November 27th, 2008 – 7:12 am

Happy Thanksgiving!

As usual, I got an early start today. Marcia and Buddy the “Wonder Dog” are both still snoozin’, so I figured I’d seize the opportunity and update this blog.

Right now the big focus is the FAST180’s new sponsor, iLearningGlobal. At the recent BNI Conference in Long Beach, CA, Dr. Misner announced a new partnership between the Misner Charitable Foundation and iLG.

Makes sense. The mission of the Misner Foundation is to empower Children’s Education and iLG is perfectly positioned to be the “Future of Learning.” Good fit? You bet.

Bottom line: Dr. Misner’s partnership with iLG is already generating much needed funds to continue the Misner Foundation’s good work. Namely, helping build schools and granting scholarships to students in need.

To paraphrase the iLG website, iLearningGlobal brings the absolute best in personal development learning, with cutting edge technology to you 24/7.

Today’s top specialists, including Dr. Ivan Misner, are coming together as the premier faculty of thought leaders in the field of personal development and business coaching, offering their secrets and expertise through video, audio and e-book libraries in full screen, hi-definition quality.

I’ve been checking out the various programs on iLG and they are great!

Anyway, not only is iLG on the right side of technology, bringing together a state-of-the-art learning experience via the internet, its business model taps into the huge, and growing, trend toward networking marketing.

By aligning the Misner Foundation with iLearningGlobal, anyone who makes an investment of $79/month in their own personal development and business education thru the Misner Foundation's iLG website, will be directly contributing to this very worthy cause.

And because it is a network marketing business model, anyone who finds themselves telling other people about iLG’s incredible value can generate some extra income too! Personally, I think that type of cash incentive is really cool.

Either way, the value of the material, combined with the state-of-the-art online experience, is much more than the monthly fee of $79 to someone who understands the value of ongoing personal development. Compared to the costs of seminars or CD audio books, the monthly investment is a bargain. And if people want to generate some extra cash flow, great. If not, the product stands on its own!

So that brings us to the FAST180. Always looking for opportunity, we too have joined forces with iLG, and everyone here at the Anytime/Anywhere Studio are both proud and excited to have iLG as our first official sponsor!

Like I said, iLG has been at the top of the list over the past several days, but as always, there’s lots of other stuff goin’ on.

One of the current big ticket items include the next two FAST180 webcasts which will continue our focus on how to use these new-fangled social networking websites like LinkedIn, Meetup, MySpace, E-Cadamy and FaceBook. Heard of these websites but don't know what the heck they are? These webcasts are for you!    

It’s no news that the current economy has most of us scrambling, a few months, or less, away from real financial pain – missing mortgage payments and trying to put food on the table. For a lot of folks, it just ain’t pretty right now.

Sure some will sink into emotional depression and other counter productive states, but I choose to focus on opportunity and solutions. And of course, I’m not alone. There are millions of people with a will to survive and a drive to succeed, who are going online in search of new opportunities and their slice of the online economy. These are the people we want to be networking with on the FAST180.

OK great. We know our target market. But here’s the funny part. Our target market is a group who wants to get into all this online networking, but the operative words is “wants.” They know they should be doing it, they just don’t know how. And that’s where we come in.

Nate and I are really just now learning about all this stuff ourselves. We want you to learn as we do, and that's why we are so excited about the next few weeks.

Next week’s webcast, featuring Beth Anderson of OrgTrack.com, serves up LinkedIn.com. We will focus on the very first step of setting up an account and user profile. And that's it. This will be a nuts and bolts, A-B-C instruction on getting started.

Subsequent webcasts will be an ongoing, one step at a time series on how to create positive results in our businesses, and our lives, through online and face-to-face networking.

Bottom line: We understand that our FAST180 community, at least most of us, don’t know how to use LinkedIn.com, but most of us would like to. And that’s what we will all learn together next time, when our adventure in networking continues…

 

November. 20, 2008 - 4:42am

We got home from the BNI Int’l Conference late Sunday night and it’s been extra hectic since we got back.

The conference itself was awesome! Met so many great people from around the world and connected with several who I am sure I will be networking with for many years to come...

I have my BNI meeting this morning and need to start getting ready, but I wanted to post a quick Blog update to say thank-you to everyone who has been supporting the FAST180 Webcasts!

Our community of listeners and special guests continues to grow and Nate and I are very excited about providing value and useful information to help BNI people from around the world do BNI better.

