“Highlights from ProBlogger Event 2013 #PBEVENT” plus 1 more

Highlights from ProBlogger Event 2013 #PBEVENT

Posted: 20 Sep 2013 08:37 AM PDT

Note: the Virtual Pass for PBEVENT 2013 is still available for purchase here.

It is hard to believe but this time last week, we were in the midst of our fourth annual Problogger Conference on the Gold Coast in Queensland Australia.

It was an amazingly emotional, nerve-wracking and yet exhilarating couple of days – and by the end of the event we knew that we had created something pretty special.

People weren’t just talking about their plans for their blog. They were talking about how the event had inspired them to make bigger changes, and think on a much larger scale. It’s almost unthinkable that this is the same event I created in 2010 in a small hotel on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Four years ago we had just under 150 attendees, all packed into a single room for a full day. We had 5 sessions, 6 speakers (5 men and 1 women) and attendees were around 60% male. We had dodgy wifi, packed everyone in (there was not a spare seat in the room) and while we had the excuse of only 6 weeks to plan the event it was fairly basic on many levels.

This year we saw just under 450 people attend. We ran 3 streams simultaneously with a total of 31 sessions of teaching. 3 of our speakers were from the US (Amy Porterfield, Tsh Oxenreider and Trey Ratcliff) and two thirds of our 30 speakers were female. Not only that – this year 84% of our attendees were women!

Our attendees went into something of a frenzy of activity during the two days – they tweeted over 13,000 times on the #PBEVENT hashtag and they posted hundreds of instagram images too.

You can get a feel for the event from this news segment that was on the local news (not sure why they decided to caption me ‘Craig Rowse’).

We held the event at the amazing QT Gold Coast (one of the most instagramable hotels I’ve ever set foot in) and had some great support from Tourism and Events Queensland, Virgin Australia, Kambrook, Yellow Pages and some great sponsors in our Bloggers Market Place.

Friday night saw us hold a fun networking party that featured fire twirlers, Aussie animals (including snakes), Life Guards, photo booth, Austin Powers and much more. We also had special guests – including Aussie Actor and Singer Clare Bowditch, Samuel Johson from Love Your Sister and Aussie rules footballer Jonathan Brown.

The overwhelming feedback from attendees this year was that it was our best event yet. While we know there are ways to improve we’re particularly excited to see bloggers implementing things that they’ve learned, collaborating and already asking what we have planned for next year.

Want to get a feel for the event from an attendee perspective? You’re in luck – attendees from this years event have been writing a mix of posts, both sharing tips and their experiences. Here are the highlights from the many posts that were shared on our facebook page.

Tips + Takeaways

Changes

One thing I’m most proud of is how it helped people. Martine Oglethorpe said that the two days “summed up what a lot of us were thinking – “the importance of living in the now. Of not settling for something that doesn’t create memories. Of not letting the 'haters' beat you.”

Here are some of the ways it helped attendees change their perspective.

Janina Lear: As I have been blogging for around 5 years now I found that I know more than I gave myself credit for so rather than learning much new I came away feeling inspired to do more and to keep being authentic
Kellie Alderman: For me, it helped to crystalize, in my mind, how best to shrug off the legacy of legacy media and find a way of bringing what I love to do into a venue where people are going to be looking for it.

Community

I think Trevor young gave one of the best summations of our industry

It became obvious at the Problogger event that many serious bloggers in Australia are becoming fully-fledged content creators, community builders and mini-media enterprises in their own right – they shoot video and/or photos, some produce audio content via podcasting, and most are hyper-connected across social networks. They are telling stories that resonate with their audience, growing their following organically through word-of-mouth not only through their blogs but also social networks, and building their brands in accelerated fashion.

I agree – and I believe that the Aussie blogosphere is pretty unique with the sense of community. Here are some more incredibly kind words attendees had to say:

Dannielle Cresp: It's like being surrounded by hope and believers. I feel like I have a force field of people who have my back around me now. And even a few days later, this couldn't be more of the truth. We all need that force field.
Pip Lincolne: If you hang out with the right people, all kinds of possibilities present themselves. Ideas spark all over the place and you can feel yourself being grounded and growing like a vine, all at the same time.
Kathy, from Yin Yang Mother: Problogger taught as much about making a life as it did about making a living. They didn't speak of success as much as service. Of getting offline, which would seem to run counter-intuitive to being well-known online. Of collaborating and cooperating rather than competing. Of community rather than markets. Of win-win rather than take-all. Of creating first, giving second, selling last. Of passion before profits (literally and always).

