Malaysia Wordpress Blogging Seminar

I just came across a blogging for money seminar in Malaysia called “Wordpress Adsense Mastery Malaysia”. The enrollment fee costs from a whopping RM600 (early bird) to RM1,200 per person. Before you spend your hard-earned money, listen to what I have to say.

Now, I’ve nothing against the trainers - I don’t know them nor have even heard of them before this. The purpose of this blog post is not to discredit anyone or any event, but my opinion and advice based on my personal experience as an Internet entrepreneur and online marketing consultant.

Firstly, I’ve never heard about both trainers being big money-making bloggers themselves except that they were students of so and so. No offense but it would’ve been more useful if the trainers of a “blog for money” seminar was a proven, well-known and successful blogger like Sabahan, Ades, LiewCF, 5xMom, Paul Tan, Kenny Sia or Hongkiat. Even Internet entrepreneurs like Menj, Samsul or Gobalakrishnan would’ve been more relevant.

Secondly, it takes more than “basic blogging” knowledge to make serious money and a one-time seminar is not enough - the useful stuff will come from your continuous learning and blogging experience.

Thirdly, you should have a reasonable amount of technical skills and money for marketing. Other qualities that’ll help include good written English, time, effort, patience, persistence, attitude, curiosity, willingness to learn and most of all, a good knowledge of the subject you want to blog about. Let’s not start another boring blog about teaching others how to make money and insulting their intelligence with more Clickbank products.

Fourth, although there are successful local bloggers, bear in mind that it’s a tiny percentage when compared to the 70,000,000 blogs out there - what are your chances?

Fifth, making money online will become more difficult because of competition (and “noise”) from other aspiring probloggers. Frequent changes like a duplicate filter will bury your copied content in the search results or reporting paid links will result in less Text-Link-Ads opportunities. Yes, we now have Malaysian blog advertising networks like Advertlets and Nuffnang but did you also know a blogger like Ades made $0.40 a month from them?

The bottomline is:
- don’t blog for the sole purpose of making money.
- don’t think you can generate a massive income doing next to nothing.
- don’t think that it’s easy to succeed.
- don’t forget that there are better people out there who can also do the same.

The seminar is possibly a good opportunity to learn from people who can guide and hand-hold you if there’s a genuine interest to learn blogging. If you can self-learn (all successful bloggers do this), there are lots of free resources available on the Internet and many good webmaster forums to seek help from. Let me get you started:

1) How to install Wordpress?
- you can create a free blog at Wordpress.com. Or if you prefer to host it your own then buy a domain name, a budget shared hosting plan and download the script from Wordpress.org - installation takes 5 minutes.

2) Where to look for Wordpress themes?
- use Google or visit the Wordpress Theme Viewer page.

3) How to find useful plugins?
- use Google, see the plugins page or ask in a webmaster forum.

4) How to optimize a Wordpress blog?
- Top 10 SEO Tips For Wordspress Blogs.

5) How to make money from a blog?
- see where successful bloggers are making money from.

6) How to drive traffic, post content, etc.?
- use Google, ask in a forum or learn from other probloggers.

For the record, I’ve never attended any Internet seminars or workshops before, apart from the two corporate ones where I was a speaker. Hence, I tend to be a bit skeptical especially when it comes to those teaching you how to make money.

But having 1 million visitors a month on my blogs, websites and forum, serving over 700,000 Google ad impressions and consulting for public-listed companies, my opinions should hold some weight don’t you think?!

Any problogger care to comment?

Update: One of the trainers, May Ong, dropped by today and sent a message on MyBlogLog to inform me about her seminar - she DEFINITELY didn’t read this post. :p

Update: Gaman a.k.a. Sabahan has given his views here and also included a link to an interesting review of eOneNet, a Malaysian Internet marketing coach.

Update: here are 2 FREE ebooks on problogging from John Chow and Yaro Starak. I’ve never read them but they should be interesting coming from two successful bloggers.