You Should Have Gone to Wordpress Camp Vancouver

Kulpreet Singh giving us the rundown on creating catalogue or e-commerce sites using WordPress. Photo by John Biehler.

...or you're glad you did.

The inaugural WordCamp Vancouver was inspiring and fun. Seven people spoke on a good variety of topics including writing better content, using WordPress as a platform for developing websites, and monetizing a blog.

Yesterday evening I found myself sitting on the hardwood floor of a room packed with bloggers. Some of them were of the laptop-wielding, iPhone-using variety and others were less technically inclined but still drawn to the popular outlet for getting some writing out of your system.

We were there for WordCamp, the first WordPress Camp in Vancouver. The show was put on by Tazzu and Rastin Mehr and featured eight seven* great speakers covering both high-level ideas and highly-technical topics.

Writing Better Content

Probably my favourite talk was from Monica Hamburg who spoke to writing better blog posts. Hopefully you'll see the effects of that here. (-;

Some quick points:

• Infuse your writing with personality and opinions.
• Make your content scannable. "The web is visual." So use short paragraphs and emphasized text
• Writing a long article? Break it into separate posts so it's easier to absorb and your readers are waiting for the conclusion of the last "to be continued..."
• Pictures!

Making Money from a Blog

Another interesting talk was John Chow's "How to Make Money Using a WordPress Blog." The numbers pouring into this guy's bank account from direct advertising, pay-per-click advertising, referrals, and sponsored content are obscene. We're talking $30K per month obscene. You visit his website, he makes eleven cents. However, most of his income is from advertisers subscribing ad placements anywhere from $250 per month to $4000. Obscene.

As you might expect, the issue of polluting the web and the morality of making a living blogging did come up. Some one in the audience commented, "making money isn't evil but you have to be evil to make money."

All in All...

I have to say I really enjoyed the entire event: the talks, the networking, and the free beer from Automattic! So big thanks again to the organizers**.

*One of the speakers bailed so we missed what could have been an interesting talk on typography.

**I spoke to one of them after the show and they can see from the attendance that they've hit a great niche so we can look forward to more events.

P.S. Check out the Thrind website, implemented in WordPress. Not the most usable theme, but definitely interesting.