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Last week I headed out to a bunch of industry specific social gatherings in Toronto that all happened to fall on the same week. I attended the monthly Third Tuesday social media meetup, the Mesh/B5 blogger meetup and the second Toronto Mastermind group meeting, which was organized by the people from in and around Toronto who are all in Rich Schefren’s Internet business coaching program.

All the events were good fun and it was fantastic to meet so many bloggers, podcasters, Internet business owners and folk who work and play online in similar ways to myself.

At the Third Tuesday meetup Shel Holtz gave a spiel about podcasting and given the room was full of PR related professionals and podcasters it was a captive audience. It was interesting to hear Shel’s speech and the questions from the audience since the group were clearly focused on the PR industry and how podcasting is used as a promotional tool, which is slightly different to the Internet marketing mindset I generally see things in.

At the mesh meetup on Wednesday night I hung around Darren Rowse trying to keep the Australians in the room in one place so we didn’t get lost, which turned out to be an interesting place to stay as different people came up asking Darren - “Are you Darren Rowse?” - obviously recognising the Problogger. When I introduced myself to people they usually had trouble pronouncing my name (as usual) and most were not quite as well aware of my blogging legacy as Darren’s. There were a few who knew “Yaro” though and it always blows me away to meet people in person who know my blogs and work online.

A big hello to Leesa Barnes, Vince Chan (the (in)famous amblogger), Tony Hung (the first real life doctor blogger I have ever met, strangely enough blogging about Web 2.0 and nothing medical), Gary Grant (another blog network owner) and of course the rest of the b5 media crew in attendance, Jeremy Wright (who I had dinner with when I first arrived in Toronto) and Mark Evans.

On Friday I attended the second Toronto mastermind meeting with my fellow Rich Schefren coaching victims. This group is entirely self-motivated and came about via the forums available to Rich Schefren’s clients. There are geographic mastermind groups all over the world that came about through Rich’s coaching. We have a good group going at the moment communicating with teleconferences and the near-monthly get togethers.

The spread of businesses is quite interesting, although we are mostly focusing on the online elements of our enterprises. When we meet we generally discuss a range of topics and also take turns in a “hot seat” to get feedback and suggestions on specific problems we are facing. I find the input from other business owners helpful in reducing the clutter in my head when it comes to decision making and there are always new ideas sparked in our meetings. I think everyone involved finds the gatherings useful and I would recommend masterminding if you get a chance.

Hugh MacLeod Business Cards

During all these social events the fact that I don’t have a business card became apparent as I was given cards from other people plenty of times and asked for my card a couple of times too. I am certainly committing a networking 101 faux-paux by not coming prepared with my card so I decided I better get something to give to people.

Some of the cool people had business cards with Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid.com) artwork. I stumbled across Hugh’s blog on the weekend again while reading my feeds and happened across the link to the site where you can buy the business cards from and went and ordered some with I think a very appropriate piece of artwork to use as my business card for the time being.

You can see it here.

Now I’m one of the “cool” people too and have something to give out at my next social gathering. Beware!

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Last month I purchased a new bed here in Toronto from Sleep Country, a retailer that was recommended to me by my family. Sleep Country has a reputation for good service and as my aunt told me - “They even assemble the bed for you!” - which is nice.

I’ve just received a little note in the mail, hand written by the salesperson who served me, with a postage paid response card attached to provide feedback. The card asks me to rank certain aspects of my buying experience with Sleep Country and provides a space for comments.

No doubt Sleep Country use the responses they get to further enhance their services and better meet the needs of customers, and based on the word of mouth I received about their company they are doing customer service very well.

What are you doing to follow-up post purchase with your customers?

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I’m reading more and more about the not-for-profit business sector lately and I suspect at some point down the track that may be where I put the greater part of my business energy towards.

Jon from Art of Money posted a great write up about Micro Lending and the Decline of Poverty in Bangladesh after watching an interview with upcoming nobel peace prize recipient, Muhammad Yunus.

Mr Yunus set-up a bank called Grameen which gives out micro loans to the poor. His bank enjoys a 98% repayment rate and distributes most of the loans to women since women have proven to be much more reliable and responsible users of the funds.

Go and read Jon’s write up and I think you will be impressed by this story of one man’s ingenuity to help the world’s poor.

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As you can tell if you click the forums link on this site the forum has been down for a day now and was down recently before that. The problem has been hackers. Once the second hack was done I decided that I may as well take this opportunity to switch the forum from the Invision Board system to the vBulletin forum system, which I have been planning to do eventually anyway.

The problem is I need to outsource the conversion and installation to bring across all the current messages and member accounts into the new vbulletin system, since I cannot do it. Hence I’m making this request for help.

If you are a vbulletin expert or know of one who would be capable of doing the conversion (I can provide a mysql dump of the invision forum data before it was hacked) please contact me. I am willing to pay for this work or do a contra exchange of some sort.

Please use my contact site to contact me - ReplytoYaro.com

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Download the MP3 [ 36 Minutes - 8 MB]

It’s been a few months since the last show but I have been itching to do a podcast and Mike Filsaime’s report, The Death of Internet Marketing (aff), stirred a lot of thoughts in my mind, which I decided to brain-dump into a solo podcast episode for all to enjoy.

A warning - this is a serious ramble and I cover a lot of topics (see the show notes below for details) but it’s very current and I suspect if you are at all interested in Internet marketing or online business, as an industry and as a participant, you will enjoy this podcast.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Show Notes

• I review many of the things discussed in the Death of Internet Marketing report by Mike Filsaime
• I mention Butterfly Marketing several times
• Rich Schefren and his reports, The Internet Business Manifesto, The Missing Chapter and Final Chapter all get a mention.
• My upcoming site, Blog Traffic School, is in there too.
• I talk about my fellow bloggers, Steve Pavlina and Brian Clark.
• Social media is included, with sites like Technorati, Del.icio.us, Digg and YouTube featuring in comparison to old-school counterparts like Ebaumsworld.
• It’s also worth mentioning Product Launch Formula (aff) since much of the discussion centers around the state of Internet marketing and the product launch phenomenon.

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