Aqeel Zafar

Yesterday I went to Lahore Bloggers Meetup, organized by Badar Khushnood, Google’s country consultant, IEEE Student branch of LUMS and CIO Pakistan.

Event started (I was 10 mins late, not sure if I missed something) with Badar Khushnood’s introduction to blogging and how to earn money from it. Main points of his presentation were:

• Follow your passion
• Find your audience
• And earn money from it.

It was followed by success stories of 17 year old student Haris from Sizzledcore.com – told by Badar as Haris’ mother didn’t allow him to attend the meetup due to his exam next day – and Saad Hamid from Sizlopedia.com. Then came Maryam Nasim, a housewife earning from freelancing using her site PinkWool. Last hour was dedicated to Question and Answer session, which was pretty interesting as well as informative.

End results were, earning money from blogging takes lots of patience and hard work. Write original content, and follow your passion. If you work hard you will eventually start getting some results, but there is no shortcut. Most importantly, don’t write because you want to earn money, write because you love to.

In the end, I finally got to meet many people I already knew on web, some more thoroughly than others. It was great to finally meet them all.

This meetup is also covered (in more detail) by Sohaib Athar, UzEE, Imran Jafri and TechMynd (the most detailed roundup yet).

Aqeel General, Personal bloggers, google, lbm08, lums, meetup

Today, there was a small and very informal meetup at LUMS of bloggers and other IT related people with Mr. Rishi Jaitly, Google’s Policy Analyst and Government Affairs Manager for South Asia, and of course Badar Khushnood, Google’s Country Consultant for Pakistan.

I went there with Nabeel(my brother) and his friend Shahrukh, who have just started a new blog PoliticsPakistan, (more on that later). Other than us, there were around 7-10 other guys, mainly bloggers & entrepreneurs, though unfortunately I have forgotten most of their names.Discussion was mainly about Google’s future in Pakistan, what are the problems people are having with Google services here etc.

Question of the day was undoubtedly, when is Google going to open an office in Pakistan (or start hiring more people from here)? There wasn’t exactly a straight answer to that, though Mr. Rishi said that he does sense great opportunity and potential here, let’s see if anything good comes out of it.

I forgot to take pictures during the meetup, just took a few after refreshments with Rishi, which you can see below

Aqeel General google, meetup