The Journey Has Begun – Lahore Blogger’s Meetup

Bloggers in Pakistan today proved their existence in real lives, when more than 100 bloggers engaged themselves in an exciting gathering at SC-4 Hall, LUMS – Lahore. This meet-up is meant to be the start of a journey that was badly required from a community that has been actively playing its role to fulfill Pakistan’s online needs.

Though bloggers have been aggressively reporting about social, cultural, educational, industrial, business and political issues coming across, but they had been missing a very important part – ‘ in person interaction with the real world’ which they accomplished today; thanks to Badar Khusnood, Pakistan Country Consultant, Google, Inc., CIO Pakistan and hosted by LUMS IEEE Students.

Meet-up basically aimed at connecting bloggers with each other to better perform in terms of content quality and revenues by sharing their experiences and expertise.

Meet-up went live as scheduled at 3:00 PM ,local time, with Khurram Amin hosting the show. Badar Khusnood was first to appear on the dice with an informative slide show that contained basic information for setting up a blog and about creating adsense account to be incorporated in blogs; for generating handsome amount of revenues. Along with he kept on responding to questions from beginners in real time.

Badar was able to convince non-bloggers that they can start earning handsome revenues by spending just an hour a day and with no up-front investment.

Afterwards, 20 years old blogger from Islamabad, Saad Hamid came up with his blog (Sizlopedia) story to impress the audience. He revealed that he is earning around $6,000 a month from a hobby that he started by just filling his leisure time, back in January 2007. He discussed about incentives, threats, hurdles and real essence of blogging which actually helped him reach this level.

After Saad Hamid, Maryam Nasim, a housewife from Lahore showcased her story of Pinkwool.com. She is earning money by freelancing activities while staying at home. Ladies from the crowd were amazed at most to see this mother of a kid earning by spending very little time on her online venture.

Haris Nadeem, a 17 years old blogger from Lahore, of SizzledCore.com was supposed to present his success story as well, but we had to miss him due to his ongoing exams.

As the meet-up went on, bloggers introduced themselves and got involved in a discussion that solved numerous queries for beginners and raised many issues for professional bloggers.

During discussion, it was concluded that content is the king. Beginners were encouraged to bring in original content to win the credibility and ultimately the revenues. Furthermore, it was discussed that bloggers, aiming Pakistani traffic, need reliable online advertising infrastructure to increase their earnings. In this regards it was emphasized that online marketing wings of Pakistani companies must consider this growing media in their advertisement campaigns.

I may not name all the bloggers I met there, but I want to name Ahmed Bilal of SoccerLens.com; we should be proud of this Islamabad based blogger who runs world’s largest soccer blog with average income of $6,000 a month.

At the end it was told that similar meet-ups are scheduled for Karachi and Islamabad as well.

We are sorry for not bringing the live coverage due to undesired reasons.

For More pictures of the event: Click Here