Every time a contest for free passes or tickets come up and you need to write about why you want to have your hands on that free pass, you always start out with why you would want to go. I’m going to be a little different here, and begin with why I did not want to be at the SEMCon Philippines on September 9-10, 2008 at The Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental.

For simplicity’s sake, here’s the list of why I, at first, did not want to go to the SEMCon 2008.

  • I probably don’t belong. I’m a small-time blogger and a relative SEO beginner, and seminars like SEMCon 2008 seem to be directed towards IT Company CEO’s, experienced probloggers, and long-time SEO addicts as its participants.

  • It’s expensive. The conference’s fee is P9,500. I can earn that through Adsense, but it will take me some time to do so.

  • I haven’t attended any blogging gig before. My mother has not fully accepted my new “work” as website publisher and writer, and I’m not sure I have either. Because of this, there were Bloggers EB’s left and right which I could have attended this year but in the last minute decided not to.

There. Big reasons why I immediately did not consider attending the SEMCon 2008 even after hearing of it at Yugatech. It was a pleasant surprise then that Yuga announced that he has three extra passes, and is willing to give them for free to three lucky people. Now that changes everything.

Without much adieu, these are my reasons for wanting to be one of those lucky three.

  • I’m free on September 9-10, 2008. I don’t have full time work and so I can definitely make it on the SEMCon days wihout sacrficing much.

  • I’m really interested in the Topics, and they would greatly help me in my blogging work. PPC Optimization, Applied Web Analytics, Search Marketing, Viral Video Marketing, Ad Optimization, Arbitrage, Affiliate Marketing… —the whole shebang! I’ll surely be a different man after hearing all of the talks.

  • The speakers. Yuga will be there, as well as Marc Macalua, Mike Villar, executives from Yahoo!, Smart Communications, Syndeo::Media, Netbooster Asia, etc. There’s nothing like hearing it straight from the experts-slash-celebrities. And you get to meet them personally.

  • SEO is (already) my life. Other bloggers might not know me, but blogging and SEO has been my life for the past year now, and will probably be for years to come. I resigned from a well-paying programming work July of last year, tired of the monotony of it. I looked for my options in the Internet, was able to find a mentor in Yuga, tried my hand on blogging, and the rest is history. Reminiscing of my working days, I can only hope I found blogging early on, right after graduation (hell, even in College). Now my life is a mess of reading SEO books, doing Wordpress plug-in installations, endless theme customizations, keyword hunting, keyword optimizations, article publishing, reading some more on SEO, drafting new articles, and making Youtube videos for posting on our blog. As I’ve said it’s a mess right now, but even so, I’m happy I dragged myself into it. I’m thinking the SEMCon will at least help me straighten some of those things out.

  • I will write about it. Knowledge obtained is only as good as knowledge shared, this I learned from the pillars of the blogging community. I’m a handy notes-taker and a very easy-learner, and everything I will learn in SEMCon I will write here in this blog. I believe other bloggers will benefit from this, and it will also serve as my little journal for the two-day event.

With Yuga’s invitation for a free pass, I no longer have a reason to believe that the SEMCon 2008 is just for IT Company executives, Search Industry experts, and old probloggers (hehe). The mere invite does just that, and the free pass that goes along with it definitely takes care of my other reasons. I hope I get chosen because it will help me in my new career, a career so unique you get to discover a new world almost every other day (just yesterday I was making plans for a Do-It-Yourself niche’d website, after stumbing on a $14 Camera Stabilizer which I tried to make and got to work).

Choose me. Why? You don’t have a reason not to.

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If you have the money and would like to attend the conference, you can register here.

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