[One Weird Globe note: this interview with Tim Anderson kicks off a new category about travel blogging. Tim was a keynote speaker at TBEX Cancun, one of the world's biggest conferences dedicated to travel bloggers. He wrote an epic, 8,000 word post about his experience - still, I wanted more. Read that first, then read on to take in some of his expertise.]
How much different was your experience as a VIP vs. what us mere mortals could access?
The only real difference is in visibility. As a speaker, people are more likely to recognize you because they’ve seen you on the posters or on the website.
Going hand in hand with that is the added benefit that businesses, sponsors and the industry professionals who are there take you more seriously as a VIP/featured presenter as opposed to being just another blogger/someone who is learning the ropes/someone who hasn’t “made it” yet. This makes it easier to land those coveted sponsorships and high-end freelancing gigs plus contracts.
I worked from 2008 until 2012 before I landed a speaking gig. Then another 2 years and 13 other speaking gigs before I landed at TBEX. I earned my invitation with blood and sweat. So naturally there will be more of a reward for attending as a VIP because it’s a sign that you’ve “arrived”, so to speak; you’ve made it to the next tier and your hard work is rewarded accordingly.
First place medals are earned. You don’t get one simply for breathing. If you want to get to the top, be prepared to claw your way up through your own due diligence.
You talked about finding a mentor, taking part of boot camps, etc. – how do you sort out what’s worth doing and what’s a waste of time and money?
Be willing to put in the time. You don’t get to become an Olympian swimmer by diving into a pool once a month. You live it, breathe it, train 15 hours a day, through good weather and bad, through sickness and health, and you bleed for your passion until you achieve your dreams.
Success isn’t based off luck. It’s based off busting your fucking ass and making your dreams come true.
That being said, you have to know when to look for help. Richard Branson and Bill Gates both talk about the importance of finding mentors to help you reach the next level. Apart from the training you’ll receive, you also get the personal contacts that these people have to offer you as a result of long-term relationships.
That’s why I started our brand boot camps in early 2013 after my brother shot himself. I was left with this shocking punch to the gut that I could have done more if I had forced him to come down to Mexico and helped him build his dream business rather than just talking about it with him over Skype. Having all this knowledge and the ability to mentor people…it just suddenly felt selfish to hoard all that knowledge and only drip-feed it out via my eBooks.
The best way to sort the trash from those who have something valuable to offer is to simply look at their track record. Are they a public speaker? Have they taught classes before? How long have they been around? Do they have a list of clients who can vouch for their capabilities?
I didn’t start doing our boot camps until early 2013. That was six years after first starting out as an online writer and blogger and then social media maestro. By that point I had already published over 7 million words of content for clients and worked with dozens of clients in social media and sold a couple thousand copies of our books.
Some random schmuck whose website has only been around three months or even just a year or two and has no verifiable or meaningful experience yet is calling themselves an “expert” in something…it’s pretty easy, for me, to see who has classes and courses worth taking and who is just a waste of time.
We still have our three-month long camps, but we are also experimenting with our hybrid travel blog boot camps now, which are for people who are already actively blogging and ready to take it to the next step and get into profitability as opposed to just blogging as a hobby. Our latest one was just before TBEX; we’ll be doing another one in December or January. They are down in Palenque, Mexico and it’s a week-long adventure tour to several of the Maya ruins along with brand building and social media classes in the evening hours.
The big thing about doing a mentorship is it’s not a week-long thing like a workshop. If you truly want your business to succeed, you have to be ready to make the plunge. Our traditional brand boot camps are three months long…and they cost a chunk of change. Just like a college degree. And if you are serious about your business, you are willing to invest.
If the only thing you are willing to put into your business is zero, you can’t realistically expect to get anything back out of it. And you also can’t expect clients, customers or readers to be willing to invest in you or purchase your products and services if you yourself aren’t willing to invest in your own growth/your business.
On your post, you talked about staying up late and getting up early to network – mentioning one guy who got the glossy eyes after hearing so many elevator pitches. As someone who lives in Mexico, you were able to shoot the shit about Mexico – but what’s the best way to approach someone who’s heard too many elevator pitches?
This is only something that comes with experience. When you are new at something, you don’t know how to approach people, how to talk with them, how to adjust your conversation on the fly to suit the needs of the individual you are talking with.
Some people react well to the direct approach. Others prefer a more amiable personality. Some people get along great with f-bombs and the “blue collar” approach. You need to learn how to read people and have built up a repertoire of pitches and replies and approaches so that you can change them out on the fly depending on the situation.
This only comes with experience. You might fumble a bit in the beginning, but we all start somewhere.
Speaking Spanish – obviously a big advantage in working with Latin American companies, as is knowing the culture and how THEY do business. How does someone without years of language experience or insider savvy make the most of these connections?
You won’t. Seriously. You can try, but it just won’t be the same and you won’t be able to replicate the success and connections someone fluent in the language and culture will have.
The thing with most countries outside of the U.S. is that they don’t give a shit about your Analytics or your Klout or your traffic or engagement numbers. That’s only a small fraction of the equation. Especially in places like Asia or Latin America where it is all about respect, gift giving, bribing/greasing the wheels, throwing away your watch, and always making sure the other side feels as though they have won…with honor.
It’s all about knowing how to navigate the cultural aspects of doing business in a foreign culture, and that only comes through immersion. If you lack that, you really need to have a cultural correspondent or consultant who can help you navigate the minefield.
If you lack all of that, put on your best smile, own your personality and your brand, and just roll with it. You’ll never know unless you try.
In your post, you mentioned most of the other TBEX speakers passed on attending a press conference. Presumably it was on the official schedule and not conflicting with too much other stuff…?
