Keep in mind that the reason presentations have such a bad rep is that many companies turn them into the goal of their research. The goal should always be clear going in – you are researching a particular area to draw conclusions that will directly help you shape your business plan, business model, marketing strategy or what have you. Use presentations to refine understanding, build speaking confidence and encourage collaboration.

Today kicked off the start of the Thirty Day Challenge. I’m sure you are wondering what challenge would take thirty days and why I would be interested in joining it. Basically, the goal of the 30DC is to earn $10.00 online within thirty days without investing any money in the process. At first, I had the same reaction – $10? Are you kidding me? However, the goal is not to become rich in thirty days but rather to realize that it is possible to make money online even if you know little to nothing about the internet. Well, hopefully I am a bit above the little to nothing category, but I thought this would be a great way to hear of some additional traffic building techniques as well as potential monetization tactics that could help improve my own online ventures. It is also important to note that $10 is a very reasonable amount someone could expect to earn after thirty days. If they picked something like $500, then people would assume they were kidding and never even attempt to follow the challenge process. The 30DC is all about motivating those who have tried and failed or never tried out of fear of failure.

Another cool component to the 30DC is the focus on teams and team collaboration. The idea is still to work independently by working on your own product that will earn you $10 in the thirty days. However, they encourage you to form a team that you can collaborate and communicate with regarding your questions, concerns, successes, resources, etc.

For those interested in joining the challenge, entry is still open (although today, August 1st, was officially kickoff). Sign up for the forums and you can start participating as a member right away. After you setup your account, be sure to check out their pre-season recap post to get up-to-date on all their 30DC tips.

A few friends of mine and I have all formed a 30DC team and will be using Google Groups to organize our communications. This was actually and surprisingly the first time I have every used Google Groups and must say that I am impressed. The idea is to create a public or private web space where you can do the following:

• Create forum-like discussion topics
• Create individual pages
• Communicate via private messages and email with your group
• Share up to 100mb of files between your group

I set up our group in 20 minutes and had no problems getting used to the navigation of the site. My only criticism is the way forum topics are organized. As soon as you create a new title for your thread, it creates an entirely separate topic, which gets messy. I was hoping to create 5-7 general topics (SEO, monetization, etc) that we could all post questions/comments in. Looks like I will just have to get used to it, but at least all posts are search-friendly via the Google search engine – so finding past threads shouldn’t be difficult.

Hope to see you in the challenge!!

If you haven’t heard of Tim, you are doing yourself a misfortune. Check out his blog and you will see why. Or if you do know what he’s all about, pick up a copy of his book:

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

The first thing to do is ask yourself why you have not been making progress. I took a careful observation of my life and work habits and noticed one major thing: I WAS NOT DOING THE DIRTY WORK. It takes working out forum post after forum post when marketing your website and cold call after cold call when selling your services. I just never seemed to be doing any of this. Too quickly would I get consumed with planning, communicating and just thinking about ideas. Believe me, I am all about proper preparation, but without execution, success will never manifest.

My solution, work 15 minutes a day on each project. I know you are thinking that sounds ridiculous, 15 minutes a day will never yield anything. It takes working 12 hours a day, every day to get anything accomplished. I’m not disagreeing that it takes serious work, however, when managing ten different projects, it really only takes getting one ‘dirty’ thing of work done each day to see results. If I work 15 minutes a day, each day then by the end of the week I will have 1.75 hours of dirty work in a project. That ends up being roughly 17.50 hours with all of the projects that I have going on (I know – ten, is this guy kidding?). Here is the beauty, that leaves another reasonable 40 hours a week to dedicate to the ‘big’ project at that time.

For the past few months, endlessroom has been taking up a significant amount of time (by the way we are only a few weeks away from beta launch – more on that later). I have been sacrificing all sorts of little projects, such as this blog, and have been very disappointed with myself. Hopefully this new approach will help me see progress in all of ventures, even if it is only a small amount.