IZEA - Filled to the Brim

New Beginnings

Contributor: David Brim May 15, 2009

We’re in the midst of the worst economy since the great depression. People are getting laid off or fired everyday and thousands of college graduates (and millions of others) across the country are struggling to find a job. With that said why in the world would I choose to quit my job now?

Allow me to explain…

First off let me say that I not only quit my job, but a job at a really great work environment with awesome people and fun/unique company culture….Where else do you ring in new hires with tequila shots, have cubicle decorating contests and plow your face into cake on your birthday & anniversary of employment? Of course I’m talking about IZEA, a top social media marketing company that operates SocialSpark, PayPerPost and more.

So the question I know many people are thinking…Why the H*ll did you quit? or What is he thinking?

Well I have always been a person that doesn’t shy away from challenges. I have also always trusted my gut, which was one of the main reasons why I moved to Orlando in the first place. I knew no-one in Florida, but something told me this was the right choice. That decision turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and over the last 2 years I’ve accomplished a great deal.

Besides trusting my gut I also moved to Orlando to be in a fertile environment to grow my own ventures. My goal has always been to create jobs for others, not be bound by an hourly job and to grow extremely wealthy in the process. Then be able to give back and help other young entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.

With these goals constantly in mind I came to the conclusion that IZEA has done all it can to assist me in reaching them at this stage in my life.

I’ve really enjoyed my time at IZEA, feel that I have learned a great deal and built relationships with a lot of great people, however now is the time for me to go hard after my goals. As time passes many people sink into a mode of comfortability and they stop striving and are content with their current situation. Though this is completely alright for some people at this point in my life this is not okay for me. At this time I have no children to pay for and no major expenses. There’s no better time for me than right now. If you desire to reach your goals no matter what they may be you have to go for it. When there’s more risk, there is a greater chance for more of a reward. In addition to that my dad taught me a long time ago that you improve and grow the most during periods of uncertainty and turmoil. If you’re not working through problems or challenges your performing not growing. I recently saw a great quote on Drew Mclellans blog: “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”

That quote really sums up how I feel and why I did what I did. I have so much of a desire to achieve my goals that fear seems very trivial in comparison. Some may call me foolish, some may call me outright stupid, but the way I see it it needed to be done. I have full confidence in my abilities and in god and know I will make it work.

Stay tuned…

More to come

IZEA’s Site Get’s An Upgrade

Contributor: David Brim April 3, 2009

I had to make a post to give props to our design & marketing team at IZEA for releasing a new version of IZEA.com. The new interface allows for so much more informative content and looks great!

By visiting IZEA’s site you can view an awesome case study on IZEA’s social media campaign for Kmart and download Forrester Research’s recent report on sponsored conversations. Another great thing that we’ve added to the new site is that you can see a list of IZEA’s clients including brands like USA Networks, 1-800 Flowers, ColdStone, Dockers, and many more. You can also view a sample of some of the premium bloggers, all of whom I’ve interacted with over the last few months and our IZEA insiders.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, what are you waiting for?

BlogWorld Expo- Las Vegas Recap by David Brim

Contributor: David Brim September 23, 2008

Ok…This is a re-cap of Blog World Expo and my Las Vegas trip. What’s funny is I didn’t even know I was going to the event until a day before. Here’s how it all went down. Last Thursday I had a meeting with Ted Murphy at our IZEA office in Orlando. We were discussing one of my projects at IZEA and then the conversation went something like this:

Ted: Hey..What are you doing this weekend?
Me: No plans really, why?
Ted: Want to go to Vegas with me tomorrow for a Conference?
Me: Hell Yeah!
I had to be up at 4:45 the next morning and our flight was at 6:50. When we got to Vegas they didn’t waste any time. There were slot machines ready to be played right after we stepped out from our gate.
We then headed to our hotel- The HardRock. Because we had no car we took cabs every where we went during our trip. I can honestly say either you love your cab driver or are totally annoyed by them. They either can’t understand english and don’t follow directions or they are really cool and have very interesting stories to tell. One cab driver we had was telling us that he always picks up hoes and that he hates it because they are so cheap. He said these hoes out here will “Crack a dude for 2 G’s ($2,000) then leave you a dollar tip.” Right after that he said “Yeah, I’ve seen all kind of crazy shit in this cab. People always get it on in the back there and I don’t even clean it up.” –> It’s a good thing he told us that just as we were getting out because we prob would have waited for another cab, even though all cabs are probably like that…Ignorance is bliss…lol

The conference was really cool. I got to see some great key notes and discussion panels on social media, SEO, monetizing your blog etc. I would say that one of my favorite speeches was done by Gary Vaynerchuk, of Wine Library TV. The best thing about attending events like this one, and IZEAFest is the networking, during the conference and after. Ted and I went to some great after party’s and got to hand out with Brian Clark, Michael Brito, Loren Feldman, Gary V, Chris Brogan, Shoe Money, Brian Solis, Pete Cashmore and many more. It was really an awesome experience and I feel some great things will come from it for IZEA.

IzeaFest Re-Cap

Contributor: David Brim September 15, 2008

After all of our preparation, the IzeaFest Conference this past weekend went extremely well. The event had some of the worlds top bloggers, marketing experts and internet moguls in attendance. Below is a brief summary of some of my favorite speakers and their accomplishments:

Michael Brito is a strategic social media marketer with 10 years of online marketing experience. He currently works for Intel managing their consumer social media and has held previous marketing positions at Yahoo!, HP and Sony Electronics. He is a really cool guy as well. We had a few drinks and hung out different times during the weekend. He also mentioned that he liked GroupTable, my start up, and even posted a link to it on his facebook account. Thanks Michael!
Brian Clark is a new media writer/producer, entrepreneur, and recovering attorney. A ten-year-veteran of Internet publishing, Clark has racked up millions of dollars in sales thanks to a mix of online educational content and direct response copywriting. He built three successful offline businesses using online marketing techniques before switching to a producer model that involves building, monetizing, and occasionally selling online media properties. His blog Copyblogger has over 37,000 subscribers and is one of the most popular in the world according to Technorati. I ultimately want to make moves like he does. He is also very down to earth and knowledgeable.
Jeremy Shoemaker went from unemployment to eight figures in only four years, Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker is a blogger’s “American dream.” Starting with absolutely, no capital he educated himself and began building ecommerce sites to earn revenue. During this time he started blogging his experiences at Shoemoney.com and then used the blog to spring board new companies like Auctionads, which had one of the most impressive launches of any online advertising company ever. Jeremy continues to launch new startups and also chronicles his adventures on his blog. Oh yeah and he had a $134k adsense check in one month…that’s unbelievable
Neil Patel is the CTO of ACS, a search engine marketing firm located in Orange County California. ACS is a full service firm that specializes in web strategy consulting, online marketing, search engine marketing, buzz/viral marketing, social media optimization, brand management, community building, design and development consulting. He is a very successful, young entrepreneur. Not to mention he is funny as hell. Def someone I could see myself hanging out with if we lived closer.
Loren Feldman is the President of 1938 Media. Loren directs the overall operations of the company and is responsible for corporate development and strategic planning. Prior to founding 1938 Media, Loren founded and published NY Hotshot magazine and was a creative director at MusicVision, an interactive advertising agency, where he developed online advertising campaigns for companies such as Nokia and Scion. He has to be the funniest video blogger on the web. Check out this video he produced of him and Jeremy Shoemaker. He also produced a funny video called Where are All the Black Tech Bloggers, def controversial, but I thought it was funny as hell…I decided to screw with him a bit and introduced myself to him at the party Thursday night and said Hi Loren…I’m a black tech blogger. Good times…lol Ne way he’s doing his thing and def has my support.
John Chow is the founder and CEO of TTZ Media Inc., an advertising network that provides shopping comparison banners to its affiliate sites. He is also the creator of John Chow dot Com, one of the most successful personal blogs on the Internet. John is best known for showing the power of blogging when he used his blog as an income case study. He took the blog from $350 per month to a over $30,000 per month in just over one year. Check out his videos at our office and on the scavenger hunt they are funny as hell.