It wasn’t on the official schedule and wasn’t conflicting with anything. This is one of those things that you should know about by being business-oriented. There are always press conferences for events such as these. This was the day before TBEX officially started, so I think most people were busy still doing their blogging + writing duties and waiting for the main event in the evening, and weren’t aware that there was even a press conference going on.
I was constantly in contact with Rick and the TBEX crew (I mingled with them more than any other people or businesses during my time in Cancun), so I was clued in from the get-go simply by nature of association. Often times it very much is “who you know” and being in the right place at the right time. I.E. don’t sleep during a convention and be everywhere.
You mentioned the serious coinage you’ve spent on your education – 15-20k in 7 years. While I’m sure a lot of it was worthwhile, what was the FIRST or BIGGEST ROI you had from one of your outlays? In other words, where’d you learn something that started making you more money than you invested?
I had the benefit of having worked in construction for over 15 years running crews for a multi-million dollar family business before I started as a writer. So I was able to apply one very important business rule from day one: you have to spend money to make money. So I was always investing in myself and my continued education and ignoring the cesspool of free, bottom-feeder information on the Internet that all of the wannabe bloggers chow down on.
When I first moved to Bulgaria to start as a writer, I had around 8,000 USD to my name, no college education, and I had never finished high school. The last year in the States gutted me. I wrote about it in our best-selling publication, The Expat Guidebook, and how I went from an 80k a year job to barely making 32k, and how even at 80k a year the cost of living and running a small business in the U.S. was so cost-prohibitive that I never really ever “made” any money. And that was back in 2007! Things have only gotten worse since then.
That first year in Bulgaria was brutal trying to land jobs with people who wanted previous writing experience/etc.
Switching over to Dragon NaturallySpeaking as a writer was my big moment. That was at the end of 2009. That put me leaps and bounds ahead of my competition. While they were struggling to make 10-15 dollars an hour on shitty SEO projects, I was banging out 3k-4k words per hour and making 35-50 an hour during my second years as a freelancer. Up until that point I had been doing OK in the 20-25 an hour range just typing by hand.
That was a personal decision. I had spent a couple of years by that point working my way up the food chain and reading a lot of other writers and noticed one thing: no one understood how to mass produce content for the McArticle generation of shitty SEO articles used for backlinking. I didn’t care about the quality on those; I was using a pseudonym to keep my high-quality content separate.
My very first book was Content Writing 101: How To Make A Minimum of $50 Per Hour Writing For Content Mills. While most others were out there trying to write Pulitzer Prize winning pieces for places lie Demand Studios where quality didn’t matter in the least, I was mass-producing generic content for the same places and breaking $50 an hour.
By early 2011 I had landed a 10,000 USD contract for 6 weeks of work and was clearing 75 an hour. By 2012 I was making $100 an hour as a writer, minimum, and was able to take that expertise and money to build Marginal Boundaries into where and what it is today.
In social media, my big “moment of awakening” came after a few years of following Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income and Glenn from over at Viper Chill. I had already been using Flynn’s stuff on niche sites to get some pretty decent SEO niche sites of my own going throughout 2011 on the side apart from writing for contracts, and then I really got into the Facebook side of things when Glenn posted his case study on making 100k in a month via Facebook ads.
Now, granted, he was doing it with Internet dating shit, but I saw the potential. I was subscribed to both of these guys and have been following Pat since 2009 when I was living in Bulgaria, and Glenn as a result of Pat recommending him. But it was Glenn’s case study on the power of Facebook advertising that moved us into the big leagues with Marginal Boundaries.
From there, I started with a small spend of around $50 over a couple of weeks to do some initial testing, and then we moved straight into a $300 a month investment campaign to run split-testing for three months. From there, it has only increased as I gather data and continue to adjust things with the growth of my brand and our new products/etc.
Finally – when and how can people see your presentation on Advanced Facebook online?
You’ll have to pay attention to the official TBEX website + social media outlets. They said 10 days or so after the event, so it should be soon. Plus, we’ll eventually be putting something up at our YouTube channel as well.
Just remember: the presentation is only a fraction of what you need to know. The real power of what goes into these events is being there and being able to talk to the speakers one-on-one during lunches, to build relationships, to make connections, and then go into working partnerships.
Also bear in mind that my presentation was only 45 minutes long. It’s barely scratching the surface in terms of what I actually do as a social media manager and marketer for brands, bloggers and companies. That’s also the reason why our traditional brand boot camps have been three months long; it takes months and years of research and day in/day out immersion in the subject to truly understand social media marketing and management and strategies.
If you are serious about building your brand and mastering social media, you have to get over yourself. They talked about this at the end of TBEX in Cancun when they were talking about professionalism and the need to attend conventions, workshops, boot camps and the like. Richard Branson has a brilliant series of articles up at the Virgin site that talk about the need for people to utilize mentors if they want to step up their game.
You have to let go of your ego. You are not, nor will you ever be, the best at your job. There will always be someone better than you who can help you along your journey. You have to be willing to realize your weaknesses and reach out to those who can boost you up to the next level. It might not be me; there are dozens of great teachers out there in the travel blogging industry. But you need to find someone.
I’ve served two mentorships in my time and I’m only 34 years old. I’m already looking at my next step up and who I want to mentor me for my evolution from 35 to 40 years of age. Even though I’m good at what I do, I’m not as good as I could be…and I’m always hungry for that next level up.
For more information on T.W. Anderson, check out his website at www.marginalboundaries.com. You can also check out his best-selling publications The Expat Guidebook and Beyond Borders – The Social Revolution for more information on a life of travel utilizing the power of social media and online income streams.
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This post first appeared at An interview with Tim Anderson about TBEX.
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