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

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!

I had dinner with Jeremy Wright, head honcho of the b5media blog network last week since we both happen to be in Toronto at the moment. Jeremy was in town on business and now the whole world knows what that business was about -

b5media Inc. have raised US$2 Million in venture funding to help grow the business into the future. That’s a fairly big stamp of approval for the blog network and (yet again) demonstrates the possibilities of blog networks as a successful Internet business model.

Congratulations to Darren, Duncan, Jeremy, Shai and the rest involved with b5.