Over the weekend, I attended a small event of local online marketers. Everything was organized via the Warrior Forum online message board. Thanks to Stacie Bennett for taking charge of that.
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating here... Real connections happen offline.
The people I work with the most (and make the most money with) are the people I've met offline.
Why?
1. It's easy to fake it online. - Anybody can put up a web page. Anybody can post income shots. Anybody can stand in front of a nice car or fancy house and take a photo to try to impress folks. When you deal with people in person, you'll get a better feel for who they are and what they're doing.
2. It's more work to do something offline. - It takes more effort to get in your car and go to a live meeting than it does to post to a message board. If you're looking for people to do business with, don't you prefer somebody who is going to go through some effort to make things happen?
3. This is a people business. - Sure, it's about web pages, and autoresponders, and other "tools" needed to do certain tasks, but behind all of that stuff is a bunch of people.
Setting up a meeting is easy to do. Simply go to your favorite message board, let people know where you are, and start getting connected with them. Set a date, find a convenient hotel to meet at, and hold your meeting.
As this was the first meeting, we didn't really set an agenda or common goal, but that is something that I would suggest. Certainly, everybody will want to (and should) meet everybody else, but my experience with having done several of these, is that people will walk away with a better experience, and be more likely to attend future events, if they can take away something which will help make their business goals happen.
Common goals, which might work for your meeting, include:
- How to get more web traffic.
- How to get more people to your mailing list.
- How to get more money out of your current product.
Then go around the room and have everybody give a suggestion of something that is working for them. For example, if you're talking about how to get more web traffic, I'd say something like...
"Online video has worked great for me lately. The videos I am posting are in Google within 24 hours and Traffic Geyser has made it easy for me to submit to about 30 video sharing sites within minutes."
Then I'd talk about how I do everything, give specifics on how I create videos, answer questions, etc.
Then the next guy in line would talk about what he's doing for traffic and the process would repeat itself. When everybody finished, each participant would have a list of several traffic generation (or whatever the topic was) ideas to take home and implement.
This is one way to do it. If you have others, feel free to comment below...
In business, you can do a lot on your own, but it certainly helps if you know people. Even if you're not looking to do "joint venture" deals, a good network of people is great for brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of.
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