Archive for April, 2006
When Your Parents Discover Your Blog
This past Monday, my parents discovered my blog. My Mom and Dad live on a farm in Idaho (more about my growing up on a farm in Idaho in another post), and their Internet connection speed is a crummy 24.4 kbps (that’s what happens when you surf over phone lines that were installed in the early-1920s). Anyway, when they jumped online to read some of my posts, it must have been out of either GREAT curiosity–or a lot of love–because their Internet is paralyzing slow. I mean, we’re talking, ‘the Google home page takes about a minute to load’ type of slow.
Nevertheless, Mom (or Dad, not sure which) typed “JeremyHanks.com” into the address bar, and a few minutes later
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eBay Live! 2006
In a couple of months, a group of us from Doba will be headed to Las Vegas, Nevada, to exhibit at eBay Live! 2006 (June 13-15, at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center). For the uninitiated, eBay Live! is the largest platform for anyone who wants to shine in front of the entire eBay Community. On a more practical and logistical level, it’s a 3-day event where thousands of eBay Community members, industry experts, and vendors like Doba gather to learn, network, make new friends, and celebrate everything eBay.
With more than 10,000 attendees, tons of workshops and panel discussions, and hundreds of exhibitors, eBay Live! is one
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Entrepreneurship—and book promotion—The Smart Way
Last Monday, in a post titled The Value of Custom Publishing: Part I, I wrote that one of the benefits to authoring a book is the exposure and credibility you receive from having your name appear on the book’s cover. While some authors write books for the gobs of money they hope to receive from some combination of an ‘advance’ and royalties, I chose to co-author mine because:
- I wanted to share my knowledge with as many people as possible; and,
- I wanted to gain ‘thought leader’ status on the topics I choose to write about (namely, product sourcing and drop shipping).
The day after I wrote that blog entry, Stacey Miller at the Book Promotion Blog
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Adventure Buddies
One of the greatest experiences and joys in my life is being a dad. My wife Amy and I have one daughter, Kaitlin, and are expecting a son this June. One of my really good friends, Chris Knudsen, told me once about something he did with his kids prior to me having any of my own. Rather than just sit at home and play with toys or hang out in the backyard together, Chris would take his kids out on mini-adventures. He called it Adventure Buddies, and I liked the idea so much that when Kaitlin came along, we started going on Adventure Buddy excursions of our own.
By design, we’d leave Mom behind, and head off on
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Touch of Madness
Thanks to Greg Galant over at Venture Voice, I just read an interesting entrepreneurship-related article in The Economist titled Searching for the Invisible Man: Economics Rediscovers the Entrepreneur . The point of the article, I believe, is to suggest that from a macro economics perspective, economic theory has very little to say in terms of the size, scope, and value of the contributions entrepreneurs make in terms of economic implications on GDP. Huh? Are you kidding me?
Since I’m such a firm believer in the notion that everyone who starts a company is an entrepreneur, I fail to see why it’s so difficult for economists–or anyone
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The Value of Custom Publishing: Part I
As you may have noticed, in addition to co-founding several companies, I’ve also been fortunate enough to have co-authored two really great books. My first, Drop Shipping For Dummies, was published by the Custom Publishing Division of John Wiley & Sons in early-2005; while my latest title, eBay Inventory The Smart Way (AMACOM Books), just came out a few weeks ago. One of the benefits to authoring, co-authoring, or contributing to a major book–or ‘custom publishing’ a book–is the exposure you get from having your name appear on the book’s cover. For an entrepreneur like myself, this means one thing and one thing only: credibility.
If there’s one thing all entrepreneurs need—aside from capital resources—it is credibility. When you walk into
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Entrepreneurship and Epic Journeys in the Grand Canyon
About six weeks ago, three friends and I headed out on a backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon. It was my fifth trip down there in the last six years, so clearly I have an affinity for the place (actually, it’s where I ended up deciding to ask my wife to marry me, but that’s another story entirely).
On four of my most recent trips to the Grand Canyon, friends and I had done the Thunder River/Deer Creek loop, as well as the South Bass Trail. This year though, in an attempt to up the ‘adventure’ quotient, we decided to hike the South Rim and do the six-day/five-night 50-mile Royal Arch loop. High adventure for sure, but a
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