Recommended Links and I’m off to Florida

I’m up early tomorrow on a Westjet plane to Florida with my mum as we both head to the Rich Schefren mid-program seminar. Rich is broadcasting his free seminar from this event on Saturday, so you never know, you might see the back of my head in the audience - look for the big pile of curly hair.

Word on the street says Rich might actually start selling some of the seats in his coaching program this weekend, even though the big launch date is later this month. I guess there might be a little bit of built-up demand :). Remember if you want in, you have to be on his launch list.

Here are some cool links for today:

• Betsy Flanagan sent me a note about here new entrepreneur podcast, The Startup Studio. Normally I’m apprehensive about people coming out of the blue and asking me to check out their site, but in this case I did and I’m impressed - Betsy’s podcast is polished, her voice is smooth and clear, and so far she’s lined up some fairly heavyweight guests.

  I just listened to the latest episode with Patemm founder Grace Welch. Grace’s story is of a simple work-at-home-mom business that came up with a new diaper bag design using a circle layout, which surprisingly had never been done before. Parenting magazines went nuts over it, she receives tons of press including some Oprah time (!), and thus found herself in charge of a million dollar home business. Nice

• Nick Rice recently published a great article at SmallBusinessBranding.com - 9 Branding Tips For Small Businesses. Danielle also had some entertaining stories to tell in her article - Want To Make Your Brand Shout Out From The Crowd?.

  We are about to do a new call for authors at Small Business Branding, so if you want some exposure on a popular small business blog, this might be just the ticket you are looking for. Stay tuned next week for the announcement calling for applicants.

• The Brisbane blogging conference has been postponed until August, which I still hope to attend. In the meantime I’ll have to organize a few more Brisbane entrepreneur meetups and perhaps add Brisbane bloggers to the mix as well.
• Jon has done some rough calculations on how much money he is investing to launch his start-up blog network, Home Turf Media. It’s pretty scary when you look at it that way. You might want to go read my series on blogging as a sustainable business model before you follow in the footsteps of Jon. Of course I’m glad Jon is doing it, otherwise we wouldn’t have the Brisbane is Home blog.