We’re blogging live from the Nigerian Bloggers’ Conference…

The conference, which is holding at the Banquet Hall of Elomaz Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria started with a quick introduction by the host (one of Nigeria’s most popular bloggers), Adeolu Akinyemi. Others, who’re busy introducing themselves include the writers of this blog, a weapons engineer, soon-to-be bloggers, blog readers, blogger of the “Gbeborun of Lagos” fame, husbands and wives who blog together, an uncommissioned “Obama speech-writer”, I-must-now-ressurect-my-blog folks and others. From the introductions, it is quite clear that many bloggers started (and stopped, and then resumed again) after reading other blogs.

‘Gbenga is taking us through the definition of a blog or what I’d like to call Blogging 101 or Blogging for dummies. Hmm… his motivation for blogging was fuelled by what he’d like people to say about him at his funeral…lol. One of the reasons he started blogging was to have an outlet for articles he wrote that Newspapers were too scared to print because it didn’t fit their model of political correctness. He also made a personal choice not to blog about bad news because there’s enough bad news out there already. One of the beauties of blogging is the realness of the authors, the way they share the things they truly believe in. Like it or not, blogging can help you to influence things in society, because you have a circle of influence.

Now Olumide is talking and I’m blogging. He’s taking the audience through domain names — what they are and why you should own one. He’s just thrown in a new word — findability — and it says a lot about how owning a unique personalized domain name can help people identify you more easily. “It sets you apart from the crowd, keeps you in control, makes moving easy and helps you keep rakings with your search engines,” he said. I like the “keeps you in control” bit because it helps avoid having adverts that contradict the content of your blog because you’re using a secondary provider’s service. Owning your own domain also shows your seriousness about your idea or business — if only because you pay some money to get that in place each year.

Gbenga Aijotan, of NaijaBrains.com, is presently speaking about online media advertising. He’s discussing the possibility of attracting corporate adverts on blogs having built loyal traffic.

Listen to this podcast (computer-generated voice)