Cameron Olthuis

There seems to be a common theme around the Internet marketing community lately about the conferences just not being that valuable anymore. Speaker quality has gone down, attendee numbers are so high that you can’t effectively network, and once you’ve already been, the value just isn’t there anymore because you just keep meeting the same people and hearing the same presentations.

Every once in awhile, there’s a special conference that comes around that you just can’t logically miss. SMX did it when Danny Sullivan broke away from SES and provided a better experience by paying attention to the details. ThinkTank did it when DK went outside the box and brought a small group of doers to the beach in San Diego for a weekend of play and low-pressure (yet high-quality) networking. I believe Blueglass is doing this with a conference agenda that’s both unique and packed with accomplished Internet superheroes. Not to mention the quality of attendees that makes networking here a severe opportunity cost to miss out on.

Let me just put it this way; if you can’t get at a minimum, 10x direct ROI, from attending Blueglass LA, you should just quit the Internet altogether. It just isn’t for you.

Register here, enter code cam15 and you’ll get an extra 15% off. I don’t make any money from you registering but my friends running this event will probably like me more and maybe even buy me a drink.

See you there!

We’ve been working on this for a long time now so I am very excited that we’ve finally launched 5ones Earth. Big ups to all of the 5ones team for their hardwork and dedication.

Earth is an interactive map for surf, skate and snow spots as well as pro shops and company headquarters. It’s almost like local search for action sports. Check it out…

I never open email forwards but my mom sent this to me and when I noticed the word tax in the subject line, I opened and read….

Tax Poem

Be sure to read all the way to the end!

Tax his land,
Tax his bed,
Tax the table
At which he’s fed.

Tax his tractor,
Tax his mule,
Teach him taxes
Are the rule.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes I forget I still have a blog. I guess that’s because a lot my thoughts are now going on Twitter. No need to write a whole blog post when I can just say it in 140 characters or less.

My Twitter handle is @factive, so follow me there if you still care about my thoughts.

I will still be posting here about as infrequently as I ever have… Whenever I have deeper thoughts that I want to expand on.

There are a couple products I’ve received lately that I want to show my appreciation for…

New Laptop Battery
I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a few years now. So it was no surprise that a few months ago my battery went to complete crap. It was basically at the point where if the power cord got disconnected, the laptop powered off. Apparently I’m lucky that I even got the few years out of it that I did. From my understanding, it’s completely normal for laptop batteries to start going bad after roughly 300 cycles. Well, lucky for me, I have a client who sells replacement batteries so it was easy for me to just call him and up and ask for a replacement. It wasn’t something he had to do for me though and when he sent me a new one, he didn’t ask for anything out of it. And to my pleasant surprise, the replacement battery for my MacBook Pro actually works better than my original Apple battery ever did… and that’s pretty cool.

Surf Art
I was pretty stoked the other day when the UPS guy showed up with a package at my door and I opened it up to find this….

It’s a killer painting from Hawaiian Surf Artist, Clark Takashima. Perfect, I’ve been needing some nice surf art. And again, something that was sent to me with no expectations. Clark is someone I’ve developed a friendship with over email in the last year. Never in a million years was I expecting him to send me one of his paitings. I love it though and it will look perfect in my office. Thanks Clark!!

Maybe it should be the other way around (what business can teach you about surfing), since I learned to entrepreneur before I learned to surf. Either way, I came across a couple of blog posts this morning about surfing lessons for entrepreneurs and felt as both an entrepreneur and surfer, I should also blog about this subject. Here are 5 things about entrepreneurship that I learned from surfing (or vice-versa).

1) Patience – It takes a long time to learn to surf, it’s hard and one should not expect to be ripping waves their first day out. Same with building a business. It’s an exercise in patience. If you think you’ll be successful overnight, you’re sadly mistaken my friend. You will fall a lot at first but the more you do it the better you will get.

2) Thinking fast – No two waves are exactly alike. Every way breaks differently and when you’re riding a wave you always need to be making split second decisions. This is a skill that’s required in business too. You can’t predict exactly how the wave of your business will break so be ready to make decisions and adapt on the fly.

3) Positioning – This is pretty much what the other two articles I referenced above talk about. With surfing, you’re relying on so many elements to come together to make a surfable wave. When then do, you need to be positioned correctly to catch that wave. The same thing with business. Lots of waves will come your way, be in position and be ready to ride the good waves.

4) Wave selection – Being in the right position to catch a wave is one thing. Catching the right wave is another thing. As a surfer, you learn to read the shape of the waves as they’re coming in. If you pick the wrong wave it might close out on you and there will be no where to go. Like I mentioned in the point above, pick the good waves to ride. In business you need to learn to recognize and pick the right waves that you can ride to success. Get on the wrong wave and you might put your business in a position that it has no where to go.

5) Competition – There are a lot of surfers competing for the same waves as you, just like there are a lot of entrepreneurs competing in the same marketplace as you. If you don’t get aggressive while surfing and take waves, there are a hundred other surfers in the lineup who will paddle right around you and do so. In business, if you don’t jump on the opportunities presented to you, there are a hundred other people waiting who will. I love surfing next to the candy-ass surfers who aren’t aggressive, that way I can take all the waves I want. I also love competing in marketplaces where candy-ass entrepreneurs don’t leverage the opportunities that come their way, that way I can and I will.

If you’re a surfer, I’d love to hear some of things surfing has taught you about business.

I am reading a great post about not selling out on your blog that I found through a post on Shoe’s blog. It’s something that I feel compelled to write about because it’s something I’ve struggled with ever since starting this blog 3 years ago. For the longest time, since people started reading this blog, I felt that I needed to please my readers and write things I thought they would be interested in. I have a mix of readers who are professional colleagues as well as personal friends and family. Who can I possibly please both audiences? I tried once, and it burned me out really fast.

Then one day, a light went off in my head and I thought… You know what, I don’t want my main focus to be building traffic, or increasing RSS readers, or any of that. Screw that stuff. This blog has my name on it and I just want to keep it real and write about things I want to write about and as often as I want to write about them. Sometimes that means I’m writing about stuff that relates to my career and sometimes that means I write about surfing, or taking a vacation, or whatever.

I honestly don’t care if this blog ever makes a cent, that’s not my intention with it. I don’t care if people read it or not. If you do want to read it, that’s great. I am stoked on that. But just be warned that I’m going to write what I want to write about – and they might not be exactly what you want to read about.

My traffic and RSS subscribers stopped increasing on this site a long time ago. And that’s just perfectly cool with me. I have enough other sites that I work my ass off on to increase traffic. This is my personal outlet and that’s they way it will always be.