One of the strange things about blogging is that it leads you into an amazing variety of relationships that you would never have dreamed of finding yourself in before. Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I think about the people that I’ve ‘met’ and have daily contact with as a result of my blogs. My friends are staggered (as am I) that I’m actually in a business partnership with 3 other people that I’ve never physically met before in b5media and that I have similar relationships with numerous other people. Add to this the 40,000+ other people that read my blogs each day and it all makes my head hurt a little to think about.
On the flip side of all of the plus sides of this is the fact that I live on the opposite side of the world to the vast majority of you reading this right now. While I love Australia and the lifestyle of Melbourne it can be very frustrating not to be able to have a coffee and get to know people on a face to face level.
As a result I’ve been wanting to get across to the US (where the majority of ProBlogger readers live) for some time now to put some faces to names and now it looks like there is an opportunity for a short visit opening up later in the year.
While part of the trip I’ll be on a conference I’m hoping to have a week available either before or after it to dedicate to spending time with readers and partners.
I’d like to float an idea by those of you in the US to see if it has any traction for anyone.
Andy Wibbels and I have been dreaming of doing a live face to face course similar in style to SixFigureBlogging for a while now and we’re thinking that this might be an opportunity to do so.
We’ve started brainstorming on what it’d look like and here’s what we’re thinking so far:
- The course would either be 1 or 2 days (fairly intensive days)
- It would probably be in very early October
- It would probably take place in Chicago (although we’d be willing to take it on the road if we thought there was sufficient interest to make it worth while)
- One option in terms of topic would be to make day 1 a fairly broad intro to blogging with some basics like blog tools, SEO, finding readers etc and to have day two a day focused upon Monetizing Blogs. Each day would be a stand alone day so you could either do one or both of them.
- The time would have loads of opportunity for questions
- Cost – this one is always tricky and would depend upon many aspects including venue costs etc. We haven’t got a fixed price in mind at this point except that it’s not a freebie event and it would be a couple of full days of content. I’d be interested to hear what people would think it’s worth.
Obviously it’s early days now in terms of content and we’d develop it and fill up the time with the type of information that we heard participants wanted. There would be no danger in us not filling it up with too much information (the feedback from participants of Six Figure Blogging was that we had too much content to digest rather than not enough).
So the question is – would anyone come? We could put together a great couple of days but it wouldn’t be worth it if we presented to ourselves. If you’d be interested what would you think it’s worth and what would you like to be included in the time?
