(Transcript continued from the Episode 132 show notes and audio podcast)

This quote that is often attributed to John Wesley is, “Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.” This quote is attributed to John Wesley, it’s often misquoted in the sense that there are some variations that are out there, and there is a significant amount of debate among legitimate historians about whether or not John Wesley ever said this. I’m told that even if he never actually said it, it sounds like something he would have said, so at least it’s in the right intent.

I love this for marketing. “Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.” I think this has something to do with the kind of intensity that you go after your business with. Are you in it? Are you in it to win it? Can people who are following you and learning from whatever content that you’re creating feel your enthusiasm?

This passion word is a word that’s a heavy word. A lot of people have come to sort of almost be put off by that word, because it implies that you have to have this one calling in your life that is the thing that you’re passionate about. What if you’re one of these people that hasn’t ever found their passion, what do you do?

I think what this quote is really talking about, no matter who actually said it, is this intensity of enthusiasm that you can have. When people sense that, that will attract people to your brand and to your message. They’ll know that you’re serious. It will help you rise about the din.

I’ve been reading this fantastic book by Mark Schaefer called Known. Mark Schaefer is someone that I’ve had the privilege of meeting at Social Media Marketing World 2016, and he is a super famous marketing guru. He’s been a corporate marketing guru and now he is an individual brand consultant. Fundamentally, he’s just simply brilliant. He wrote this book, Known, which I highly recommend.

In the book he talks about the fact that passion is really not enough. Passion has to be overlaid with purpose. You need to really care about something, but there has to be some purpose that gives that passion some direction that is in general targeted toward helping people accomplish something.

Then on top of that you have to have endurance to see the thing through, because there is no overnight successes and you have to focus on something where there is actually space for you to grow. Super crowded niches may not be the right place for you to nurture this purpose driven passion.

I think one of the myths that Mark busts in this book is the idea of passion, he talks about the fact that you need something with a plan and it’s really not a passion, usually, that you find people having great success with. It’s more accurately described as a sustainable interest. You may have passions that really aren’t very suitable for business, but if you can have a sustainable interest that you can feel passion for, but it’s something that you can sustain and has purpose, that’s going to have a lot more opportunity for you to be successful.

Whatever that is, when that comes through, when you have that enthusiasm and energy, it’s sustained, when you light that fire, like in the quote attributed to John Wesley, people will come.

Late Night Tech Tip: Dropbox

For those of you that don’t realize this, at the very end of the show after the show music plays there is this strange tape rewinding sound and then I just riff on whatever I’m thinking about that may or may not have anything to do with internet marketing. This is kind of a tradition that I’ve done with the show, it’s kind of the after-the-show show. If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, you can stay around for after the show music and there’s more stuff.

I was talking last week about the fact that Episode 131 almost didn’t make it on the air on time because I had accidentally left my laptop in Dallas for my trip to San Antonio. I got to San Antonio and didn’t have a laptop.

I was able to borrow a laptop from my son and after he went to sleep I was able to download the audio files that I needed from Dropbox and the software that I needed from Adobe to edit the show and get it uploaded. Everything else is sort of in the cloud, WordPress and so forth. So I was able to get that done and get the show out on time.

That was very important to me, because you guys are important to me and because I have this streak going of getting the show out on time. In fact, right now I’m recording the show early before I leave for Social Media Marketing World so I can make sure that I get that done, because when the show goes live on Thursday I will actually be at Social Media Marketing World.

Dropbox saved my life as far as the show in concerned. That might be a slight over dramatization of what happened, but you get the idea.

I think Dropbox is awesome. If you’re not familiar with Dropbox, it’s basically this cloud based syncing service. Any file that you put on Dropbox will appear on any other system that you install Dropbox on and tell it to appear there. If you have a laptop and a desktop machine, or a laptop and a desktop and an iPad, you can upload a file to Dropbox and it will be available to you on any of those machines and you can log onto their web based application anywhere in the world and access that file. It’s really good.

I wanted to give you some tips for how to get the most out of Dropbox so that if you’re thinking about using Dropbox or you’d like to use it and you want to know what are the reasons, what you can do with it, there are a few tips I wanted to give you that I thought would make a great tech tip for this week.

The first tip is you can get started with Dropbox for free. If you’re not familiar with Dropbox you can go to LateNightIM.com/dropbox to sign up for a free account that will give you 2GB of space.

If you want even more space than that for free, you can refer your friends to Dropbox and every basic account that you refer gets another 500MB of free space for you. What I just did was I referred you to LateNightIM.com/dropbox, if you were to sign up using that link I would get free Dropbox space. I don’t really need that because I pay for a terabyte, which I don’t even come close to using.

That is a really cool way to get started with Dropbox for free. That’s awesome and that’s the first tip for Dropbox is if you think you might be interested, but you’ve never pulled the trigger because you didn’t want to spend the money, free Dropbox is really cool.

