It’s very easy when you start out in Internet Marketing to think that this is a career that won’t require you to interact – with your customers, with your competitors and with other marketers. Everything is so neatly handled by being online.

Well, in practice, that’s probably the most damaging idea you could have. Removing personal interaction from your business (no matter how shy you are) can only end up hurting your prospects, no matter what personal comfort you gain from it.

I try to make a habit of going to at least 3 or 4 big events every year and if I get the chance, I’ll also attend a lot of smaller get togethers. Both have their place in my business.

The big events often turn into pitch-fests, where every hour you get a new call to action along with a price tag to make your wallet bleed. If you can find ones where this is not the case, then the opportunity to meet a lot of new people in one place is a huge benefit. Take lots of business cards and a notebook for names and numbers where others have no card of their own.

As an example of the latter, I just spent a weekend at Mark Anastasi’s Financial Freedom bash in London this weekend. Mark has arranged many conferences over the last few years (often multi-speaker wallet-bleeders!) but has moved more recently to running the show himself. The new format gets a huge thumbs-up from me, I always liked Mark’s speaking style and getting more of that and less of some other unpredictable speaker is a real plus. If he runs more shows like this, I’d recommend you check them out.

The smaller events work on a different level for me. It’s much easier to grab more time with one or maybe two people and really get to know them…this is where the real joint ventures are made. You’ll often hear more about what is really working (along with some smal but tasty tips) at this kind of meeting and you will also get a chance to be an answer to someone else’s questions. Don;t underestimate what you’ve already picked up…everyone starts somewhere.

One of the things that makes it harder to do this regularly is actually finding out what is going on. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere that regularly announces events, so watch out for an announcements about a new site that I’m going to set up just for this purpose.

So what did I learn over the weekend? Well, apart from being hammered by the “build a product” message, the big wake-up call for me was to build my list properly. If you’ve just started reading this blog, you’ll have seen my pop-up by now – did you grab it? 🙂  It was there because I think I’ve always known that a list of folk I can help is actually the same as a list of people who can help me, but when it comes down to it, I’ve never pushed that side of my business.

So, my commitment for the next 30 days (let’s see, that takes me up to something like the 11th of November) is that I will post my list-building efforts and results on here daily for all to read. As is always the case, I will probably end up doing too many other things as well, but that is the target.

In that capacity, I am going to set aside 2 sums of cash; the first will be just $100 to see what is possible with a small investment. The second will be more, I haven’t decided how much more yet, definitely less than $1000 but maybe not much less. This will be the real all out effort to build a substantial seed list.

As you can guess, I intend to buy traffic, but I’m also hoping to use other techniques like giveaways to boost my efforts. I will be tracking how successful everything is. Not only that, but I will probably also be following along with Valerie Duvall’s List Ignition WSO which you can guess is also about list-building!

Consider this Day Zero, I’ll update later in the day about the progress so far but just so we are all on the same wavelength, here is my rather small list on Aweber for reference: