As you can see, my blog updates have been infrequent of late. I would like to change that.

If you are an introverted entrepreneur, or if you know a good introverted entrepreneur who has a great story about how you’ve produced results in your business without doing icky sales stuff, I’d love to hear from you. I’m sure that my RSS readers would like to hear your story as well.

Some things to think about:

1. Have you gotten customers or clients who found your web site? How have you made this happen?

2. Have you been successful getting referral business? How could someone else do what you did?

3. Do you have any amusing stories about how NOT to sell?

I’d love to publish your stories on here. If you have a great story, please e-mail me.

They say a good overnight success is two years in the making (or something like that). I’m now starting to see what they meant by that. Specifically, I just did my first workshop this past Saturday with Alice Osborn, and while it was exhausting to put together, it was well worth the effort. We’re now doing a second workshop in February.

There are several reasons why this is going to be a lot easier the second time around:

1. I partnered with several people to put this together, and we got the wrinkles smoothed out.

2. I documented how I ran the workshop with an instructor’s manual.

3. I got some great feedback from the participants about how to improve it.

4. Alice collected video testimonials, which we’ll be posting online in the very near future.

5. During the process of making call-outs for the first workshop, we found a number of people who were very interested in attending but couldn’t make the time and date work. In other words, we’re coming out of the gate with some hot leads pre-loaded.

6. Rose Wilson of Wilson Marketing helped me get my sales calls done. Look at the title of my web page. I’m not good at that sales stuff. I realized I needed to bite the bullet and hire somebody.

The main point here, though, is that it’s always easier the second time around. You don’t have to figure it all out the second time, and you don’t have to drum up interest from scratch the second time.

This is basically a shout-out to all startup entrepreneurs who aren’t making money yet. Less than 2 years ago, I was right where you are. It gets much better, and it happens very quickly. All you have to do is stick in the game and stay in action.

2009 was a great year to be an Introverted Entrepreneur.

While a large chunk of the planet was wallowing in doom and gloom about the economy, some of us simply realized that the rules of the game were different than before. It’s a lean, mean economy now. Being mediocre is no longer sufficient to pay the bills. Being great is now a matter of survival. Going after your passion and your dream is no longer something you can afford to put off until “someday.” If you aren’t doing something because you absolutely love it, people won’t give you the time of day and you’ll go broke.

For me, it took most of 2009 to get that through my thick skull. But now, I’m fired up and ready to play. I’m now planning my books for the rest of the year. Let’s just say that they look a little different than they did when I wrote Pied Piper Entrepreneurship, but I’m basically on track with my original plan.

The next book, I think, will be about writing a team book. The clincher: is there any integrity in trying to write it by myself?

Details to come.

My latest book, Get That Book Out of Your Head, is in its infant stages of marketing. The classical solopreneur’s challenge has shown up once again. How does one market a book with a shoestring budget?I thought you might appreciate this little trick. I killed two birds with one stone. My laptop has a tendency to overheat if it’s placed directly on top of a hard surface with no space underneath it. When I’m at coffee shops, I typically prop up my laptop to create some air flow under its hottest components. A thin book works well for this.A picture is worth 1,000 words. Hey, it’s got to grab some eyeballs, right?

I’ve just recently put up a Facebook Fan Page for my new book, Get That Book Out of Your Head! We’ll see how this works.One thing that I’ve noticed right off the bat, from an introverted entrepreneur’s perspective; I felt bolder about shamelessly promoting a Facebook Fan Page than I do when it comes to most things. I still staunchly refuse to “select all” and send. That is just sloppy. I hand-picked everyone who received an invitation to become a fan of the book, and I ended up with just over 150 people. For me, that’s a lot.I even had hesitations about doing this. However, with people on all sides consistently criticizing me for not self-promoting enough, I figure that I’m in no imminent danger of being marked as a spammer. So, I bit the bullet and clicked “send.”I wonder if I should be less sensitive and just start sending e-blasts for every dang old thing. That’s what a lot of people are doing, and it still works.If anything remarkable happens on my Facebook Fan Page that you can easily copycat, I’ll be sure and post it here.

If you think that you don’t have time to write a book, time compression is possible. Think of it like de-fragging your hard drive or consolidating all of the ketchup bottles.

With an embarrassingly-slow typing speed of 25 words per minute, you’d think that it would take me an eternity to write a book. The fact: it took me a grand total of 55 hours to finish a 138-page book, and I didn’t even break a sweat. How I know this: I tracked my time throughout the project. I included all of the time that I spent brainstorming, outlining, writing, editing, and doing miscellaneous stuff. I used a simple Excel spreadsheet to do my time tracking.

Part of why this went so well: I scheduled 2 hour blocks of time to shut out the world. The cell phone got turned off, and I didn’t even let myself entertain the thought of checking e-mail, checking my Facebook page, or indulging in any other such mind-numbing time-wasters. If I even got up to take a bathroom break, I noted this in my spreadsheet.

The lesson I took away from this: we tend to egregiously overestimate the amount of time things take. Take that into account when deciding whether or not you have time for something.

If you’ve gone to leads groups or Chamber events, you’ve probably noticed that you can’t learn very much about someone in 30 seconds. Also, a roomful of strangers trying to sell you stuff you don’t need isn’t usually the most conducive environment to building real business relationships. If you’re a classic introvert, you might even find this setup somewhat intimidating.

