Ipod University

Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs have two major challenges in my opinion. They need to constantly be learning and they have very little free time. I have struggled with this issue for a while. I don’t have time to read entire books and in contrast spend a relatively short time watching TV. At the same time I love to learn new things, read about new ideas, and about interesting people. I loved going to the bookstore and finding the latest business or marketing book but realized that I had acquired a library of partially read books.

For Christmas a few years ago my wife bought me an ipod. How cool! I filled almost 20 gigs of music and with my FM modulator (plays the music through your car speakers) I could listen to all of my music without having to cart around all those CD’s. Life was good. However those books remained unread…

One day while looking for music to download, I came across some audio files by Tony Robbins (the self help guru) I downloaded them. The information was interesting. I can’t say that I agreed with everything the man said but he got me thinking. I liked getting information this way. I found more files and began listening to them while I jogged in the morning. The audio files were fragmented meaning that you would get a chapter in a book but not the entire thing. I went back to the bookstore and bought an audio book and loaded it on to my ipod. This was great! I was finally reading books while I ran in the morning or drove in my car. I decided I would purchase a new audio book every paycheck. I mean this was really an investment in my continuing education.

At this point I realized just how much time I actually spend in my car. (outside advertising sales rep) I was going through the audio book in just a couple of days and then had to wait till the next paycheck to get another. (audio books are spendy) I needed more. I was craving more information.

Finally, I found it. simplyaudiobooks.com This site lets you rent audio books similar to netflicks. They send you two or three audio-book (depending on your plan) and you keep them as long as you want and when you return them they send you more. Heaven!!! I have been using this service for about two years now and you would not believe how many books I’ve gone through. As soon as the audio book arrives I load it on to my Ipod and send the CD’s back.

At this point I am a happy guy. However, the audio book service just can not seem to get them to me fast enough and I constantly found myself running out of books to listen to. By now I am addicted. It just does not feel right to drive without having a voice talking to me, feeding me information, or telling me a story. That’s when I discovered the new drug that would consume the rest of my waking hours of audio desires. Podcasts. I don’t know how many podcasts I subscribe to now but lets just say I could listen to my them 24/7 and never run out. ever… If you are not familiar with podcasts, I not sure I can describe them a do them justice. Basically they are like radio shows. However anyone can produce one. If you have some basic recording equipment you can broadcast yourself to the world. The coolest thing about the podcasts is that if you subscribe to one, the newest shows automatically download to your ipod every-time to sync it to your computer. There are some news podcasts that are updated daily. So if you update your ipod every AM, you can have current news in your car that you can pause and listen to again if you want. It’s like TIVO for your radio.

So you may be asking, why is this in a small business marketing blog. Well I believe that most small business owners like me don’t have time to read or watch the news before work. So this is a suggestion to all small business owners or anyone else. Make an investment in yourself and go get an ipod and sign up for an audio book club. There are so many books that will help you to run your business more effectively and give you ideas that you can implement.

Thanks to Sterling and Jay

As my first post I would like to give thanks to Sterling and Jay from Internet Business Mastery. Their podcast and news letter inspired me to come to WordPress and start a blog. Anyone interested in web marketing should visit thier website internetbusinessmastery.com. Sign up for their newsletter and they will send you a link to download a cool little program called ‘freemind’. This is a mindmapping program that helps you develop ideas by brainstorming. I have used to the program to help me begin to develop my small business marketing company. I hope to use this blog to document my process of making this business come to life and hopefully include some information that small business owners can use.