This time next week, I’ll be watching a beautiful sunset over the beaches of Tamarindo, Costa Rica. Except I’m not going for vacation, I’m moving to Tamarindo, Costa Rica.

The motivation to move to Tamarindo, Costa Rica was peaked in early June when I had went there for a one week surf vacation. It was one of the most epic trips of my life.

It’s biggest attraction to me was the laid back and happy feeling you get from all the locals. They are extremely nice and welcoming. Two words some up the people in Tamarindo, “Pura Vida“! Which directly translates into Pure Life.

This was a big decision in my life. I gave up a high paying position at a tech start up in Boston, MA to make this move because that’s not the life I wanted. My primary purpose for getting into internet marketing lifestyle design in the first place. I didn’t spend years of sacrificing to sit at a desk in a city that didn’t interest me.

Moving to Tamarindo, Costa Rica is the first step in designing the lifestyle that I’ve been working towards for so long. I’m ready to escape the hustle and bustle of the big cities, negative news, limiting thoughts from friends and most of all, the lack of surfing.

Moving to Tamarindo, Costa Rica will allow me to focus on my business in a stress free and laid back environment that I need to thrive. I’m a very chill kind of person and the lifestyle in Costa will be a perfect fit with my personality.

Goals

I’ve put together a small list of things I want to accomplish while there:

• Learn to dance (Latin American Style)
• Speak fluent Spanish
• Become a really good surfer
• See a Volcano up close
• Experience a new culture and live it
• Get in the best shape of my life
• Run everyday
• Train to fight
• Go through a surf training program

And that’s what I got so far.

Invitation

My place in Tamarindo, Costa Rica will have an extra bedroom that is open to anyone that’s interested in visiting. We can mastermind business while surfing the perfect waves at Witch’s Rock and drinking Imperials at the bar.

If you’re interested in visiting, just let me know and let’s make it happen. See you soon hopefully.

If you haven’t heard the news yet, Traffic Geyser’s Mike Koenigs is relaunching his local marketing consulting coaching program under the name Main Street Marketing Machines. His last coaching program, Firepower, has apparently had outstanding results which he will share this week.

As I’m sure you’re aware, one of my primary businesses is working with local Internet marketing clients. It was not an easy business to start. There were a lot of mistakes and learning from trial and error. In fact, I’m still working on building my systems to be perfect.

Main street marketing machines will help you cut your learning curve tremendously. Instead of learning from trial and error, main street marketing machines gives you proven systems to make it easy to start your own business the right way from the beginning.

One of the best things about Main street marketing machines is that it covers every facet of starting a consulting business. Main street marketing machines has you covered. It’s basically a franchise without the franchise fees. Just like McDonald’s sells its franchise owners a system that provides predictable results, Main street marketing machines does the same exact thing.

Main street marketing machines will provide you with everything that you need to meet the goals that they have for you, which is 10 weeks of coaching to make $10,000 and 10 weeks or less. In my experience, this seems like a very realistic goal that you can hit if you’re willing to implement and do everything you have to do to make it work.

One of the main reasons why I think this is a realistic goal is because every time I go to a local business owner and explain to him what I can do they inevitably are amazed. They’ve been buried in their business for the last decade. They know the internet’s there, but they have no idea that they can use it to gain customers on a daily basis. That’s where we come in at that’s where Main Street Marketing Machines will help you help them.

if you are interested in getting Main street marketing machines to start a local marketing consulting business, you should check out my Main street marketing machines bonus that I’m offering to help you reach your goals quicker. If you have any questions also about local Internet marketing, you’re more than free to contact me at any time.

This is the story about how I created two separate short lived EBay businesses that could have been leveraged into a sustainable model, but I wasn’t paying attention to the possibilities that were right in front of my eyes. Two lessons learned!

EBAY “Information King”

This was my first eye opener into the world of selling information. I had found an info product that came on CD that came with resale rights. It was a list of wholesale and drop ship companies with extra stuff included. To tell you truth, I think I glanced at the titles and that was it.

When I got the CD, I made a seller account, made a sales page and I was in business. I was selling the CD for a few bucks and charging inflated shipping and handling fee. When it was said and done, I was profiting close to a $10 profit for every CD that I sold. Figured I could sell 1 or 2 a day for some extra money. Never in a million years did I expect what was about to happen.

I can’t remember exactly how long it took, but it wasn’t long before I was taking daily trips to the Post Office and dropping off boxes full of CD sleeves. I couldn’t believe what was happening. My daily income was close to $100/day. This lasted for about 2 months and then bam. Everybody and their brothers were doing the same exact thing and my business crashed faster than I could blink.

