“Melbourne Blogger Training Day 3 August 2010 – 12 Seats Left” plus 1 more

Melbourne Blogger Training Day 3 August 2010 – 12 Seats Left

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 05:30 PM PDT

Just over a week ago I had the crazy idea to run a training day for bloggers while Chris Garrett was in Melbourne. It was a spur of the moment idea and as a result something that I thought would be quite small, informal and relaxed.

I posted about the idea and asked for expressions of interest and was flooded with enquiries. What I thought would be a 20 person event was starting to look like a 50 person one. In conjunction with the team at SitePoint I started to look at venues of that size but as the expressions of interest continued to come in we realised we needed to think bigger.

We have booked a venue – the Jika International – which will seat 100 comfortably (there is a chance we can upgrade to a larger room) and on Friday opened the doors to start selling tickets (via this page on EventBrite).

As I write this – we have sold 88 seats and there are only 12 8 6 available. There is no guarantee we’ll get the larger room so if you’re interested – today’s the day to secure your place.

A few details about the event:

When: Tuesday 3rd August – 9am-5pm
Where: Jika International in Fairfield (it’s not a high end venue but has everything we need including wifi, plenty of food, close to public transport, 6km out of the CBD and some crazy carpet).
Cost: $99 AUD – including lunch and morning and afternoon tea (plus some other bonuses/prizes). We’ve tried to keep it as affordable as we can and think for 6 hours of training this represents value.
Who: this event is for people with blogs. It’s not at the real beginner end (ie how to start a blog) but will be accessible for those starting out through to more intermediate bloggers who want to take things up a notch. The 88 people signed up already are a fantastic bunch from all around Australia (and New Zealand) (you can see them listed on the ticket sales page). We’ve got people flying in from Perth, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane etc and there will be time during the day for networking and interaction.

Sessions/Topics

The sessions in this event will cover a range of topics identified by a survey of attendees including:

Creating Killer Content
Finding Readers for Your Blog
Building Reader Engagement and Community
Monetizing Blogs

We’ll be mixing up the presentation style with some keynote style presentations, case studies, a panel and some workshop/interactive times for looking at some participants blogs (we won’t be able to do everyone).

I still want the day to be informal, relaxed and fun – but we should be able to cover some good solid teaching over the day too.

Speakers

Speakers will include both Chris and myself but we’re also bringing in some other great Melbourne bloggers to do case studies including Collis Taeed from Envato and Pip Lincolne from Meet me at Mikes. There will also be some of the SitePoint team participating.

Prizes/Giveaways

Attendees will also be in the running for some cool giveaways. The team at Haul have put up an iPad folio or sleeve (like the one I have) for one lucky attendee, we’ll give away some ProBlogger books, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbooks, and the team at Flippa are giving all attendees $20 credit at their site. We’re also talking to a couple of other companies about some giveaways/bonuses to add a little spice into the day (if your company would like to talk about that let me know).

If you’re an Aussie blogger (or you can get to Australia on 3rd August) we’d love to have you join us. Reserve your seat today and if you find that all 100 tickets are taken please do add yourself to the waiting list as we’ll do our best to find a way to add a few more seats or shift to a larger room if it is still available.

Reserve your seat here and join the great group of bloggers attending.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Melbourne Blogger Training Day
3 August 2010 – 12 Seats Left

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How to Boost your Income and Popularity by Giving Stuff Away

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 06:14 AM PDT

A Guest Post by Johnny B Truant.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re blogging to make money, or to express yourself. So why would you ever give something away? If you’re in this as a business, giving stuff away without charging for it seems counterintuitive. If you’re just out there writing for the sake of writing, then what you want are readers… and how is giving stuff away going to get more eyes on your blog?

The answer is that what goes around comes around. What you give comes back to you. What you sow is what you reap, and all of that. It’s not just platitudes. It works.

I was thinking about this because I’m in the middle of a promotion where I’m setting up self-hosted Wordpress blogs for free. (In fact, if you want one, click over and go get one.) This isn’t an experiment. It’s the third time I’ve done it. I continue to do it because each time I do, my statistics go way up, my RSS readership grows, my Twitter followers grow, and I meet a bunch of new people who may end up being customers later. And thanks to the fact that I’m an affiliate for website hosting (which my free blog setup folks would have to buy regardless), I make money too.

All of my best tips come down to giving things away.

Want to grow your mailing list? Write a great report or e-book — and then instead of charging for it, give it away to people who sign up for your list.
Want to reach a new audience? Write a really good blog post, ideally one that is immediately actionable for people who read it. Reveal your best tip or tips in that post. Then, give it to someone else as a guest post rather than running it on your site.
Want more referrals? Give a greater percentage of sales to your affiliates. I’m not quite gutsy enough to do this myself, but Dave Navarro told me once publicly that he gave affiliates 100% of the sale price on a certain product and then paid the transaction fees (which would normally come from the sale price) out of his own pocket. He “lost” money on his own product, but built a list in his shopping cart of people who liked his stuff well enough to buy it — a list he could promote to later.
Want more goodwill, better Karma, or more raving fans? Then do something for charity. Twice that I know of, Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz.com has rallied her audience to raise money for a cause. The first time, she raised relocation expenses for a female reader who needed to get out of a physically abusive relationship. The second time, she raised over $12,000 for Cambodia — enough to build a school. The benefit to her? Tons and tons and tons of “good feelings” out in the blogosphere about her, which converted casual fans into die-hards.

I could keep going. There are tons of ways for any blogger at any level to increase either business or readership by trying the experiment of temporarily swapping “what can I get out of this?” thinking for “what can I give that people would really want and love?” thinking.

The really cool thing is that if you plan a little in advance, there’s usually a way that you can benefit too. If you’re smart, “giving it away” can get you a lot more than you’re probably getting right now.

Give it a shot. And if you’ve done it, let’s hear how it worked out in the comments!

P.S: If you’re still trying to figure out how to get your start in blogging in order to try this stuff? Well, now’s the time because I think I mentioned I know a guy who’s doing a mutually beneficial free blog setup promotion right now.

——
Johnny B. Truant blogs at JohnnyBTruant.com and is one of the two guys behind The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Boost your Income and Popularity by Giving Stuff Away