Why I skipped the Traffic & Conversion Summit this year

This week, there’s a big conference (actually 2 of them) going on for the online marketing industry in San Diego. One of them is Traffic & Conversion.

I’ve been there the last several years. But, not this time.

And here’s why…

As this email is going out to you this morning, I’m busy prepping my motorhome to leave Fredericksburg, Texas to head back to Florida. Getting the inside cleaned up, hooking the bikes up, and generally getting our second home road-ready. 🙂

We were here for the RV Entrepreneur Summit, put on by Heath and Alyssa. They’re a young couple who full-time RV and have built a nice business around it.

I actually decided to skip out on the Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego in order to come out here to Texas. I’m not speaking here or anything. Just hanging out.

So, why did I come out?

For the people. Also, a cool excuse to travel to Texas in the RV. 🙂 And to get some ideas for our little hobby blog.

But, the coolest thing about this group of people isn’t their motorhomes or 5th wheels. It is that…

They’re disagreeable. 🙂

Let me explain…

Society sorta “trains” us to live a certain template. To go to school, then go to college. To acquire more and more stuff. To get a house with the white picket fence. To serve your time. To retire. Play for a little while before you die.

That’s the template.

And that template is kinda enforced by society. It takes BALLS to do something different. I talked to several people here at this conference in a campground who are full-timing and they told me about reactions from their family or parents. They were told they were wasting their life. That they had to live life according to that template. Anything else was too risky… and just plain stupid.

There are a lot of ways to do things, but if you go against the societal norm, you’ll get a few arrows in your back.

And these people here… they disagreed.

Many of them live full-time in an RV, traveling the country. Others aspire to do that. Sure, there are difficulties that come with that. For many, chief among them is how they’re going to PAY for it. There were a lot of online businesses here at this conference, too, because you can take those businesses on the road.

But, I love hanging out with the disagreeable. The misfits. The people who decided to live life by a different set of rules.

We listened to a young lady named Abby who was the youngest girl to ever kayak the entire Grand Canyon. She was only 12. She’s now 13 and just one of the smartest, most engaging 13-year olds I’ve met. She and her parents live in a Winnebago van and travel all over the place. My daughter got to hang out with Abby and she was inspired. Not to kayak the canyon, mind you. 🙂 But, she was impressed with Abby and found her really inspirational.

And these guys never stand still. Literally, in many cases. Their homes literally have wheels and they live where they park. Strangely, my wife and I felt like a minority here in that we don’t live full-time in our motorhome. We spend a ton of time out on the road, but we still have a sticks-and-bricks home back in Florida.

Anyway…

As it says right on the Blog Marketing Academy homepage…

I decided that the 9-5 and life in a cubicle wasn’t for me. Not everybody is cut out for it. There are people in this world who want to make the world better by traveling a different road and following their own rules.

I’m here for those people. Blog Marketing Academy is here for those people. And to the extent that they choose online business as their path to achieving that, that’s my mission.

That’s why I came out here and didn’t go to San Diego to hang out with a bunch of marketers.

Don’t get me wrong, there are great people in San Diego right now for T&C. This is the first year in several that I haven’t attended that conference.

But…

Hanging out with a bunch of RV misfits around some campfires, drinking some scotch (yeah, we were bad) and listening to some people sing and talk about things other than business…

That was more my style this year. 🙂

Whether you’re interested in RVs or not, I’m here to help you disagree. It is why I’m such a believer in online business. It separates your time from your money and makes you independent of your location, setting your own schedule.

And what you choose to do with that is up to you. 🙂

– David