The Family Research Council blog has linked to most of the speeches given at the Blogs 4 Life conference in DC on January 22.
Unfortunately, FRC didn’t capture the first few speeches, including mine. But I have posted the test of my speech on page 2 along with powerpoint slides for those interested.

Blog Conference speech, FRC, Washington DC
by Jill Stanek
January 22, 2008
At last year’s conference I discussed blog basics, much of which I gleaned from Hugh Hewitt’s book, Blog, which I would recommend to anyone interested in blogging.
This year I will discuss ideas on how to grow your blog.
I returned home from the 2007 Blogs for Life conference with a greater understanding of the importance of pro-life blogs, and I committed myself to work harder on mine.
We all know the mainstream media leaves so many of our stories unreported, underreported, or misreported.
The message I got from last year’s conference was that pro-life blogs aren’t just exercises in frustration relief, which is basically how I previously used mine. Pro-life blogs can really make a difference in our war against the culture of death.
And so, this past year I made my blog my #1 pro-life work priority. And it paid off with a good deal of growth.
The number of visitors checking my site daily is up 650%.
The commenters have become prolific, often over 100 on each post. I started the year with zero moderators and now need six, plus a proofreader. I was quoted this year too many places to count, including many pro-abortion blogs and websites.
Because of my increased visibility, I received calls from the mainstream media,

such as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, seeking my opinion simply because I was a pro-life blogger.
I am by no means an expert on blogging. Many here today could be and are my instructors. But I did a few things that increased my traffic that I would like to pass along.
The first thing I did was blog more often, which is a fundamental principle of noteworthy blogging. I now write 3-5 posts a day on weekdays. If you feed it, they will come.
That said, posts must be meaningful, not just take up cyberspace. It’s better not to say anything than to say something poorly.
And it’s better to take time and produce one good post than write something inaccurate or inane and lose credibility.

Internet viewers are not a captive audience. They can and do pick up and leave when the least bit bored.
Which is why less is always best on blogs. It takes me longer to edit than to write. In journalism it is said, “Edit until it hurts, and then edit some more.” I do. Every word has a reason for being there.
So I don’t just recycle what is already out there. I don’t just cut and paste from LifeNews.com or LifeSiteNews.com, although they are great sources. I find new information, or a new angle.
One easy way to get new information is to send yourself google alerts.

Go to google, then go to “more,” then send yourself notification on any word or phrase you like as often a day as you’d like.
I receive google alerts every day on the words “abortion,” “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” “anti-abortion,” “stem cell,” and, of course, “Jill Stanek.”
But sources are everywhere. Develop an eye, even at the grocery check-out, where you can scan magazine headlines.
On the topic of angles, one perfect niche for pro-life bloggers is to dissect mainstream media stories on our issue and correct them or draw out points, sometimes buried headlines.
The Los Angeles Times featured a story January 7 on men and post-abortion stress syndrome. The LAT quoted the president of the American Psychiatric Association, Nada Stotland, making some remarkable statements.

Stotland said pro-lifers “’have succeeded in convincing a lot of the American public’ that abortion leaves women wounded… But the research does not prove cause and effect… and women who have abortions are more emotionally unstable in the first place.”
Now what would cause the president of the American Psychiatric Association to disparage the feelings of an entire class of people, when anyone who has taken psych 101 knows “feelings are neither right or wrong, they just are. But further Stotland called women who abort “emotionally unstable”?
In my opinion, that was a buried headline, and I wondered, why did she say that?
Well, I researched Stotland and found she is a lesbian feminist who sits on the board of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, and then I blogged on it.

So no wonder she said what she said. She has a liberal agenda that trumps her profession.
You may wonder why Stotland’s lesbianism matters, but the homosexual lobby supports and works with the abortion lobby because they both have the same goal: illicit sex with no consequences.
Pro-life bloggers can also show graphics and pictures to make our point, something the mainstream media can’t do to the same extent, and on our issue doesn’t if it can. Readers enjoy graphics, and they break up a page. I include photos or graphics with every post. Planned Parenthood never fails to provide fodder, such as the valentine it’s sending to Barack Obama.

And on the right is a photo from the January issue of Vogue magazine, with the photo of a post-partial birth abortive mother modeling the latest in fashion – including a Christopher Fischer cardigan – and smiling at her wanted live child. Grotesque. I didn’t need to add much commentary to that post.
Another area where pro-life bloggers can excel is by providing documentation. Eric Scheidler spoke a few moments ago about the Aurora Planned Parenthood debacle, and Eric and his team were great at providing fodder to bloggers to hammer to the America public that PP lied its way into the city.
Here is a document PP’s front company, Gemini Office Development, submitted to the City of Aurora falsely stating it did not know who would occupy its building, when PP had created Gemini specifically to cover up that fact.

By showing that document and others like it, we let PP and Gemini condemn themselves.
I even posted PP Chicago Area’s tax returns, showing its CEO Steve Trombley made almost $300k and its lead abortionist $500k in 2005.

And when we had pickets, how superior was it to show 1k marchers rather than just say there were 1k marchers, as MSM did? I even made a couple YouTube videos.

In fact, pro-lifers have become quite adept at using YouTube, for instance posting 130 videos about Aurora Planned Parenthood – marches, public hearings, prayer vigils, etc.
It was in fact pro-life bloggers who swarmed around this story and gave it wings. MSM was clearly planning to ignore it by its first stories. I once listed all the pro-life blogs that google said had carried this story until google went ga-ga and wouldn’t let me open blogs past page 29 of its search pages.

Another way I increased traffic to my blog was by encouraging conversation. My blog software includes a spam blocker, so I don’t make commenters go through an elaborate sign-up or sign-in process, and I don’t screen their comments before posting them. I encourage dissent. I think it strengthens us to debate. It hones our skills. I don’t block pro-aborts, and I don’t force commenters to stick to the topic, although we’d prefer that Our goal is to encourage discussion of our issue and to build relationships.
This open comment policy has an element of danger to it but has worked out very well for me, surprisingly. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve had to lock down comments when trolls came to call. Fortunately, I have many moderators who constantly check to make sure commenters abide by our posted guidelines, and they usually do.
You must have a thick skin to do this, because comments can get rough. But there are rewards. Over the past several months we’ve had 4 converts – people who came to our site pro-abortion, engaged in prolonged conversation, and changed their view to pro-life.

Pro-life bloggers must not lose sight of the goals, to convert those on the other side and make America abortion free ultimately through a human life amendment to the constitution, likely preceded by the overturn of Roe v. Wade. We also have many new Life issues to contend with like euthanasia and human embryo experimentation, which reminds me to mention that developing a niche is also a way to grow your blog. Become an expert, the go-to person on a certain issue or organization, and you’ll get noticed.
And always remember, blogging is a means, not an end. Don’t become more concerned about growing your blog than the issue at hand.

Thank you.