The second tip for Dropbox is that if you delete a file from Dropbox it keeps everything you deleted for 30 days. If you recognize that you accidentally deleted or overwrote or changed a file, it keeps any file that you had up there for 30 days and you can just simply login to the web application, right click on a file, and choose restore to bring back files or folders back from nowhere.

That only lasts for 30 days, so I don’t consider this an actual backup system. I think it’s a nice sort of not fully featured backup piece to your strategy, like short term backup. I think it works pretty well for that. I wouldn’t do this instead of backup, I would do this in addition to whatever backup strategy you have. But you can recover deleted files and use Dropbox sort of as a poor man’s backup strategy.

The third tip is you can set Dropbox to automatically seek out and find and upload your mobile photos. This is super cool. If you have an iPhone and you have the Dropbox app on your iPhone and/or you have a PC or Mac and you’re constantly dumping pictures on there, you can set Dropbox to automatically suck those pictures up, to watch certain directories for pictures and upload them, to watch for memory cards that are inserted in your SD slot and upload those pictures. That’s really nice for an automatic backup of your pictures.

One of the things that we’re always freaked out about in my house is what if we lose all of our pictures. I have my pictures backed up a number of ways; I use Dropbox, Google Photos, I have a Synology NAS drive, I have them backed up in what I commonly refer to as cold storage. If you’re a Katie Floyd fan on Mac Power Users you know what cold storage is. Basically I have a drive on a shelf that is not stored in my home and then I have the pictures backed up to Backblaze. So I’m very serious about protecting my pictures.

This is a really nice thing. It also makes it possible where if you’re having trouble with picture storage on your mobile phone and you know your pictures are generally backed up to Dropbox, it leaves you a little more free to delete those pictures off the phone because you know they’re going to be on Dropbox.

The fourth tip is that Dropbox offers two-step verification. I definitely recommend that you turn on two-step verification for extra security on Dropbox. This means that whenever you login to Dropbox you’re going to need a second factor, either a text message to your cell phone, a secret code from that, or something like the Authy App to allow login. It’s not that big of a pain because it remembers browsers, so once you tell it this browser is okay it reverts back to one-step. But if someone in some foreign country tries to login to your Dropbox and it’s not you, two-step verification will go a long way to keep them out.

The fifth tip is probably what I use Dropbox for the most. This is the perfect solution for sharing monster files. You can put a monster file in your Dropbox. I have a folder called Public for stuff that I want to share but that I don’t necessarily want to keep forever. I put the monster file in the Public directory, I right click on it, grab a Dropbox link, and then I can email that link instead of a 100MB file to whoever needs that link. That is an absolutely fantastic feature of Dropbox and I would say that’s probably one of the best uses for Dropbox.

The sixth tip is you can actually turn on a feature called Selective Sync. If you have desktop machines and laptops, for example, and your desktops have a lot of storage but your laptops don’t have much storage, you can tell your laptop, “These directories I want you to sync, but these other directions I don’t want to sync those to the laptop.” Everybody that uses Dropbox I think agrees that Selective Sync needs some more features and it has been rumored that Dropbox is working on that. That’s a really good place to start. It’s really nice to be able to manage that kind of capability.

The seventh and last tip that I’ll give you is that a lot of cross-platform applications that exist both on the iPhone and the Mac or on Android applications and the PC, or across different PCs and Macs, will share their settings on Dropbox.

Dropbox is by far the most popular file syncing service out there and a lot of these apps will take advantage of that. Once you enable something like password syncing in One Password with Dropbox or other applications that can use, like Text Expander to sync text snippets back and forth between machines, it’s really hard to ever go back from that.

That’s seven tips that you can use that will help you get the most out of Dropbox. Again, I recommend that you check that out at LateNightIM.com/dropbox.

Why Invest in Attending Conferences

For the main segment today I wanted to talk a little bit about my trip out to Social Media Marketing World that’s coming and talk about why I am doing that.

Why am I going to Social Media Marketing World? What’s the point? It’s expensive, right? The tickets for Social Media Marketing World are not inexpensive, and the airfare involved in getting out to California from Texas is not inexpensive, and the fancy hotel that the conference is in is expensive, and I have to take three days off work from my day job, I’m going to miss my daughter’s soccer game, I’m going to miss my softball game.

The opportunity cost of going out to Social Media Marketing World is really high, so why bother? What do I expect to get out of Social Media Marketing World?

There is a list of things that I think are important when you go to conferences. I hope, as you think through this list of things, you’ll think about whether or not it makes sense for you to attend a conference in your niche or a conference related to your business in 2017. I think that it’s something that can really benefit you.

You don’t have to start off with a conference in Paris or Hawaii. A lot of times you’ll find out that things that you’re interested in are happening in your local area that maybe won’t cost you as much as a trip to something like Social Media Marketing World.

Here are my goals for Social Media Marketing World and why I am interested in doing that.

One is, I think maybe the most important thing, Social Media Marketing World is an opportunity for me to reconnect with people that I have met over the last 10 years in internet business, both online and in real life, and actually see them face-to-face. There will be 3,000 marketers or more at this conference, it’s growing every year. I’ll get to see people, not only all of my good friends from my Green Room Mastermind (Cliff, Pat, Mike, Leslie, and Ray) but I will also get to see a lot of other people from the industry that I’ve made friends with over the years.