If you’ve been attending business networking groups for awhile, you may have heard of a “one-on-one.” The basic idea is that you meet for coffee with another business owner for 30 to 60 minutes and get to know each other’s businesses a little better. This has value to an extent. You can build relationships this way if you meet with the right people. One obvious drawback: you can’t meet with everybody one-on-one.

The “think tank” is a middle-of-the-road option. The basic idea: get 3 to 7 people together for 2 to 3 hours and brainstorm about how to help each other more proactively. I’ve done this now a few times, and I’ve learned some things about how to do them effectively.

1. Pick the right people.

2. Make sure it’s the right combination of people. Pair up people who are most likely to be glad they met.

3. Send out one-line e-mails introducing the participants to each other beforehand.

4. Summarize your findings and send them out to everyone in an e-mail after the fact.

As I develop this model, I will be sharing what I learn. I’ve already found that it’s an easy way to get introverts talking and start stimulating team thinking.

Note: I’ve never posted a “theme of the month” before, and may never do so again.

I always remember my sales trainers and coaches telling me that the key to success is consistent action. Pick an action plan, and execute it consistently over time. So they said. These past few months, I’ve really begun to doubt the wisdom of this. I have noticed that it’s easy to get consistently crappy results, or a consistent lack of results whatsoever. But on the few occasions when I felt like I’d hit a homerun, it didn’t happen as a result of anything I’d done consistently.

I’ve decided to start acting like consistency doesn’t matter. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve always been acting that way. Granted, there are some things we can’t avoid doing consistently (breathing, etc.) But it’s the inconsistent spikes of unpredictable fun that make life juicy, as far as I’m concerned. Besides, with my self-diagnosed ADHD - look at that bird! - consistency is pretty boring.

I’ll be putting out my first newsletter issue soon. I may be publishing my newsletters at highly irregular intervals. We’ll see.

I’ve decided that as my business expands and I become involved with more and more groups, e-mail is just not cutting it. I was hoping that Facebook and Twitter would solve the problem, but they’ve been inadequate. Don’t get me wrong; the ability to put out a status message to 600+ people at one time has had its benefits, but you have to be careful not to abuse this level of permission. If you keep putting irrelevant, over-promotional, or uninteresting things into people’s feeds, they’ll hide your posts (or just ignore you). I haven’t found a great solution to this.

When it comes to e-mail, this hasn’t been ideal, either. I’m not going to e-blast everybody every time I have something to share. I’m not going to copy 200 people on an e-mail in the hopes of getting 5 of them to respond. That just doesn’t work either.

I’ve decided to start using blogs in a new way. For example, I’m involved with a training program with Landmark Education, and there are over 800 people in the program with me in North America. I am going to have a lot of things to say to this community over the next year. I was thinking of posting something on this blog, but I was concerned about diluting my core message. This blog is my place to be fully transparent about what I’m up to.

So, I created a new blog just for the training program. I may create other blogs like this for other groups if this goes well.

If you’ve ever read “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, you’re familiar with the idea of a “big, hairy, audacious goal,” or “BHAG” for short. So, I’ve devised six such goals for the next year.

(If you’re in the Landmark Team Management and Leadership Program, these are my Team 2 Games in the World. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, check out http://LandmarkEducation.com/)

Here are my BHAG’s:

1. Creating an entrepreneurial household. This will look like a team of 10-20 entrepreneurs moving into a 3,000 - 5,000 square foot home and renovating it to facilitate 24/7 obsession with collective labors of love. I’m thinking this will include an espresso bar downstairs.

2. A creative sales training retreat. This will be based on training people to use their creative faculties to sell their stuff in a new way that they devise. It might look like, for example, selling insurance policies by singing vintage Zeppelin tunes to a ukulele on a street corner in Manhattan with brochures in the ukulele case.

3.  A #1 best-selling self-published book. This might be my next book (”Get That Book Out of Your Head” - subtitled “…and onto the shelves”). Or, it might be a book that I work with a client to create. In any case, an idea will be born out into the world this year in a big way. I’m also putting out the intention that either I or the author with whom I work will receive an offer to buy the motion picture rights.

4.  A 33% reduction in the number of cars on the road worldwide. Don’t ask me how I’m going to pull this off. I will do it primarily by writing, I think. But part of the plan is to show people the hidden benefits of carpooling (beyond gas/wear and tear savings). I’m referring to the relationships that develop when people spend time together in a car, as opposed to five people making long commutes in five separate cars. This is doable. Just look how many times you see bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic, with one person in each car. I rest my case.

5. A skill-building video game. This was inspired by “Guitar Hero.” I was thinking, what if somebody made a game like this, which could teach people how to play a real guitar? I’m thinking if I could have my way, I’d make a video game to teach people how to learn foreign languages. But the criteria is that it has to be as addictive and fun as the most mind-numbing shoot-em-up games that people use to rot their brains.

6. Mastery of lucid dreaming. This was inspired by Timothy Ferriss’s blog post, where he discusses how he trained with a professional wrestler in his sleep. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, and haven’t made it a priority. By this time next year, I will be doing it nightly, along with a power team of out-of-the-box thinking entrepreneurs.

If you are interested in being part of any of these things, or know someone who might be, please shoot me an e-mail. Writer at Dave dash (”-”) Baldwin dot c0m.