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Why is community important to your success?

Having a community is like having the ultimate support group. Rarely do any of us go through life without the help of others. Building a community around you is vital to increasing your ROI and success with each new endeavor.

What do I mean by building a community? I mean giving your time, talent or treasure to help others. The secret to success is giving. The more you give the more successful you’ll become, I guarantee it. Now that we are approaching the Holiday Season, charity and giving are in the air and almost become second nature to most. This is the same feeling and approach you should have with building your community.

Going out of your way to help another person with an idea, link, promotion or an extra hand will eventually fill your community cup to overflowing. This can’t be faked. People know when you do something out of sincerity versus trying to gain something from them. Take the time out of each day to do something for someone else and see what happens. Pretty soon you’ll notice that people will be doing the same for you.

For example, a friend of mine just released a band new Beer Review Blog (bigbeerblog.com). The site barely has a half-dozen posts, but it is already racking up a dozen or so comments per post. Not bad for a band new site. The thing to notice here is the fact that Allyn has built/joined a community of like-minded individuals online. This has made the launch of his new site a success very quickly. A community can help your reach your goals much quicker.

Another example with community that I love is the ability to trade/barter with people you know. When starting a new business the best thing you can do is keep your cost down. I have had to worry about this with the launch of my new hotel booking site (whosgotroom.com). I was able to build the majority of the site in its current form for under a grand. This was only possible because of the community relationships I had built.

For all of these reasons I decided this week to set up a Facebook Fan Page called Friends of Griz and Vic. The community that has sprung up around these two Internet Marketers has been amazing. They have had tons of positive impact on many people’s lives. I for one quit my job and made a successful living practicing what these two preached.

I set up the Friends of Griz and Vic page to help others find each other and support each other for all of their latest needs or projects. The table is open for any ideas on better things we can do to enable one another in our own pursuits. Obviously, I don’t expect all of you to know who Griz or Vic are, but if you want to join a pretty awesome community online, here’s your chance.

So come, and build a community around yourself and give back to others. All it takes is a little time.

Today is the first day of The AdSpace Contest, and I’m proud to announce that I am one of 10 co-hosts.

The idea is simple and easy: Get as many entries as you can (very easy to do) over the next 30 days. The more entries you get, the better chance you have of winning! At the end of the 30 days, we’ll announce the winner.

The prize?

A 125×125 pixel ad spot (above the fold) on at least TEN DIFFERENT BLOGS that will run for one month. That’s at least a $100 value!

Who else is co-hosting?

• Geek Mom Mashup
• Vrtualme
• Jamaipanese
• Best of Stupid
• AxioBlog
• The Big Bald Blog
• Jason Boom
• Unconventional Marketing Blog
• Offended Blogger
• GorillaSushi

How do you enter to win?

1 Entry – Subscribe to any one of the blogs above via email.

10 Entries – Write a post about the contest (must include links to all 10 hosts OR use our suggested text)

25 Entries – Offer up an ad spot on your own blog for one month as part of the prize package (links will be listed above)

Simply put, you could subscribe to all 10 blogs, write a post and offer up your own ad spot for a grand total of 45 entries! Be sure to tell us in the comments below when and how you’ve entered to ensure that your entries get counted.

Good Luck!

Welcome to TEABERRY Fargo! As some of you know, I write to you primarily from Fargo, North Dakota, and like to share some marketing ideas I can easily take pictures of. This brings us back to TEABERRY in downtown Fargo.

If you aren’t familiar with Fargo, during the winter it gets very VERY cool here. As you would expect, coffee is quite the staple drink for about 6 months of the year out of the necessity of staying warm. What Fargo doesn’t have is a lot of varieties of tea outside of Starbucks or Dunn Bros. Some astute people felt that not everyone likes coffee but still like to share in the experience of those delirious hot and cold beverages, so they created TEABERRY.

TEABERRY is owned and operated by a man named Trung. He was quite busy when I stopped by so I only got a few words (that’s a good sign for a new business). By my estimate, they have about 40+ different flavors of tea and hundreds of possible combination of different flavors by adding jelly (basically a jelly bean added for a different flavor) or pearls (like a taffy that adds a little kick of sugar). My favorite tea so far has been the Aloe Vera. You can taste the chunks of aloe along with some amazing bursts of other fruit flavors such as strawberries, orange and lemon. It is quite the combination. I also hear they do serve one type of Vietnamese coffee that is super strong and dark as night. I will have to try it sometime.

The beauty of the whole TEABERRY idea is the simplicity of the idea and providing something to people that doesn’t currently exist. What a concept! Never forget that it is OK to be the only one in town, or in your niche that is doing what you are doing. When you are the only one around, people will naturally refer others to you. A while back I was looking to have some engraving work done on something other than jewelry and ended up at a very nice trophy shop at the suggestion of the jeweler. It worked out very well for me and I am pretty sure there can only be 1-2 of these in town to begin with.

