Just a little over a year ago, I attended an introductory seminar on internet marketing – and now I’m speaking at the same seminars. A lot can change in a year.
When people find out that my background is in health care, education and medical research, it can seem a bit weird that I’m now in this internet marketing and entrepreneurial scene. It all makes sense though. In fact, I was speaking with a mate the other day who commented that everything I had ever done has led me to this place.
There were a couple of reasons for my initial internet in learning about internet marketing and online business.
First, I had a book I had started to write and I wanted to find out about self-publishing the book online.
Second, my research is in public health, and so I was interested to find out more about using the internet for promotional purposes – for getting a message out there.
Third, I had been using online education technologies in my role as an academic and was very familiar with online learning. I wanted to increase my knowledge about how the internet could be used to provide continuing professional development for health professionals.
Fourth, I was searching for business opportunities and a change of professional direction. I’d been an active property investor for 10 years and was looking for other opportunities.
So, I go along to this introductory event – and was blown away. I learned more in those 2 days than I had learned in a long time – essentially because it was all new. At that one event, I learned that I could use the internet for all of the four reasons I had for attending – which meant that this particular seminar delivered the goods.
I also came away with an additional understanding and vision – and that is that the internet provides everyday people with an opportunity to achieve their long-term aspirations and explore their ambitions. This was perhaps the most intriguing lessons of all. As a health professional and researcher working in public health, I had continuously come across people who appeared successful, but who were miserable – primarily because they weren’t actually doing what they really wanted to do.
IT consultants who wanted to run cafes. Cafe owners who wanted to become jewelers. Lawyers who wanted to be authors. Chef’s who wanted to be musicians. HR managers who wanted to be travel writers. This list goes on, and on, and on …
The most amazing thing is this – only a very few were actually doing something about it. Over the many years that I came to know thousands of people – hardly any took the plunge to make it happen. And I frequently saw this as a contributing factor to their ill-health or general feeling of stress.
They were unfulfilled.
Their external actions weren’t ‘congruent’ with their internal desires.
They felt ashamed, embarrassed, or had low self-esteem because every single day that they went and worked for someone else, doing something that wasn’t congruent, they felt weak, powerless, gutless.
And time keeps on ticking … into the future (as the song says).
So, I began to understand that the internet represented an unprecedented opportunity for people to finally start doing what they wanted to do – to finally start being congruent. And this was the most exciting aspect of it all for me.
Since then, I have helped people realize the same thing. I’ve coached them. Encouraged them. Helped them make their first money online doing what they love doing. As a result, and due to my background in education and lecturing, I’ve now ended up speaking about this in public – at the same types of seminars that I first attended and where I was exposed to this awesome world of the internet and internet marketing.
It was a blast to be invited to present at World Internet Summit in Perth, Australia, 2010. Here is a short video taken the morning of my presentation – as I was getting ready to get up on stage.
