Allow me to explain…

First off let me say that I not only quit my job, but a job at a really great work environment with awesome people and fun/unique company culture….Where else do you ring in new hires with tequila shots, have cubicle decorating contests and plow your face into cake on your birthday & anniversary of employment? Of course I’m talking about IZEA, a top social media marketing company that operates SocialSpark, PayPerPost and more.

So the question I know many people are thinking…Why the H*ll did you quit? or What is he thinking?

Well I have always been a person that doesn’t shy away from challenges. I have also always trusted my gut, which was one of the main reasons why I moved to Orlando in the first place. I knew no-one in Florida, but something told me this was the right choice. That decision turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and over the last 2 years I’ve accomplished a great deal.

Besides trusting my gut I also moved to Orlando to be in a fertile environment to grow my own ventures. My goal has always been to create jobs for others, not be bound by an hourly job and to grow extremely wealthy in the process. Then be able to give back and help other young entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.

With these goals constantly in mind I came to the conclusion that IZEA has done all it can to assist me in reaching them at this stage in my life.

I’ve really enjoyed my time at IZEA, feel that I have learned a great deal and built relationships with a lot of great people, however now is the time for me to go hard after my goals. As time passes many people sink into a mode of comfortably and they stop striving and are content with their current situation. Though this is completely alright for some people at this point in my life this is not okay for me. At this time I have no children to pay for and no major expenses. There’s no better time for me than right now. If you desire to reach your goals no matter what they may be you have to go for it. When there’s more risk, there is a greater chance for more of a reward. In addition to that my dad taught me a long time ago that you improve and grow the most during periods of uncertainty and turmoil. If you’re not working through problems or challenges your performing not growing. I recently saw a great quote on Drew Mclellans blog: “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”

That quote really sums up how I feel and why I did what I did. I have so much of a desire to achieve my goals that fear seems very trivial in comparison. Some may call me foolish, some may call me outright stupid, but the way I see it it needed to be done. I have full confidence in my abilities and in god and know I will make it work.

Stay tuned…

More to come

With that said, tomorrow is my one year anniversary since I started blogging.

The purpose of this post is to outline major events in my life and the lessons I’ve learned about blogging since I first started on February 11th, 2008.   I encourage each of you to do this exercise as well.  It can really be rewarding/helpful and encourage you to think about what a year from today can bring. If you do, or plan on doing a similar post drop me a comment, I’d like to check it out.

Major Events Since February 11th, 2008 (My blogging B-day)

1. Launched GroupTable‘s Beta (First week of February)
2. Went to the Indy 500 Racetrack & pitched GroupTable to judges in the back of a limo (Late March, National Business Plan Competition)
3. Won the UCF Joust Business Plan Competition (Only UCF Student to ever win back to back competitions, April 2008)
4. Started working at IZEA (May 2008)
5. Attended conferences: Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, Search Marketing Expo in Ny, Blog World in Vegas,  IzeaFest, Affiliate Summit in Vegas (Random dates- Definitely learned a lot)
6. Became the Director of Premium Blogger Relations at IZEA- Met and worked with top bloggers like Chris Brogan, Wendy Piersall, Chris Pirillo, Jim Kukral, ShoeMoney, Neil Patel and many more. (Late July)
7. Moved with Lindsay (@Lindsay273) to an awesome apartment in Baldwin Park (August)
8. Graduated College from UCF with a degree in marketing (Mid August)
9. I was interviewed on Orlando’s Local Six news about Social Media & its impact on Politics (Mid August)
10. I got my first dog (Pics: Jackson and me, Jackson and Lins) (September)

There’s a a few more…but I’ll keep it to 10

Lessons I’ve learned about and from blogging

1. Blogging is a great way to build your personal brand.
   
2. Like writing in general, blogging is an effective way to organize and get your thoughts together.  It can be very therapeutic.
3. The blogosphere/twittersphere has its own culture.  It’s best to interact on other blogs and see how those who are experienced do it before you jump in. (Double Dutch Analogy)
4. I’ve learned how to identify influencers and high quality bloggers…It’s my job
5. I learned that I like WordPress way better than Blogger.  It’s more flexible and has lots of cool plugins.
6. If you don’t post regularly your traffic will drop….significantly
7. Write about issues others are interested in (even do keyword research before writing certain posts).  When I first started this blog all I wrote about was GroupTable.  When I started writing about other issues (like some of my favorite posts on the right) my traffic and reader engagement went way up.
8. Social proof is a powerful thing.
9. It’s good to comment on other blogs regularly. (Helps build relationships and brings you traffic)
10. Twitter is an incredible tool to increase awareness & traffic to your blog if you know how to properly use it.  (Many people who join it don’t have a clue how to harness it’s power or are unaware of all the third party twitter apps available)

Writing this post definitely helped me become more aware of how far I’ve come in this past year and what I’ve learned during my first year of blogging.

