Jan

Power of Local Mastermind Meetup Business Networking Groups

Filed Under (Relationship Marketing, Tips) by admin on 21-01-2010

I wanted to write a bit and add a new but related dimension to this blog.

So far it’s been about breaking news stories and software which can really help your marketing and grow your business as well as training articles from my own experiences and learnings.

Ever since the end of the 30 day challenge with Ed Dale back in the month of August I’ve headed up a local meet up group here in Austin, Texas.

Ed Dale and Dan Raine encouraged those going through the challenge to take up this sort of challenge within the overall challenge…namely heading up and participating in local in-person business networking mastermind groups.

So being the leader I am I decided to make a post in the forum and organize the local Austin Texas group.

There are six of us in the group who come on a regular basis. We started out once a week and have now cut back to once every other week.

As the most experienced marketer in the group with graduate-level skills it’s been a great eye-opener for me to see some of the newer people progress in their entrepreneurial journey.

One thing I particularly take notice of in the meetings are what kind of objections and hurdles they’re facing getting a business off the ground.

One of the biggest is lack of financing but probably even bigger is lack of time issue.

One big challenge presented is having some income now while building a business asset you wholly own for the future.

Building web assets you own is very key because it’s great to have the option to sell them or just collect a steady stream of revenue each month from your asset.

The big rub is it takes time to ramp up and build a business and what do you do in the interim to pay the bill’s?

One of the biggest things is providing service to other business and billing out for your time. This gets you free of your corporate job and allows you enough time to devote to billable hours as well as time left over for building your asset.

I’m going to be talking more about that in a later article series.

The big value of these Austin meet ups is collaborative idea generation, different perspectives, and the ability to partner up in link building campaign’s as well as help each other’s businesses in other ways since we all have a similar skill set.

Also, it helps to have a fresh set of eyes on any marketing pieces you’ve come up with like opt-in pages or sales letters.

When you write your own sales copy it’s easy to get attached to it and have the rose colored glasses on.

But having people who don’t know your market or your business take a look at it, see if first off they can immediately understand it, and whether it compels them to want to know more or to buy.

All of these things are very important as well as the potential to have a group project which is a group owned asset that can theoretically be built much faster than you can do on your own.

This happens because you can divide the labor out to very laser focused areas like content creation, link building, social media campaign traffic, and JV partnerships and guest blog posts.

Building any business including a web business is a very valuable asset.

But it’s also difficult and extremely time-consuming especially in the beginning when you’re starting from nothing and you have to build up that momentum until the snowball starts rolling down the mountain and reaches a critical mass of size and steam on its own where you can’t stop it even if you wanted to.

Having multiple people and basically multiplying your time is a great way to do so.

All the biggest financiers and wealthiest people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett used the time leverage of hiring other people in the business and partnering with other people to achieve the massive success they have.

And with tools like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect software recently being released you have more viral site building power and promotion at your fingertips than ever before.

You just need that little push your local group can give you.

I highly recommend you get a local group going through sites like meetup.com (fee based to be the group leader) or upcoming.yahoo.com (free service).

Even if you’re in a small town put it out there on the web and see what comes back as far as other people who would be interested. Drive a little ways to a central location if you have to because it’s very beneficial.

One idea I’m going to write about that came from my last Austin meet up was about how focus is easily distracted especially when you’re an entrepreneur and productivity severely suffers because of it. I’ll also give you some tips for how to maintain your focus.

Post your comments about any local meet up groups you’ve been a part of, success stories of networking groups, or even disaster stories and things to avoid for your business networking groups. I’ll look forward to our conversation.

Originally posted 2008-11-06 18:35:35. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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