Hey Shouter,
Welcome to the day 2 of our journey to do something back for the blogging community. If you are new here, ShoutMeet is an initiative by ShoutMeLoud to encourage blogging in the country & help upcoming bloggers to get the right direction. You can read our day one journey here.
Day2/15 – started from Udaipur for Ahmedabad at 6.45 AM, got our Car tank full.
Before we reach Ahmedabad, we met Naga Rajan, who is a friend & a co-speaker at WordCamp Baroda in 2014. He gave a tour of his initiative to uplift the rural area of Himmatnagar. He gave a tour of his state of art Data Centre & I had a lovely time chatting on his great ideas with him. I was surprised with all the smart things he is doing to fight the corruption & utilizing the tech to ensure rural development happens without fail. I hope his initiative is replicated by other cities & it would make a lot of difference for the country.
Later on, we all moved to Ahmedabad chapter venue that was taken care by Jaydip Parikh. We reached just on time & got a warm welcome by energised bloggers of Ahmedabad.
For 2 hours, we all keep talking about blogging where many bloggers shared their journey & some of the tips like Guest blogging, content editing & publishing strategy.
All the ideas were coming from the experience & you can imagine the enthusiasm of bloggers by countless questions they asked in the whole session.
Like Jaipur chapter, we ended up the Ahmedabad chapter with a group photo.
Later on, few of us went to have lunch together which was again interesting, as never had an unlimited buffet at a Pizza outlet. (The Pizza Hub Prahladnagar.)
At 4.30 P.M, we started for Vadodara chapter via NE1. Jimit Bagadiya also accompanied us in our car for this chapter.
I always get excited to drive on this expressway (NE1), as this highway is pure bliss. Imagine 80Km of straight road where you can cruise at any speed. Anyhow, I didn’t go more than 140Km/hr as was very tired & feeling little lethargic due to lack of sleep. Finally, Jimit took over the driver seat & we reached the Vadodara destination at 6.30 P.M.
Thanks to Rahul Banker who organised this chapter into his office, & Pranay Patel took care of all the arrangements. Few bloggers were already waiting & we started as soon as we stepped in.
The start was little slow probably I was little tired but within half hour we picked the pace & started discussing various stuff related to Blogging, SEO. The most interesting part of this chapter was a long discussion on community building & many of them shared how they are doing it using Slack & few other tools to keep the community communication on.
One of them also suggested to develop a smartphone app for keeping the community close & bloggers can stay in touch with other bloggers in their city. Over the discussion, I realised that there are many missing pieces which is hampering the growth of individual bloggers in many cities. Mostly the lack of proper support & their ambition of making quick money. A lot went on to discussing how to fix it & I believe this discussion will carry on as we move to next chapter (i.e. Pune).
Finally after 3 hours of non-stop interaction, we all bid goodbye & we moved to enjoy the famous Gujarati thali. If you ever visit Gujarat, ensure that you have a Gujarat thali as your dinner, & it would be a meal of lifetime. Thanks to Pranay for hosting the dinner for us, and ShoutMeet team went to get much-needed rest.
Seems like rest was not in mind, as I wanted to upload today’s moment with everybody & finish today’s write-up. This is 1.07 A.M. & signing off for now! Will see you in the next post after Pune chapter.
Harsh
Hello Harsh, you are doing very good. Hope you’ll come to UP so that I could also attend these type of meets.
Thanks for sharing the insights.
i missed that event @harsh can u again do that i will arrange all things in Gujarat Surat
Aha, It was great Meetup. Many bloggers has shared their blogging journey. Most important thing I learned is to keep upto date with your writing, be enthusiastic, keep changing, success will come automatically.
Indeed, we had lunched lunch, and had gossip with IAS Naga Rajan as well.
Awaiting for the #shoutmeet in hyderabad ….
mee toooo Awaiting for the #shoutmeet in hyderabad
Hi Harsh,
It is really looking amazing. I am going to use this plugin on the post that I had written for the Jaipur shoutmeet. I loved that meet and hope you will come again here.
Thanks buddy for sharing this.
have a great evening.
🙂