For those of you haven’t attended before, the content of BlogWorld covers a wide variety of topics, including monetizing your blog, expanding your online influence in your niche, improving your site’s SEO, and designing a killer theme. There are also many sessions about specific topics in social media and video/podcasting.

When I first attended last year, the sheer amount of new knowledge and techniques being thrown around was pretty mind-blowing. I came out of the event with dozens of pages of notes on sites I needed to check out, services to try, and changes to make to my blogging efforts. This year, I came away with a few good ideas and some great new connections made, but I didn’t feel nearly the same sense of awe at what I’d learned. If you’ve never attended before, though, you must attend at some point. It’s one of the best conferences in any industry, and can do wonders for your business.

I think this lack of new surprises is probably just due to having been in the industry for another year and keeping a much closer eye on resources like Twitter than I did before last year’s event. However, I also think it’s because social media and blogging technologies have matured, and the truly useful tools and services like Twitter (honestly, I swear it is) have continued to grow while other flash-in-the-pan technologies of last year have fallen by the wayside or been relegated to a particular niche. At BlogWorld 2008, people were really excited about some exciting sites or products that just didn’t turn out to be that useful.

At this year’s BlogWorld, I heard plenty of conflicting advice on different panels, like whether to use Twitter for your business or not, whether (and how) to monetize your site, how much content to give away for free, and much more. The funny thing is that listening to each person make their case, I think they were all right in their assessments! It just really depends on how you personally want to do business, and what your goals are. Except in a few really rare cases, it’s probably possible to make any technique work in any niche.

One message that was common to everyone I heard speak, though, was this: You’ve got to seriously care about what you’re doing. If you’re only ever chasing after what you think will make you popular or rich, you’re far more likely to fail. I heard it in Laura Fitton’s great keynote, Ben Huh’s talk on How to Get Huge, and especially on the all-star panel of Internet Marketing for Smart People. Caring isn’t a guarantee of success, but it’ll make it more likely that you’ll be passionate about your business, that you’ll persevere when things don’t go well, and your caring will be appealing and infectious to other people. Your passion, and genuine willingness to form relationships with people in your niche, will go a long way to helping you be a success.

PS- If you were hoping for more details and specifics, I’ll post those separately soon.