Personal Development for Smart People^TM

If you’re interested in coming to Vegas to see me speak in person, here’s your chance.

Next month I’ll be presenting a blogging/internet workshop for the Las Vegas chapter of the National Speakers Association.  It will be held at the Imperial Palace (on the Las Vegas Strip) on Saturday, November 11, 2006, 9am-4pm.

This presentation will be geared towards NSA members (i.e. professional speakers), but the workshop is open to the public, so everyone is welcome to attend.

This will be a practical, how-to workshop for people who want to learn more about blogging as a business model.  I’ll cover basic blogging 101, how to get started, content creation, traffic building, marketing, optimization, and income generation.  This presentation is intended for a non-technical audience, including people who don’t know HTML, so I promise not to overload you with TLAs.  That’s Three-Letter Acronyms, not Text Link Ads. 

I’ll be doing a PowerPoint presentation with lots of specific data from my last two years of blogging, and there will be time for interactive Q&A as well.  Since this workshop will be several hours long, I can get a lot more detailed than I did in articles like How to Make Money From Your Blog, so much of the information I’ll be sharing was never shared publicly before.  These weren’t intentional secrets per se – it’s just that I primarily write about personal development, not the business of blogging.

The Vegas NSA charges a nominal fee for the workshop ($87 for NSA members and $107 for non-members), which includes a catered lunch.  I’m doing this for no fee though, so all the money goes to the Vegas NSA and to pay for the room and lunch.

This may be the last time I do this kind of workshop, since my main focus is personal development, not blogging or online marketing.  In this case I decided to make an exception because blogging has the potential to force major changes on the speaking community, and I want to challenge speakers and life coaches to re-think their business models for the 21st century.  I also want to give my local speaker friends the practical knowledge they need to build high-traffic web sites.  To me this kind of work is very high leverage, since speaking to speakers is an opportunity to influence the influencers.

If you think this workshop would benefit you, you can register for it here.  The prices I mentioned above include the early registration discount – they’ll go up by $10 after November 4.

I’m sorry I couldn’t provide more advance notice than four weeks, but I just noticed that the registration page was up this morning.  If you do decide to attend this workshop, be sure to say “hi” and introduce yourself.  And just to let you know, it’s conventional at NSA events to dress up — male attendees typically wear suits and ties or sport coats.  I’ll be wearing a suit… a total betrayal of my game developer past. 

If you have questions about the logistics of the event, contact the Vegas NSA directly.  They’re in charge of the registration and room arrangements.  I just show up and speak. 

Will this presentation be available online?  The NSA will probably record it and might make a DVD version for its members, but I don’t intend to post it anywhere myself.  There will be several hours of material, so the file size would be huge.  Plus I don’t want to drift too far towards making this a site about blogging instead of personal development.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 11:39 am and is filed under Business, Entrepreneurship, Public Speaking, Technology, Wealth & Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.