Melbourne Blogger Training Day
3 August 2010 – 12 Seats Left

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 2 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.