Derek Semmler dot com - money, motorcycles and cars (with a little bit of everything else)

Reaching your goals requires sacrifice. The specifics of what you need to sacrifice will depend on a variety of factors but very few goals are achieved without some degree of sacrifice.

This year I have set a goal to attend my very first blogging related conference.

While it might not seem like a goal that is difficult to achieve, there are a variety of factors that can make it difficult. Two factors that can impact the goal of attending a conference are time and money.

With limited vacation time at my day job and two weeks of time already planned with my family, that doesn’t leave many days to use for attending conferences. From a financial standpoint, I’ve done my best to keep expenses low but obviously attending a conference will come at a cost - often a very steep cost.

These factors are not enough to prevent me from achieving my goal, although they are making me cautious about selecting a conference to attend.

The good news is that there is certainly no shortage of conferences related to blogging and making money online.

However, not all conferences are created equally.

Clearly one advantage of attending a conference is to network with like-minded people and begin relationships that have the potential to grow into a special friendship. As important as the networking aspect of a conference may be, ultimately you want the conference itself to provide a great deal of value as well.

With the cost of many conferences running in the neighborhood of $1000.00 or more, one needs to be somewhat selective while operating on a budget. The concern is in picking the wrong conference to attend and all you end up with is an extremely expensive name badge and not much else of value.

As I continue to review the calendar of conferences and look for the one that will pop my conference cherry, I would like to solicit some feedback from all of you.

Have you attended a blogging conference?

If you have attended a conference, please share your feedback on which conference you attended and whether you felt it was worth the cost of admission, taking into account all aspects such as networking and the actual presentations.

Please be sure to also comment if you have plans of attending a specific conference this year. It would be great if I can reach my goal of attending my first conference and have a chance to meet up with some of you as well.