Why I’ve Been Away… Not A Good Excuse…

Okay, as you can see… I’ve been away from my personal blog for quite a while now (wayyyyy tooooo loooonnnggg).

Really, there’s no good excuse.  But, let me fill you in to what the heck I’ve been up to that has pulled me away from my personal blog.

Just a quick note:

I’ve said it time and time again that your own personal brand is possibly even more important than the brand of your company (not in all cases).  If you are a consultant, marketer, employee, etc… your personal brand is huge and should be constantly built over time.  As you see… I’ve neglected my personal brand in exchange for building the brand of another company of mine… and to tell you the truth… it feels terrible!

Okay, What The Heck Trevor Mauch Has Been Up To…

Don’t pay attention to my "3rd person" title.  Every now and then the 3rd person just seems to fit right.

Anyhow, over the past month or so I’ve been crazy busy.

1. Relaunch Of The REI Brain, my real estate investing website – I started The REI Brain (The Real Estate Investors Brain) back in 2006 as a little hobby.  First it was a crappy little website that I designed myself and threw up there with information that I’d learned in my own real estate investing endeavor.   Actually, Alexa still shows the old crappy design as the image for my site (how long does it take for the image to be updated… anyone know?).

   Anyhow, for the past several months I’ve been working on launching a new redesign of the site to bring it up to date now that there’s a good bit of traffic to the site now (over 70k pageviews a month).  Well… we just launched the new design (with the help of two awesome wordpress designers)… and right now I’m just working out the kinks and selling ad space like crazy.

   Check out the site << … and let me know what you think!

2. Finalizing Projects With Consulting Clients –

   Technically, right now most of my income comes from my consulting projects.  Small to medium sized companies who already have websites… but are struggling to make them drive the new clients in the door like they want, hire me to dissect their overall web presence, develop a plan to effectively market their website online (using a lot of "Web 2.0" stuff), and execute that plan.

   Anyhow, so I can focus more on my own projects I’ve decided to cut back a bit on my consulting so only about 25% of my income is consulting… and the rest is from my own internet ventures.  I’ve heard it said a few times before… the best SEO’s don’t consult… they can make more money optimizing their own websites than they can getting paid to optimize other people’s websites.  This is sooooo true.

   To me, for an internet marketing and SEO consultant… I make way more money when I apply what I know to benefit my own online businesses.  The economic model just isn’t working for me as well as a consultant unless I were to hire a staff to run the consulting company… so I could spend more time on my own projects.  I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

3. Golfing Waaayyy Too Much –

   Well… I guess I shouldn’t say way too much.  You can never get too much golf… can you?  I’ve been volunteering at a local municipal golf course here in Lake Oswego (Oregon) in exchange for free golf.  I work only 3 hours a week… but get free golf the whole summer.  Pretty good trade off for me… and I get to meet a ton of new and interesting people.

   The other day I recorded a bunch of video with my Flipcam while I was at the driving range to see what I could correct in my swing… man… after watching that video I found a couple things that will instantly change my game… I’ll keep you posted.

4. Family Stuff –

   If you don’t know me… I’m married (2 years this year) and don’t have any kids yet.  My wife is graduating from graduate schoole next month so I’m helping her wrap up some things with her school and helping to plan a little lunch get together for family after graduation.  That doesn’t take all that much time… but it’s definitely high on the priority list.

   Also, I just got back from camping in the high lakes of Oregon with cousins… and am heading to the Oregon Jamboree next week… heading down Bend and Roseburg, Oregon to go on job interviews with my wife (she’s graduating as a Physician’s Assistant) in two weeks… heading back down to Southern Oregon to camp at Emigrant Lake with family again… then after that it should be quite for a bit (I hope).

   This is what entrepreneurship is all about… doing what you want… when you want.  I wouldn’t ask for anything else.

Other than that… I’ve just been doing some "behind closed doors" projects that we’ll release later in the year in the real estate investing world.  I’m really excited about that… I’ll let you know when it’s time.

Whew!

Okay… to tell you the truth.  I really don’t expect you to care about why the heck I’ve been a slacker on this blog.  Bottom line is that I’ve been slacking big time and there’s no excuse for it.

I think a big reason for the "slackage" (I’ve trademarked that word… don’t use it is that I haven’t focuses the topic of this blog down enough. It makes it way harder to write great content when I really don’t have a specific aim behind the blog other than to promote my own brand.

The Future

The future of this blog will be two fold:

1. To further build up my own personal brand
2. To chronicle my entrepreneurial ventures, ramblings, and "life wisdom" that I pick up as I go

In the past I think I tried a bit too hard to be everything to everyone as far as marketing and the internet goes.

Guess what!  I’m not all that great at a ton of things!

So I’m going to stop writing about things that don’t put that fire in the pit of my stomache… those things that other people are way better at and that I’m just mediocre at (like web design, offline marketing, etc.).

From now on, I’m ONLY going to write about things that really inspire me and get me out of bed in the morning.

Things like:

• Entrepreneurship and helping others break the entrepreneurial hamsterwheel
• Internet marketing for honest, ethical, and cool people
• A bit of search engine optimization advice (since I’ve had a pretty damn good track record of cracking competitive search terms effectively)
• Life success ramblings as I learn the "game of life".  People can always learn from the mistakes and successes of others… so I want to share mine with the world to see if I can help to make a difference (no matter how small) in someone’s life

That’s it.

Be on the lookout… over and out!