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

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.

I arrived in Vancouver last week and thankfully with my nose, ears and throat functioning as they should, I could enjoy all the delights that Vancouver offered – and wow, did it deliver!

Balancing rocks at the beach on Stanley Park

Vancouver is an amazing city and by far my favorite destination on this trip so far. As I demonstrated in a recent video, I rented an inner city apartment on coal harbor, complete with Internet, cable TV, full sized kitchen, great views and close access to everything I could want from Vancouver.

Organic Food Paradise

I’m not the kind of guy to spend money on many frivolous things. I don’t drink and I’m not really into clothes or cars or gadgets (I’ve had the same laptop for over three years now – a good old trusty Asus), however there are two areas I will spend good money on with no regret – food and shelter…err, accommodation.

In Australia I shop organic as much as I can. New organic shops open up regularly in Brisbane, but nothing compares to the full blown grocery store called Capers in Vancouver – devoted entirely to organic produce.

Okay, these aren’t organic but they look tasty

I spent the early part of my first day in Vancouver walking around Capers with wide eyes, shopping for food. This turned out to be the beginning of a trend and I have to say with no hesitation – Vancouver is the best city for good healthy and tasty food I’ve ever been to.

Maybe it’s because of where I was staying (in the West End of Vancouver – strangely enough my favorite suburb in Brisbane is West End too), but I had a lot of trouble finding many overweight people, quite the contrast to Brisbane. Vancouver, the land of healthy eating and healthy living it seems!

One guilty pleasure for me is chocolate and again, Vancouver spoiled me for choice. Australia just doesn’t do dessert the way North America does, which is a good and bad thing.

My favorite place for chocolate in Vancouver is a boutique shop called Mink, where I am presently sitting typing this article (Vancouver has to be one of the best cities for Wi-Fi net access – even laundromats have it!). I just finished consuming a rich dark chocolate Fondue, with cake and fruit pieces. They also have the most amazing rich dark drinking chocolate here that frankly, is better than sex – honestly!

Nature’s Glory

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I’m experimenting again with these short video blog posts (vlogs). This time I even added a few callouts to the video, which was really cool (for me anyway).

Click play below to hear what I have to say about blog design in this 4 minute video.

I’m heading on a family road trip this week up to visit cousins at their respective universities north of Toronto with my mother and aunt.

I’ll be staying at Kingston to see one cousin at Queens university and then heading to Montreal to see another who studies at McGill.

During the travel time I hope to get some writing in (I’m not driving) and possibly some blogging from hotels too.

In the meantime here are some links you might care to review (speedlinking is all the range these days…).

Recommended Links

• Two blogs I’m really enjoying lately are from fellow “dot com moguls”, as John Chow calls us – guys making a living online. John Chow’s blog is quite a smorgasbord of topics. In between photographs of what John ate at his last night out at a restaurant in Vancouver you can catch all kinds of great tidbits and advice from a guy living the online entrepreneur dream.

  If you like my blog I expect you will definitely like John’s – he’s very prolific at the moment, he must be going through the blogging addict phase writing a ton of content each day to keep us entertained and educated. He also happens to turn good coin from his blog topping the $2700 a month mark in December 06 and regularly writes about how he does it.

• The other blog is from Tyler Cruz, who is no where near as prolific as John, but I feel a lot of similarities with this guy since he has just bought his first condo and makes money from forums. Read through his archives and you will get a very personal insight into how Tyler makes money online (he was recently part of a six figure deal on a domain name sale!).
• Wil Schroter and the team at GoBig Network released a report on small business funding. You can download the report in PDF format here – Small Business Funding Review
• Apparently I have a “Big and Beautiful” RSS button. You can see how other prominent blogger’s RSS buttons were rated in Nothing Ventured’s post What your RSS button says about you.
• I was meaning to tell you guys about this one many months ago when it changed price – one of the best and original books on selling online – Make Your Site SELL! 2002 – is now free.

  It was a $29.95 ebook produced by Ken Evoy and his team at SiteBuidIt but they have decided to make it free, presumably to use it as a solid lead generation product for their e-commerce hosting service.

  It’s a fantastic book that covers many of the core principles behind making money from websites, including Ken’s Content – Traffic – PREsell – Monetize formula, one of the foundations of Internet commerce. If you have never read this book now is a great chance to pick up a copy for free. My affiliate link points to the book, but rest assured it is free, I only get a commission if you decide to one day sign up to their ecommerce hosting service.

Enjoy everyone, and if are in Montreal leave me a comment and you never know I might just have a chance to come visit you, although my schedule is a bit tight and I plan to spend most of the time indoors because winter scares me .