There were a lot of other great people and speakers I met at IzeaFest as well. Here is a short list…Tamar Weinberg from Mashable, Steve Spalding from how to split an atom and groove shark, Sean Livingston (He was the MC for the event and did an awesome job!), Johnathan Dingman (Really cool kid, owner of fireside media), Merlin man who is a great speaker and entrepreneur, and Lena West a successful entrepreneur and marketing consultant. One more speaker I’ll note is Scott Allen. Though I knew Scott before, he actually did the design for GroupTable, he gave a good presentation during the blog make over session. There was a significant amount of other speakers there and all did well. Those mentioned above were those that I had a chance to meet and talk to or left a lasting impression on me. (Sorry if your excluded…I’m sure you rocked!)

Besides the conference, there was an izea party basically every night Thursday-Sat, we even had open bar on Thursday and Saturday. Below is a picture of my girlfriend Lindsay and I at the party Saturday night.

After the conference was over on Saturday we also had a scavenger hunt called IzeaHunt. I was a team leader and we had to do all kind of different things. You can see John Chow’s post & video about IzeaHunt here.

As I said the event was really a big success. Extra props to Ashley Edwards, Ted Murphy and all the speakers who really made the event an unforgettable experience.

My Silicon Valley Trip Wrap up- SES, Google Party & More

Contributor: David Brim August 23, 2008

I just got back from San Jose, California also known as Silicon Valley for the SES Conference (Search Engine Strategies). Overall I had a wonderful experience. The weather was amazing and it was surreal to be in the mecca of technology & innovation. While I was there we passed the buildings for Adobe, LinkedIn, WebEx, Google (Which I’ll get to in a bit), Yahoo, Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Intel, eBay and more.

The trip began with some turmoil, not only was there a problem with the names down on our hotel reservation, but DHL, the company that was to ship our booth…Lost it! After a few hours of going back and forth with our hotel and hotels.com (where we booked the reservation) we finally got the room situation squared away…But we still didn’t have a booth!

The trade show was in less than 12 hours…What to do?!? We called DHL, but their last update was that the booth was somewhere in Fresno California. The somewhere didn’t help and they really had no idea where it was. So Ashley and I decided to unleash our creativity. We thought the best thing to do would be to make light of the situation, so we decided to head to kinko’s, get some poster boards, markers, double sided tape and bust out some skills we learned back in elementary school. We came up with a cool slogan….”DHL didn’t deliver, But IZEA Will!”

Funny enough, the whole lack of booth really worked out well for us. It was a great conversation starter and apparently made a lot of lasting impressions- We’re number One!.

After day one of the conference Google through a great party for everyone. They shuttled buses from the convention center to their “Campus”. They really did have a Campus, equipped with Volleyball Courts, lap pools, work out facilities, several cafeterias and tons of office buildings. For the party they also had open bar, great entrees, a DJ and lots of other cool stuff going on.

The next day Ashley and I went to Santana Row for a late lunch. We had some great Mexican food food and I got to pose with my Future Car, an Aston Martin.

Later that night we went to SearchBash 2008, hosted by Bruce Clay Inc. (Internet Consultants). Another open bar and some live entertainment…

I’ll have to say that everything with the trip was great…Except for the Final Decent into Orlando. That had to have been the scariest flight of my life. Flying directly over Tropical Storm Fay was not cool…Lots of bumps and dips. If I want those thrills I’ll go to Universal. I was soooo happy to be on the ground and I know Ashley felt the same way.

Now it’s back to work in Orlando…Lots of good things coming up. Stay tuned!