe, but ContentRobot turned two today!

We are happy to be zooming along, and we have our clients and fans to thank. Some highlights of the year include:

• Launching a bunch of client sites and meeting great people along the way
• Partnering with Automattic (parent company of WordPress) and Stephanie Agresta Consulting
• Developing two popular plugins: iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Google Website Optimizer Plugin for WordPress (with more on the way)
• Collaborating on parts of The Secret Power of Blogging book

It was very satisfying to meet and surpass some of our company goals. ContentRobot looks forward to another great year!
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The ContentRobot team is heading back to Las Vegas on February 24-26 for Affiliate Summit West.

What is a blogging development company doing at a conference aimed at affiliates?

We are speaking during Tuesday’s Ask the Expert session and we’ll be on hand to help attendees to gets answers about making money with affiliates on WordPress blogs.

We hope to meet you there!
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The ContentRobot Team hasn’t posted since we wished our readers the happiest of holidays … so, what have we been doing in the meantime?

Our new client, Nine Lives Media, wanted to take the wraps off of their two new sites — MSP Mentor and The VAR Guy — by the first week of the new year.

We worked with Nine Lives Media to:

• Install and configure WordPress and a bunch of plugins on their own host
• Create 2 unique, but related, designs that captured the essence of each brand
• Develop 2 fairly-customized WordPress themes
• Convert existing blog posts and comments
• Oh yeah, can you launch them in 5 weeks?

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We promised an inside look at the offerings at BlogWorld’s conference floor. Here is what we found:

• Blog advertising is alive and well. The majority of booths were featured money making schemes for your blogs. Since ContentRobot focuses on business blogging, we really didn’t spend much time here.
• Blog widgets were in vogue here. Were developers really hoping to code some sidebar goodies only in hopes of getting bought out? Time will tell.
• Another interesting trend was the talk of multimedia. Just like the promise of websites of a decade ago, the convergence of audio, video, and text on blogs seemed to be hot, hot, hot.
• Finally, social media (which of course was in the name of the conference) was everywhere - get those communities together anyway you can.
• The biggest omission? We were surprised that WordPress and Six Apart did not have booths at this show (tho Matt Mullenweg and Anil Dash were both featured speakers).

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Here is Day Two’s recap of ContentRobot at BlogWorld Expo. Despite yesterday’s full day and all the socializing, we were a bit more rested and ready to take on the day.

The Morning Keynote
Friday opened with “The Future of New Media Publishing” with a discussion with Tech TV’s Leo LePorte and Six Apart’s Anil Dash. Anil discussed OpenID and Google’s OpenSocial API. Leo talked about global, cheap, easy, self-publishing that promotes 2-way communication and community building. Social networking (particularly with Facebook and Twitter) was definitely a theme for the conference.
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ContentRobot descended on BlogWorld Expo on Thursday, after attending a fabulous party thrown by ShareASale and The Conversation Group at the Wynn in Vegas. We were able to network with a bunch of cool bloggers and industry bigwigs and eat some out-of-this-world (sea)food. We were off to a good start, even tho we were still on Eastern Standard Time.

The Morning Keynote
Onto the next day … After fortifying ourselves with a few cups of Starbucks, we kicked off BWE by attending the opening keynote, which featured a cool interview with Matt Mullenweg (founding developer of WordPress and Automattic) and Ed Sussman of Fast Company. We consider ourselves advanced WordPress developers and it was funny to hear Matt say that some of the WordPress tools still “suck.”
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