Finally, BNI’s new Strategic Alliance with ILearningGlobal marks the beginning of a new era! Never before has so much high quality, premium Personal Development and Business Coaching material been available in one place for such an affordable cost.

We are also very happy to announce that “ILG” is the first official sponsor of the FAST180 Webcasts.

There are tons of great things going on right now and unfortunately, I do not have time at the moment to go into detail… I guess that means you’ll have to check back soon to get the latest news when our adventure in networking continues…

 

November 9th, 2008 – 7:16 am

We are busy getting ready for the BNI Conference next week in Long Beach, California. Lots of exciting stuff on the schedule and Marcia and I are psyched for the road trip!

Change is everywhere, from our new President-elect, Barak Obama to the millions, that’s right millions of people scrambling to build their business with online networking. It’s exploding… LinkedIn is adding one new profile a second. I repeat: one new person every second! Wow…

And I’m part of that demographic. Let’s face it, the business environment right now is challenging. Going online to build the business seems like the right response in the current market.

So I got my toes wet dabbling with online networking. First was MySpace. I posted a basic profile and ran a search with “Business Network BNI” as the keyword. After sifting through apx. 150 matches, many of which were for a band I never heard of called “BNI,” I came up with 60 or so bona fide BNI people to contact.

The results were disappointing. At least from a numbers standpoint. Got three responses. Good news? Two were quality contacts. One in particular is from a guy named Max who has provided invaluable help with some technical website issues that I have been able to fix with his help!

While not too effective for BNI networking, at least not yet, MySpace is a terrific vehicle for the other side of my networking world, the music biz.

I took a five year break from real estate back in ’98 to 2002, and I pursued my passion for music and writing. That whole deal is a long story I will tell some other time, right now the point I want to make is that a few of my old friends from the music biz tracked me down almost instantly to say hello.

You may not realize this, but independent musicians have been at the forefront of online networking and marketing from way back to the beginning of cyberspace. And it appears that MySpace has a very healthy music biz community.

This is very exciting for me on a couple of levels. Number one: I want to bring together the wit and wisdom of online networking from both communities, music biz and BNI networkers, to help each group learn from the other so we can all grow our businesses.

Number two: I am co-author of a new book, “Relix, From the Beginning,” featuring interviews, photos, art work and feature articles from Relix magazine’s first 25 years of rock and roll journalism. The book is being published by BackBeat Books of the Hal Leonard Publishing group and is scheduled to launch sometime in mid ’09.

Obviously, my co-authors Toni Brown (longtime Relix editor and publisher) and Ed Munson (graphic artist) have a vested interest in selling as many books as we can, and it would make sense that networking online will be a big part of that program.

So I am learning as I go. The focus at the moment is building the FAST180 webcasts with its emphasis on business networking and serving the greater BNI community around the world.

That brings me back to LinkedIn. For business networking LinkedIn appears to be a far superior choice as compared to MySpace. Gone are the profiles of gun toting, Rambo-style weirdoes and thinly veiled, scantily dressed hooker come-ons, which although entertaining, are not the target market of choice for the particular networking adventure I am exploring!

Bottom line: LinkedIn rocks! I found over 50 groups of various BNI enclaves from around the country and the world, including a biggy, which has over 1,000 members.

The group is run by Frank De Raffele Jr., a BNI Executive Director from the Hudson Valley area of New York, and world class business trainer and keynote speaker. Frank also broadcasts a syndicated radio show on Monday’s from 5pm to 6pm Pacific Time (www.eeradioshow.com)

So anyway, instead of cutting and pasting 60 or so individual emails like I did on MySpace because I didn’t find a big BNI ‘Group’ there, I posted one announcement to the BNI group on LinkedIn to introduce myself, along with details on the webcasts, and got four responses and over 20 hits on the website. Not huge, but much better statistically.

I am planning to send one post a week to the group announcing “This week’s topic” and a link to the archive from last week. As people send comments, I am responding, thanking them for joining us, and then asking if they would be interested in helping promote the webcasts by being a “Fast180 Bragging Buddy.” So far we are getting a 100% success rate!

I believe that expanding our network online, combined with the time tested truths of word-of-mouth referrals, is the only road to long term success for most business people in today’s global economy. And it is our intent to demonstrate that process with the success of this project!

Our guest on Wednesday is “Coach” Troy Henson, a very successful Business Coach who will be joining Nate and myself on location in Long Beach, California, for a preview of BNI’s 2008 International Conference. Please try to join us on the webcast, as our adventure in networking continues…