Cheers!

Whats new at the Unconventional Marketing Blog?

Well last week I did a featured series for a blogger appreciation week, where I made mention of those who wanted to be recognized. I believe I got everyone. If you slipped through, send me a message and I will make up for it. Here are the posts:

• AlmostFit.com takes the stage
• The Big Bald Blog, a Big Pappa creation
• The MLM’s best friend, John Leonard
• Four blogs worth checking out featuring…
  • That’s Great PR
  • Down On Our Luck
  • It Might Be Love
  • The Blue Workhors

Overall I feel it went very well and I really enjoyed talking and sharing some of my reader’s blogs with the rest of my readers. From time to time I really like to give back and make a mention the best I can for those who help support my blog. I wish I could shower you with lavish prizes and tons of cash but not quite yet .

Guest Posters

I have offered up guest posting in the past and have not received much attention until out of the blue Shaun Connell stepped up to the plate and shared his thoughts on Google Adsense. I would like to thank Shaun and welcome him to guest post anytime.

Also, you might have noticed a new guest poster page at the top of the blog. To encourage some more guest posting and share a little more about those who do guest posts, I created a page to show off a mug shot and brief bio for all to see. Shaun is lonely on that page and is looking for some more company. If you are interested, feel free to use the contact page to let me know of your interest to join Shaun.

Goals

I am a big fan of goals for both this blog and my personal life, and this month was a great month for goals on this blog.

Here were my goals:

Page Views : 70,000
Alexa: under 125,000
Technorati Rank: 30,000
Technorati Authority: 200
RSS Subscribers : 250

Here is what I got:

Page Views : 106,953 Unique Visits 53,000
Alexa: under 122,000
Technorati Rank: 26,138
Technorati Authority: 193 (just missed)
RSS Subscribers : 308 (last day of the month)

As you can see, I made all but one of my goals of the month with which I am really pleased. I didn’t meet all my goals in the last two months and so I did not set July goals as out of reach as the others. I also was not anticipating all of the new subscribers to the blog but would like to welcome all of you. Seeing that I just missed the Technorati goal by a few, if you would like to add my blog to your favorites to help me meet my goal, I would be eternally grateful. Heres the link.

Well this has been a busy week for me and this blog. Yesterday I upgraded to the newest Wordpress and what an event that was. I first upgraded our dog blog without any major problems and then proceeded to upgrade my own. Thankfully I waited ’til about 10 p.m. because my blog was probably down for over an hour. After I did the upgrade, everything was fine until I started reactivating the plugins. When I reactivated the Top Commenter plugin, it threw everything out of whack and I didn’t know what to do. I eventually came to the conclusion I had to revert to my backup.

Thankfully I had the necessary files to re-upload, another reason to always run a backup before you do anything major with your website. That took some time and I had to redo the upgrade yet again, this time without enabling that plugin. Later I found out that you could just delete the plug from the plugin directory and that is the equivalent of disabling it. I wish I had known that before all of the issues, but since that note was on the plugin page that I could no longer see, it got overlooked.

I also installed the Sez-Who comment plugin to participate in the newly joined Entrecard Sez-Who partnership only to find that it added a full second to my already pitiful load time (3 seconds to over 4 seconds). I did some adjusting and also disabled the NextGen Gallery plugin (another really slow plugin I wasn’t using). So now the load times are a bit better but still something to be desired. Taking input

New to the Unconventional Marketing blog this week is also a Contact page and contact form. I know you are probably asking yourself what took so long? The answer to that question is I don’t know. So please check out and use the contact form whenever you feel it is necessary, otherwise leaving comments is also welcome at anytime.

Also, two days ago was the latest in the Internet land grabs when .me domains went up for sale. I tried to buy 5 .me domains only to get emails back on 4 of them saying that someone else had registered them before me. There was so much traffic and people trying to buy the same domains all at once that many people found that they had paid only to get a rejection email a short time later. I was fortunate enough to get JOSHING.ME the newest domain to add to my list. I haven’t quite figured out what I would like to do with the domain, but for now I will probably place a blog on it. If you have any ideas on what I should do with my newest domain I am all ears, shoot me a message on my new Contact Page.

P.S. Although everyone was bashing GoDaddy for screwing everything up, I think you should remind yourself that it wasn’t GoDaddy selling the domains they were only the facilitator. I ended up talking with their customer support about the refunds and we pleasantly surprised by how knowledgeable and professional they were through the process. (If you call ask for Dew).