Problogger Event, Melbourne: Passion is Implied.
On reflection of Friday’s blogging conference, I was initially a little disappointed that in all of the fantastic information that came out of the speeches, presentations and Q&A’s, very little was ever mentioned about passion other than as a small part of the intro speech (with very cute accompanying graphic). From my own experience as a blogger (even on the small scale that I am), I know that the number one thing you need in this game is passion. Without it, you won’t be successful. And I don’t mean success in a monetary making-enough-to-quit-your-job-and-blog-full-time kind of way. I just mean blogging full stop. Without passion, there’s no way you’ll be able to sit down at the computer and write posts day in and day out. Even the incredibly successful bloggers speaking at the conference began with only a handful of readers and had to work their way to where they are now. You need to be passionate about your subject. You need to be passionate about your readers. It takes a lot of hard slog and determination to keep it up so no passion = no blog.
But then, after FURTHER reflection, it dawned on me that the Problogger Training Day was working on the assumption you have that already. Duh, it’s a no-brainer. If you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t be there. You wouldn’t have flown all the way from the many corners of Australia – Tasmania…Adelaide…Sydney…Brisbane… You wouldn’t be braving the potential embarassment of being snubbed by your blogging idols. You wouldn’t be shelling out the big bucks for the ticket and airfare. In short, you wouldn’t be sitting in a room full of 269 other bloggers waiting with bated breath to hear what the experts have to say.
So now that we’ve got that passion thing out of the way (or rather at the forefront of our minds), the conference filled in everything else you’ll need to know to make your blog work better for you. Topics included: Monetization, Creating content that builds relationships, Creating & launching e-books, How to find readers for your blog (this was by far the most popular but unfortunately conflicted with the session about Blogging for Social Good which I’d been looking forward to all week), there was a session about Webinars but the term ‘Webinar’ scared me off that one! I actually found myself accidentally in a blog critique session instead of the Productivity talk (which is something I really need the most help with!!) but I found it to be the most enjoyable and informative session of the entire day! It was run by British/Canadian blogger Chris Garrett who was both amusing and had the ability to break down some tricky concepts into simple terms. Of all the sessions, this is the one that I know will directly affect changes on my blog (in a good way). He had some great suggestions to tweak what’s already there and make it work better for the reader. I won’t go into all of the key lessons gleaned from the day as a) it’s boring to anyone who isn’t a blogger and b) I haven’t written it yet! but I WILL say that there are some cool bloggers this side of the hemisphere.
We got to hear from (and meet) bloggers in the world of fashion, I.T (OK so most of his expertise went over my head), travel, photography, parenting, social media and food. It’s a true testament to the variety of intelligent voices in Australia on many different topics (although I was kinda proud that the male/female ratio was clearly in our favour at the event!) The diversity of expertise, topics and bloggers made for a well-rounded day but what I was most impressed with was the inclusion of the ‘Blogging for Social Good’ session. It blew my mind that the event coordinators recognised that the influence generated from blogging to a targeted audience is not just a great way to make money from advertisers but it’s also a fantastic way to help others. It can be tempting to use these conferences purely to push the monetary side of this blogging game so to see a focus on the human side of things was refreshingly awesome.
Thanks to Darren Rowse (aka ProBlogger) who gathered together such a great team of bloggers to speak at this event. I hope there will be many more to come.
Glad you enjoyed the critique session – it means a lot to me to read this as I felt it went horribly wrong at the time because of the internet going down at the absolute worst time (and my nerves were already on edge from having to face meeting actual human beings in person, ha!) – thank goodness Josh saved the day with his laptop!