All up – it was an amazing couple of days on the Gold Coast (the highlight of my year in many ways) and since coming home I’ll admit to wondering around the house feeling a little lonely after having so many amazing bloggers to hang out with. I guess we’d better start planning for next year!

Looking Forward

Speaking of next year – our team is already making plans for 2014 and hope to build upon what we did this year.

If you’re interested to hear more about our plans you can add your email address below and we’ll make sure to send you an update when we have that information ready to share.

Grab All the Teaching from PBEVENT Here

This year we recorded sessions (audio) at PBEVENT and have collected up all the slides used during the two days. These are available as a Virtual Pass which is now available for you to purchase and listen to at your leisure.

Pick it up in the next few days and you’ll also get an invitation to join a live Q&A call with myself and my team in the coming weeks as well as a webinar with Jonathan Fields.

Thanks

The theme of this year’s event for me was one of realising what a lucky person I am. I am particularly grateful to have an amazing team work with me to produce PBEVENT. To Jasmin, Justine, Laney, Liz and Nicole – I’m indebted to you each and thankful for your hard work. Thanks too to Shayne for his advice, encouragement and support.

To our support team of room producers, social media team, volunteers, ushers – your positivity and spirit were infectious and helped make this a smooth running event in many ways.

To our speakers – both international and Aussies – I love this year’s line up. As I said at the event you not only were informative and inspirational – you are good hearted people who left us all better for the opportunity to hear you.

Lastly to our sponsors (particularly Virgin Australia, Yellow Pages, Kambrook), Venue (QT Hotel) and other partners (particularly Tourism and Events Queensland) – I appreciate the value that you added, the effort that you went to to be relevant and fit in with what we planned.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Highlights from ProBlogger Event 2013 #PBEVENT

When Affiliate Marketing Can Be a WIN/WIN/WIN Situation

Posted: 19 Sep 2013 09:37 AM PDT

Several years ago on my photography site I was approached by a company who sold a software product for photographers. They wanted to run a banner ad campaign on my site to promote a new product.

Their product was a quality one from a source I trusted and it was relevant to our readers so I sold them a banner ad that would run in the sidebar of my blog for the duration of a month for the cost of $2000.

The month ran it’s course and I emailed my contact at the company to see if they’d like to renew the ad. They didn’t.

It turns out that the banner ad had not driven enough sales for them to justify running the ad again (from what I know the sales generated from the ad made the company about $1000 – so given they paid $2000 it was a loss).

A year later noticed that they’d released a new product so I emailed them to ask if they’d like to try another ad campaign – potentially something in a different position on the site or even a competition/giveaway to give them a different type of exposure.

They said now but mentioned that they now had an affiliate program and would be willing to give me a review copy of the software for me to review. The commission on this $100 product was 30%.

I signed up for the affiliate program – wrote a post that gave a fair review of the product and posted it onto the blog. I pushed traffic to that post in our weekly newsletter and via social media and we ended up selling around 300 copies of the software over the coming weeks – making a total of $9000 in commission.

A Win/Win/Win for All Parties

While affiliate campaigns are not always going to have this result – I think this is a great example of how affiliate marketing can actually be a Win for everyone.

It was a Win for Me

Obviously I was happy with this affiliate campaign. While it took a little more work to review and write a post than to put a banner ad in our sidebar the increase in earnings from $2000 to $9000 was great for the bottom line of my business.

It was a Win for the Brand

The beauty of an affiliate program when you’re the manufacturing a product is that you only pay out when you generate a sale. The risk is pretty much non-existent for the company.

Rather than making a loss of $1000 they generated $30,000 in sales and took 70% of that. It also would have brought them new customers that they could promote to in future.

It was a Win for My Readers

The other party in any affiliate promotion is the reader. I like to think that they also won in this campaign because instead of seeing a banner ad that was all ‘marketing’ from the company they had the opportunity to read a fair review of the product.

I go out of my way in these kinds of reviews to show the pros and cons of products and help readers to make an informed decision.

In this case we had a number of readers email to say that they’d seen products from this company being advertised previously but seeing a review had helped them to make a decision if it was something that would help them.

When Affiliate Marketing Works Best

Of course affiliate marketing isn’t ‘easy’ money.

While the above story might seem rather ‘seamless’ and an easy it is important to note that the result was only possible after several years of building up: