Today I have been at the first day of the Internet marketing and Joint Venture bootcamp organized by Dan Stojadinovic in Tampa (www.hypefreebootcamp.com). On Sunday I will have my own presentation on Twitter, but I wanted to be amongst the attendees from the very first day because it is a fantastic opportunity to assess my Internet Marketing strategies and to meet people I will be able to do business with.
This is the second year in a row that I participate to the event and last year I created a strategic relationship with Mark Jackson, a leading investor and nation wide coach from Atlanta. By the way, Mark is leaving for Italy in a few weeks to meet my Italian partner Daniele Bogiatto and get introduced to a number of investors there.
Be your own voice.
So I can’t wait to see what will result from this edition of the JV bootcamp. For one thing today I followed a very interesting presentation by Gerald Rogers, an Orlando based real estate investor and Internet Marketer who has remembered to all of us that no matter what business we are in we are all in he same business, and that is marketing. Without proper marketing nothing moves and 60% of our time, as entrepreneurs should be devoted to marketing, leaving only 20% to the actual production and 20% to administration and operation.
As part of a project that I am, conducting with an important business partner I had to become proficient on personal branding. How do you promote yourself instead of you business? Personal branding is a kind of a lost art that is regaining ground every day with the development of social media sites and with the greater attention that customers now place on people as opposed to products.
In the last months I have met several people who were trying to develop their own job, they had been laid out by some other company or they simply wanted to add another stream of income to the one they already had. They all promoted themselves and their own expertise and were willing to pretty much do anything that could bring them business in their field of action.
It is fairly normal, at the beginning of a career, to test many avenues and several different customers until you find the main vein which is going to become your special field. For quite a while the new born entrepreneur or professional looks pretty much like anybody else: she is willing to perform work for anybody asking for it and she doesn’t really bother giving herself a precise positioning, a unique image. Read the rest of this entry »
Those of you who follow my blog regularly already know that I have just passed a test on motorcycle riding so to be able to ride legally in the US. I have been riding for a long time in Italy and had already a driver license there that allowed me to do it, but I had never gotten any formal training and despite my extensive experience I found out in the three days of the course that there were some very basic concepts that I didn’t know.
When you fixate on an obstacle in riding on a curve you will end right there! - courtesy of www.motorcyclebasics.com
Motorcycle riding is very similar to running a small business or any new business for that matter. It can be very fun and you’ll be able to enjoy every minute of it, but it is also challenging because you have much bigger and stronger guys out there that can simply crush you without even noticing it.
This is not the right way to ride your business! Mind what you are doing, stay focused!
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It becomes therefore a game of anticipating other people’s moves, of allowing yourself enough cushion to have the time and the space to get out from dangerous situations. Above everything else you must be nimble, you must react fast and be able to coordinate several actions simultaneously in a split of a second without even thinking about them. The coaches at the riding range called it “muscle memory” and it is basically repeating the same action over and over through exercise so that you can then execute it with speed.
I have been running my blog now for three months and I find it extremely satisfying that I have about two comments to every post that I make. This is an average, some posts have no comments, otehrs have maybe four or more. This gives me the idea that people are actually reading them and also points me somewhat in the direction of what people want to hear the most.
Looking at the most commented articles, I see that they carry some element in common: they are very personal and they tell some kind of story. From a pure traffic viewpoint, I seem to attract more attention with how-to essays, that is explanations on how you do things with a specif tool or site. But people on the other hand respond to something that is more familiar to them. Some aspect of life that they resonate with, inside.
Emotion is much more interesting than “logic” and when it gets to spending some minutes in front of a computer screen, I understand that people want to either be entertained or emotionally engaged. Only the “techies” that make a living out of technology care for the little details, the rest of us don’t.
So the tip I can give you today is to inject emotion into everything you write and say, into every video you shoot. Be personal, be real, be alive. The comments you get from your readers will guide you in the right direction
Sometimes your life can be affected greatly by something that happens very far away. With modern technology you can be virtually connected with all the world and your potential sphere of influence grows accordingly. Also I noticed that in life you tend to elect some key places as your safe points, the areas where you can return to and get support or simply friendship every time you need it.
Castello di Mazzè near Turin - courtesy luxuryproperty.com
They don’t need to be close to where you live and actually they can be quite far away. Maybe you don’t even realize that you have elected these special places as your “sanctuary”, namely the spot where you can return and rest, while feeling protected and “at home”. Maybe you haven’t been there for quite a while and you simply forgot about them or they are so far away an “unreachable” that you feel as almost they don’t exist anymore.
They could be the house where you were born and raised or they could be any other location. For me, after I left Italy and my original town and moved to the US about 15 months ago, there was no special place like that. I felt I had abandoned my home town forever and my life was going to bring me in new places and new adventures. The visa procedures also restrict my motions inside and outside of the US and so I concentrated in make myself more comfortable in the place where I am right now.
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