Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

I’m off to New York City tomorrow for a holiday. While there I was thinking of holding a meet-up for my readers, but I just got word that Ed Dale and his 30 day challenge people are meeting on Wednesday, so I’ve decided to head to that instead – and you’re invited!

If you want to meet me and say hello to Ed Dale and his crew too, we’re meeting on Wednesday night starting 7pm.

Full details are on the 30 Day Challenge blog.

Last night was the Toronto bloggers and blog readers meet-up organized between myself and John Chow.

I forced John, his readers and my readers to go to the Live Organic Food Bar in Toronto, which I realize is not everyone’s cup of tea (no meat). I was secretly curious to see what John would post on his blog about it because he always covers the food he eats when he goes out.

John wasn’t too harsh thankfully and enough people ordered food, so I think we pulled it off. Who knows, maybe I even converted some people to organic vegetarians or even raw foodists (not likely! – I’m not there yet myself).

You can watch John’s video of the event below and read his recap here -

I’d like to thank everyone who turned up. It was great as always to talk to so many like minded individuals all following the blogging path.

If you attended the event and want to keep up with anyone you met, don’t forget you can go to this Facebook event page and find a list of people who attended (or at least who RSVP’d).

A Common Thread

We talked about all kinds of topics but one thing stuck out in my mind after the event as the most common thread, something which people continued to ask me about throughout the night in some shape or form.

I have to blame Tim Ferriss for this, it’s his fault.

Everyone is dying to emulate the 4-Hour Workweek.

As testament to how much people don’t like their day job and desire travel and lifestyle freedom, I was asked how I manage to travel and blog and earn a good living running a business several times by different people. I think that has to be the greatest motivation for a lot of people to start an Internet business and one of the main reasons you read this blog.

To answer this question, last night I mentioned two factors -

Read the rest of this entry >>

I finally had a chance to organize the Toronto meet-up I’ve been promising so many people since I arrived here.

As a lucky coincidence, John Chow is also in town, and like we did with the Vancouver meet-up and his Dot Com Pho regular gatherings, we decided to combine meet-ups for T-dot too.

If you are in Toronto and like to hang out with me, John Chow and the other people and bloggers who attend, come along this Thursday night (August 21st) at 7PM, to the Live Organic Food Bar.

Full location details are at this Facebook event page -

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=24673968029

Please click the attend button on that page if you can make it so we know how many people are coming.

The location I’ve picked is a raw organic food restaurant (they have an amazing chocolate smoothie!). There are some cooked meals too, but everything is vegetarian, which might be scary for hardcore carnivores.

There is an Irish Pub down the road we are going to use in the event of rain or if too many people show up. We might just head there afterwards for those people who want to drink something harder. The pub is a 5 min walk – it’s called the “The Pour House” on 182 Dupont.

I hope to see a good crowd and I look forward to meeting many of my Toronto readers.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Australian Blogging Conference, which was a lot of fun. Instead of having speakers up on stage talking at you, it’s more like a tutorial where everyone can chime in with their stories and advice, led by one or several leaders who guide the conversation.

I sat in on Duncan Riley’s session after lunch, which was on how to improve your blog, although the conversation went all over the place covering different blogging related topics.

Then in my session with Des Walsh we talked about building traffic to blogs, which was a lot of fun too.

It was a good event, not super large, but any chance you get to sit in with a group of people who share an interest in blogging and just chat, is a fun day in my books!

Plans are for this event to become an annual thing and travel around the major cities and no doubt I’ll do my best to attend, timetable permitting of course.

Recommend Links

Here are some links I’ve been collecting for the past couple of weeks for your weekend reading. There’s a lot of “Yaro” in here, but I like to highlight people who highlight me to return the favor.

• Carl Ocab is a 14-year old kid from the Philippines, who runs a blog about making money online. He recently asked me for my “Best Blogging Tip Ever” for a series he is doing on his blog. For a 14 year old, Carl is doing a lot better than most bloggers in the niche he is covering, so don’t underestimate him because of his age.
• The Blogging Scholarship is up for grabs again. If you currently attend college and blog, are a USA citizen or resident then you qualify for a chance at $10,000 scholarship. Entries close October 6th.
• Mark Wielgus from the 45n5 site emailed me to let me know I made the Top 10 in their top 100 money making blogs list. The team at 45n5 are quite busy building all kinds of features, so it’s worth checking out their site.
• Closely following the 45n5 Top List, comes the Top 50 Make Money Online Blogs Ordered by RSS Readers thanks to Marc Eilbeck. I guess people really love these lists .
• Nicholas Carroll sent through a link to Law of the Blog – A Blogger’s Guide to Copyright, Defamation, Trademarks, and other online legal issues, which will help anyone concerned with the legal implications of what you say on your blog and what others say in comments to your blog.
• Matt from the Blogging Fingers blog has put together the Top 5 Blogging Success Stories: Exclusive Quotes including quotes from yours truly, John Chow, Andy Beard, Kumiko (cashquests) and John COW.
• Laura Milligan offers her 50 Practical Home Office Feng Shui Tips for all you home business folks.
• Qwizzy is a unique new service that lets you add a question and answer stream to your blog and other popular social media sites
• Courtney Tuttle was nice enough to include me on her list of Top 7 Internet Marketing Mentors You Can Trust. I like it that the lines between Internet marketing and blogging are blurring, since as you will see in this list, all the Internet marketing mentors are bloggers.
• Blog Mastermind students and long time blogging friends, Life Goggles, posted up 100 Ways To Save The Planet, which you can get in a PDF report.
• And to finish with, the mysterious John Cow is running a competition including prizes from Seth Godin, Aaron Wall and me, with a free three month entry into Blog Mastermind.

One of THE BEST Internet marketing events I have ever been to was the World Internet Summit Melbourne (you can read my recap here). For me the event was awesome not because of the content, but because of the caliber of people I met and spoke with.

In Melbourne I had lunch with Mike Filsaime and Tom Beal, met and then chatted with Mark Joyner, hung out with Daryl and Andrew Grant for the first time in person and just had a great time with all the other attendees and speakers.

The guys behind the event, Tom Hua and Brett McFall have teamed up with Mike Filsaime and his i5Gold team, Donna Fox and Paulie Sabol, to do a combined event, this time called the World Internet Main Event and it’s going to be held in San Francisco from September 13-16, 2007.

Needless to say I think this event is going to rock. Unfortunately I’m not going because I don’t want to travel all the way to the USA, but if you are in the area or can travel there and you have never been to an event like this, definitely go, it’s a blast.

In terms of content, you can expect the usual – 90% content from each speaker, followed by 10% sales pitch for the package the speaker offers. The content is targeted at relative beginners, but even if you are experienced, it’s worth going just to see how these guys and girls ply their craft. It’s quite incredible to watch the presentations even if you know most of the content – just beware the sugar rush!

Here’s the link to the information page which lists the speakers and details -

www.WorldInternetMainEvent.com

Bonus For Attendees – Butterfly Marketing

Here’s the best bit about this event – since Mike Filsaime is part of it, he’s giving a copy of Butterfly Marketing (the full digital-version script) to every single person who buys a ticket.

The cheapest way I know of to get Butterfly Marketing is $497 for the digital version, so if you were considering buying the package you may as well buy a ticket to the event and get the script and course for free!

You can check out details about the offer at the World Internet Main Event page.