What have you learned since you started blogging? Isn’t it great to be able to have a chronicle of what you went through, or were thinking over the last year(s)?

I’ve been extremely busy lately and haven’t had much time to come up for air and post on my blog.  I was out of town for a week in Vegas for Affiliate Summit West then came  back and have had a lot of obligations for both IZEA and my start-up (GroupTable) lately.  It’s the beginning of the semester so many students across the country are going back to school and so GroupTable’s usage is really picking up.  GroupTable also has a bunch of other things in the works, which I’m not able to talk about until they come to the light, but trust me it’s awesome.

(But time consuming)

Rest assured I will have some good posts in the near future.

Thanks for your patience

You’re probably thinking what the hell does jumping rope have to do with Social Media, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit.

But here’s my thought process..When children jump rope together, specifically double dutch and another child wants to get involved in the process, that child will:

1. Watch others jumping and the rhythm / timing of the two ropes
2. Prepare them self mentally
3. Jump in

I feel that’s the same process you should take to get involved in Social Media.  I recommended to each of the people who contacted me to follow the same process.

1. Watch others utilizing Social Media and learn from them

See how others utilizing Social Media interact with their readers, listeners or viewers depending on the kind of content they create.  What do you like?  What don’t you like?  See how they present their content…Do you feel it’s an effective way to connect with their audience?  What can you learn from them?  Some great places to find top Social Media participants in your niche are Technorati Top 100, Twitter Grader Elite, and AdAge Power 150.

2. Prepare yourself mentally

After you finish step one, to prepare your self mentally I recommend commenting on relevant blogs in your space.  This will help you find your personal voice and get you in the mode of discussing and interacting with others who are interested in similar topics as you.

3. Jump in

After the previous two steps your ready to jump in.  Set up your blog, podcast, vlog or other content platform.  Keep in mind that just like in jump rope you’ll make mistakes.  For me one of the big mistakes I made when I first started blogging, was that for the first three months I only posted about my company GroupTable.  You can see this by checking out my archive from February-April in the footer of my blog.  Not until the post I made on May 11th entitled A Transformation did I decide to switch things up and begin creating content that I feel would be helpful and interesting to others.  So far that decision has worked out very well.

Come to think of it this formula can work on virtually anything from entrepreneurship to sports.  If anyone else has any thoughts on the Jump Rope Analogy feel free to share them.

Lots of interesting facts and very thought provoking, definitely worth checking out.

SearchWiki reminds me of StumbleUpon in the sense that it allows the user to see comments about a site and decide after they have heard other opinions if it’s a site worth using.  It’s putting the results back in the hands of the end user, not a company paying thousands per month for back links or SEM.  I feel this will alter CTR rates and deemphasize SEO & SEM to a degree.  In six months to a year when people have become accustomed to using Google’s SearchWiki and more people comment on websites in the Google SERPS, less will be focused on the position of the site in the SERPS and more on what real people are saying about the site.  Google will have more of the value that made Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon popular.  This will force companies to be even more competitive in providing the best service or product possible, or else an unsatisfied customer could slander them on the SERPS.  SEO will still be important, because a person will still have to find what their looking for, however once they find your website it may be tougher to get them to click, or easier depending on what’s being said about you.

You can visit Google’s blog to find more about Google’s SearchWiki and personalized Search or watch the video below.

Even though these features are only available to you when your logged into your google account, do you think Google’s SearchWiki will have any affect on click through rates and SEO/SEM?

What are your thoughts on these features Google has added?

Well I thought about it and this is how I could personally finish that statement in regards to ways somebody can reach me:

If you have any questions feel free to…

• Email Me
• IM Me
• Skype me
• Tweet  @ me
• DM me on Twitter
• Text me
• Call me
• Send me a Facebook Message
• Poke me
• Facebook Chat with Me
• Gmail Chat with me
• Message me on LinkedIn

I could get crazy and start adding in many other niche social media sites, or even snail mail.  But seriously..How do you finish that statement?

I’m interested to hear the comments on this

This month there were also a lot of great posts written about us on various education and technology blogs Here’s some of my favorites:

• GroupTable on Mashable
• GroupTable on iLearn Technology
• GroupTable on FreeTechnology for Teachers

We really have a perfect product for the time.  College enrollment is rising, especially with the economy the way it is.  On top of that, students are staying school longer for their mba and doctorate degrees. Group projects are often required in classes and it’s proven that study groups improve grades, however students are busy and/or lazy and getting all group members together and focused at the same time is challenging. Many students face this problem and neither social networking sites or course management software systems solve this need, however GroupTable does.  Below is a message sent to us via twitter.

