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It Is official CNN has just confirmed that Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden is Senator Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick. Text messages will be going out sometime Saturday morning. I guess the mass text message approach just isn’t as fast as old fashion reporting.

Update 0: It is all over the web now. Even wikipedia has it “On August 22, 2008, the Associated Press reported from an anonymous source that Biden has been selected by presumptive Democratic nominee for president Barack Obama to be his running mate as the Democratic nominee for Vice President of the United States.” and they sited yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/veepstakes;_ylt=AjGbUgn_I1l0zlRhA3K64_ms0NUE. So much for not preempting the text message. I wonder if we will ever find out who leaked it, or if they would have been watching Sen. Biden house anyway when the Secret Service showed up.

Pat Lovell and Sean Roach presenting a prize to Solomon Huey

So I am back from the Focus marketing seminar in DC, and I now own like 168 shares of GotAccess.com, maybe .0005% of the company. So hopefully when GotAccess goes big and sells for billions of dollars to Google or someone I will be able to cash in and make several thousand dollars, but for now I can only dream.

GotAccess is currently in Beta until October 31, 2008, however once there are more people on the platform and they start adding all kind of new features GotAccess could easily be positioned to surpass many of the social networking sites currently on the web. In fact Sean Roach, the Chairman and founder, envisions GotAccess as a whole new way of using the Internet; a web 3.0 platform if you will. The best thing about GotAccess is that since they have a number of premium levels of membership which they charge for they had no need to sell your data and say so in their terms of service. They also have clubs you can setup with 10 levels of access so you can have a lot more flexibility in deciding what to keep private from whom.

Sean is an incredibly energetic person, and yet still very down to earth. He spoke to my friend Tim Linden and I about the elections and a number of other topics. From what he told us along with the many of the other concepts he discussed from the stage I can tell he is very actively thinking about many things and is a very insightful person. Some of the things he taught us were concepts such as own nothing and control everything, and that you need to have a can do attitude.

Accordingly, his favorite phrase this past weekend I would say was “shameful bronze”, although he did use his trademark phrase “get off your duff” a few times. He had a very good point with shameful bronze. It had to do with the fact that Michael Phelps is known by everyone, but very few people know the names of the other swimmers who have come in second and especially third behind him. They are basically forgotten, however if they were able to get a Gold medal in one of those races they would be remembered as the person that beat Michael Phelps. Essentially this means there is no middle ground you either win or you lose.

I met a ton of people in DC from all over the world; most are actively involved in Internet marketing and other financial fields. So hopefully someone will need photography services, and be willing to pay a little bit of money for my services. Even if I do not get some new clients just getting some great ideas on Internet marketing should also help me to have better financial success.

I saw a lot of people pay good money for many of the programs that the various speakers were selling. Many of them were indeed very enticing, although as I said before I was able to resist the deals because I simply did not have the money to spend on the program.

It was really a different experience for me, since I do not come from a marketing background; and my experience with seminars is more collegiate in nature. The main difference that kind of bothered me was the speakers were unable to reference some basic information, either because of a contractual agreement, or because it was proprietary or some kind of a trade secret. Some of the things that they could not mention was in one case a person’s last name and in another where leads were being generated from; there were also other various details about their products that some of them could not mention. Now this does not mean their products were bad or anything. In fact, I believe most of them genuinely had good products to offer. What does it mean then? It just means that if you are like me you will be dying to know the details, and it will be hard for you to sit there guessing, as I know it was hard for me to tell exactly what they were offering sometimes. If you cannot afford the product you feel sort of like a horse having a carrot dangled in front of you only being allowed a few nibbles of it. There were of course some good nuggets of wisdom that almost every speaker sprinkled in, but there was clearly a major focus on building up a reputation and an anticipation for their products.

Most of the speakers were amazing orators, and were good at presenting just enough information to tickle your appetite for the product, and I am sure most of them did have good products. If not learning form their presentations is valuable in itself. However, for me when someone tells me they are making a lot of money from their product it leads me think that they will be charging a lot of money for their product and their time and be out of my reach more than I want that too, especially when they are selling things such as coaching sessions too.

Overall, I believe the seminar was beneficial, although I was disappointed with some of the content, such as large number of speakers that mentioned the book “The Secret”, and even some that mentioned working with the movie. I have looked at the book and find some of the concepts presented in “The Secret” are flat out wrong. For example the book claims that people who suffer tragedy such as the Holocaust victims are somewhat responsible, because they are on the same wavelength or something of that nature. I cannot accept that bad things only happen to people because they are thinking wrong. Sometimes bad things do happen to people, because someone else was doing wrong. However, I think I can see what the speakers were geting at and agree with them on the point that even though something bad might have happened to you you in the past you cannot hold a victim mentality; you must move on and forgive. Your focus has to keep coming back to positive things, even when addressing negatives you got to keep coming back to a positive and uplifting mindset.

So now that I have probably violated all the rules of marketing, which I just learned, and laid it all out reveling almost everything to you. I have to say that if you go to their next seminar it will certainly surpass your expectations, and that I believe the positives are far higher than the negatives. Nonetheless, you do to a large extent get out what you put into to it. For example if you do not take the initiative to meet with and talk to people your benefit may not be as great. You will learn the importance taking action, and steping out or miss out.

Hopefully you can now see I am not trying to push this seminar on you and not trying to hard sell it. If you have been thinking about going I really think you should, and I recommend that you do go to the next one if at all possible.

Despite the focus on selling their products they will not be down on you if you don’t buy. They will still talk to you and share their knowledge, and will even still give you the VIP treatment. When the speakers are not trying to sell their products you get a unique opportunity to pick their minds and really get some insider knowledge. Also it is an amazing opportunity to form new friendships and connections, you may even get a chance to win some of the speakers products, and even if you buy nothing you most certainly will leave with a bunch of free material, books, business cards, and maybe even some cash; making the event well worth your time and money.

You sign up by following the link below.

I am currently attending a Focus Marketing Seminars event in DC and really enjoying the DC area. I am learning some useful information, but much of it is very familiar such as the fact that bad news sells. So for bad part there have been a number of speakers selling things, which I simply have no money for or am not really interested in. To be honest for many of the products the cost is simply prohibitive for me. However, if I do not listen then I will lose my chance to win money; I learned this the hard when my name was drawn before I returned from lunch, and I lost some sheet money from the Bureau of Engraving. This was despite the fact that I was back within exactly 1 hour, which was the original amount of time lunch was going to be. Normally I can eat in 15 minutes, but when you need to go three blocks in the DC underground to find food it takes time. On the plus side I am getting some little tit bits of information and hopefully some ideas on how to seriously improve my online marketing. Nonetheless, the best part is the fact that I get to form connections with people from all over the world through networking and hopefully find some new photography clients and/or maybe move into some advertising business. Focus Marketing Seminars has really grown, with Pat Lovell and Sean Roach announcing a UK event for Focus Marketing Seminars just the other day. Last night was very interesting going to a Hibachi restaurant three blocks away from the Crystal City Marriott with a 17 other people all involved in traffic exchanges and so forth. If you see me ask me for a password to view the photographs from the event on our RIPhoto.com website here