That is a really fulfilling thing for me personally, something that I really enjoy. Making an additional investment in those relationships, even if it’s just a beer at the hotel bar or a walk down to Chipotle with one them, that will be a real value to me. In fact, the Green Room Mastermind we’re going to all go to dinner together. That will be our one chance this year for us to all be physically together in the same place. I really highly value that. That’s going to be a highlight of the trip for me, just seeing people.

The second reason that I go to a conference like Social Media Marketing World is that it gives me an opportunity to add to that list; I will meet people. Last year I met Mark Schaefer and I talked to you about his book Known. This guy is an amazing thought leader in the social media marketing space, and just being around him and being friends with him on Facebook and just interacting with him, being on the periphery becoming aware of him has influenced my thinking in this space and will continue to do that for years to come.

Getting that exposure and making connections with people like Mark Schaefer. I got to meet Gary Vaynerchuck last time I was at Social Media Marketing World, Guy Kawasaki; these are people that I wouldn’t normally get to meet on my drive back and forth to my day job.

That ability to meet people, and not just super famous people, I’ve met a lot of people over the years that came to talk to me, that sought me out and are up and comers in internet marketing that wanted to ask me a question. That’s really cool for me, too.

In fact, sometimes I enjoy that a lot more, meeting people that are where I was several years ago in their marketing journey is very rewarding for me. I just really like the meeting new people part, that’s super great. That’s the second reason that I really enjoy to something like Social Media Marketing World and am willing to make the investment.

The third reason for going to Social Media Marketing World is there is an enormous amount of content available at this conference. Quite frankly, it’s kind of mind numbing. Luckily, everything is recorded so that I can get to it later, because there are so many simultaneous sessions that there’s just no way that you could get to them all.

The number of ideas that I come out of a thing like this with, opportunities for collaboration and ideas from speakers from the stage, the number of ideas is amazing. It’s always more than a dozen, I’m never able to get to all of them. My personal rule for conferences of any kind, whether it’s in my day job or in internet marketing, is to identify at least one killer idea every day that I can take away and actually go take action on.

If I’m at a five day conference, my goal is to come away with five really good ideas that I can use and do something about when I return to my normal everyday life. I wrote those down in Evernote and I try to take action on those when I get back from the conference.

You can do that, too. When you go to a conference, even if it’s just a little meet-up in your town, you can look for that one tiny golden nugget and bring that away with you. If you do that consistently, all of a sudden you’ll have a whole box full of golden nuggets that will have been added to your business. That can be a really valuable continuous learning approach that you can take by going to this kind of conference.

The fourth reason that I go to Social Media Marketing World is that I’m privileged that Mike Stelzner, who runs the thing, let’s me do stuff when I’m there. I love to be part of the answer, to be part of the help. One year I gave a talk there. One time I hosted a panel. I’ve led sessions. This time I’m both chairing a track and moderating a panel.

Not only does that open amazing opportunities – that’s how I met Mark Schaefer, that’s how I met Michael Hyatt – it gives me an opportunity to say thanks to Mike Stelzner for being awesome and be a small part of what is just a truly amazing thing in the social media marketing industry, that is the Social Media Marketing World conference.

I’ve gotten to know Mike’s staff and the people that he works with and they’re amazing. The people that work for Mike are really amazing. That’s another angle that I’m able to exploit, if you will, by attending Social Media Marketing World. I get to go to a party on an aircraft carrier, that’s pretty cool.

The bottom line is it’s a heck of a lot of fun. Maybe that’s really number five. I love it. I love going to conferences. I particularly love Social Media Marketing World, it’s the best run conference that I’ve ever been to in either internet marketing or engineering. It’s just totally amazing and the experience is fantastic.

If you can find a conference this year, even if it’s a very small one, where you can maybe meet some people that you’ve known online but never seen face-to-face, where you can meet some new people, where you can learn some things and maybe even contribute some things and have some fun, the five things that I’m going to do out at Social Media Marketing World, I highly recommend that you do that. Next week I’ll tell you all about what I was able to accomplish out there.

Wrapping Things Up…

My suitcase is packed. I have a couple of other things that I have to do. I actually have to make an update that I promised my wife to her website before I leave, which is kind of funny. When you wife is a blogger you get these internet marketing tasks. Some guys are doing the laundry, I’m updating websites. That’s how it goes.

I have to do that before I leave and I have a couple of other things to do. I have an early morning flight out, so I’ll have to leave for the airport around 5:00 AM, then I’ll be in California by 8:30 in the morning California time. I’m really looking forward to that.

Until next week, I hope you have an absolutely fantastic and productive week. Go check out Dropbox. Think about your systems for backup, make sure you’re solid there. Think about what conference you might go to this year. I think you might get a lot of leverage out of that relatively small investment for the kind of return that is possible.

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