Besides our strong user traction and growth, we have a number of companies that want to partner with us that can really add value, an enhanced design ready to be integrated, several campus representatives at different locations across the country and a solid revenue model.  We are in the process of raising capital, which will allow us to really ramp up.  If anyone knows of any investors passionate about education and technology please connect us.  The sooner we obtain resources, the sooner GroupTable’s staff will be able to give this venture our full attention, build our team and grow GroupTable to it’s full potential…What do you bring to the table?

Contacts? Capital? Comments?

I feel there are a number of ways that twitter can monetize that can be extremely profitable.

1. Highly contextual advertising below tweets

Imagine sending a tweet saying your going to Red Lobster, your followers would be able to click through to Red Lobster’s site where a landing page could offer you a 15% off coupon. This kind of advertising could actually be appreciated being that it is highly relevant and adds value.

These ads would have to be performance based.  Either CPL, CPA or CPC.  They wouldn’t do well as a CPM model because it would be too difficult to quantify the people who actually saw the ad.  I for one know there are a lot of tweets of people I follow that I never see.  No advertiser in their right mind would want to pay for ads on a CPM model unless it was an extremely inexpensive deal.

Twitter could also charge people a certain amount to upgrade per month/or year to not receive ads within tweets. This would be a good idea, because regardless of how relevant some will feel the ads are, there are still going to be some people that feel the ads are spammy and would be willing to pay the premium to get rid of them.

2. Charge users a small annual or monthly subscription fee

This is something interesting to think about. Ask yourself would you pay $1 a month, $5 a year or another nominal amount to use twitter? There’s going to be a lot of people that wouldn’t pay for something that they’re used to getting for free. However on the other hand twitter has so many thought leaders and professionals that utilize it that many people would find the nominal subscription fee well worth the ability to build relationships, network and share meaningful content.

They could also impliment a freemium model.  The base model of twitter would be free and they could offer some sort of upgraded service at a premium.

The revenue potential from both models is really a function of their user base.  So how many users does twitter have?  According to Compete twitter has nearly 3.5M unique visitors per month.  I don’t think that’s an accurate estimate of people that actually use Twitter, being that many people use applications like Twhirl, Tweetdeck or applications for their mobile devices.

From what I gather nobody really has a strong hold on how many users twitter has, but twitter and they’re not talking.

TechCrunch estimated back in March that twitter had 1M+ users, 200k active users and over 3M tweets per day.

There has also been people such as Daren Rowse of Problogger that estimated there are tens of millions of people using twitter across the globe.

Lets do some hypotheticals…

CPC Model: If twitter has 1M users and a total of 3M tweets a day, all with some form of contextual advertising…With an average CTR (Click through rate) of 2% and an average CPC (Cost per Click) of $.50 their daily revenue would be: $30,000 per day.

Here’s the math just in case you were wondering:

3,000,000 tweets x .02 CTR= 60,000 clicks

60,000 clicks x $.50 (CPC)= $30,000 per day

$30,000 x 365= $10,950,000 per year

Affiliate Model: It’s hard to say the CPA or CPL an advertiser would pay out on twitter because so many different types of advertisers would be relevant.  I was going to take a shot and try to do a projection, but decided not to.  There are advertisers that are paying out $1.50 for a registration and advertisers paying out lucrative commissions for travel packages or other products or services.  If I tried to project it wouldn’t be accuarate at all…

But what the hell…Using the same 3M tweets per day stat and 2% CTR if there was  a 10% conversion of those that click through and the CPA was $10.  Twitter would have a daily revenue of: $60,000 per day.

3M tweets x 2% CTR= 60,000 clicks

60,000 clicks x .10 <–Conversion x $10= $60,000 per day

$60,000 per day x 365 days= $21.9M per year

Hybrid Model: Most likely my guess is that they would do a hybrid model…part CPC and part CPA.  So for the sake of argument we’ll take 1/2 of my calculation for CPC and 1/2 for my CPA calculation.

$16,425,000 per year

Keep in mind this is probably way out of the ball park, but atleast I gave it a shot.

According to Tech Crunch Twitter raised a total of $15.1M:

Do you think the investors would be happy with the numbers I projected? My thought is the revenue I projected is very attainable for Twitter and would add value, however I feel the real cash out for Twitter’s investors and founders is acquisition.

I project that a large Tech Giant will want to acquire Twitter and try to monetize it in the ways I mentioned or use it as a piece of a larger puzzle they are trying to put together within the next 3 years.
What do you think?