I wasn’t prepared for that. Didn’t give much thought to the fact that others would end up doing what I did. My main flaw with this business was that I didn’t grow it out to eBooks or a website. This would have been a perfect opportunity to establish a list of information buyers. I wasn’t growing and learning more, which ultimately killed my business. Could you imagine how big my list could be right now if I had done this?

Drop ship EBay Business

My next online business was also on EBay. This time I was using some of the information in the CDs I was selling to start a profitable drop shipping business using EBay to sell the products. At this point, I still didn’t understand the value of having a site of my own, but I sold quite a few things on EBay and made some decent money using this model. The primary products that I sold were electronics.

The process was actually quite simple.

1. Research the products that I had access to on EBay to see what they were selling for and how well they were moving. Target profit margin was always at least 20% or I wouldn’t touch it.
2. Find the best selling copy and “swipe it”. I wouldn’t completely copy it, but I would use the same format and information to sell my products. Don’t change what’s not broken.
3. Sell it and then put information into drop ship account.
4. Post sale customer service.

I had this down to a science. I was moving tens of thousands of dollars in a month’s time. Again, like the last two businesses I failed to learn to grow this into my own site. At the time, it just didn’t make since to me to do such a thing. Once people started to find my source, prices fell dramatically and profit margins went right out the window. And another business was up in smokes.

My first profitable internet business was in high school when a friend of mine showed me this computer game called “Ultima Online”. It was a multi player role playing game that had tons of players. They would beef up their characters and basically act as if they were the character. My first thought was “Why would anyone play this dumb game that you can’t beat?”

But with me being as curious as I am had to know more before I completely wrote it off. So I sat there and watched my buddy make trades, talk to people and start fights. The most interesting thing to me was the trading part of it. People would trade goods at a market in the game and people would have little stores set up in the game.

Naturally, this caught my attention rather quickly. I asked all about the trading resources part and how all that worked. He explained everything to me the best he could, but one thing that he said to me that really peaked my interest was that people were paying real money for these virtual resources. I couldn’t believe my ears. People were paying to get items that weren’t real?

So I went home and did some research. Come to find out, people were paying very good money for certain assets in the game. There it was waiting for me. An eager market that spent all their time playing this game and when they wanted something they acted quickly.

The very next day, I went to my friend’s house to get the CD-Rom for the game to install it on my computer and he gave me a character that was already paid for. And I was in business.

They used “UO Gold” to buy things in the game and the only way to get it was trade something or play for it. I started with 2 or 3 items and started buying and selling things in the game, building up a pile of this “UO Gold”. Then I found out that I could buy “UO Gold” for $20 a million on EBAY then go into the game and buy game assets with the gold that I could sell for way more on EBAY.

This kept on for almost a year and I was making anywhere from 2k – 3k a month for playing a game and making simple trades. It was a dream come true for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. The game lost a lot of players with the development of new games and the market became too saturated. But for about 4 months, I was making more in one week than a lot of my friends were making in a month.

My only regret is that I didn’t make an information product explaining how I did what I did and how others could do it too. Definitely could have made me some more money with less effort and since the market was becoming saturated anyway, this could of given me an opportunity to diversify. This was a big lesson learned.

Yesterday, Wednesday May 6th, 2009, I spent the day following and watching some of the world’s best golfers practice for the upcoming tournament, The Players Championship. This tournament is played yearly at the TPC of Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra, FL, just south of Jacksonville. The course is in awesome shape! We were there so early we actually got to see the grounds crew still mowing and rolling the greens for the day.

Empty Parking Lot

Grounds Crew at TPC of Sawgrass

Tiger Woods at the TPC

We arrived at the course right when they opened the gates at 7AM and ran to where we knew Tiger Woods was playing and ended up finding him on the 11th tee box. He was playing his practice round with Jim Furyk and Nick Watney.

Jim Furyk at TPC

On the 11th tee, Tiger tried a new driver and drove it short down the left side of the fairway. One of the funniest comments of the day was in the 11th fairway, when Furyk came over to his ball, he picked up Tiger’s short tee shot, threw him the ball and told Tiger to throw that driver away because he couldn’t even out drive him with it.

They really had a lot of fun and joked with each other quite often throughout their practice round. It was fun seeing them on a non-competition day and how they interact without the pressure and seriousness.

Maurice Jones-Drew Autograph

On the 13th hole, we got to see the 4th highest paid running back in the NFL, Maurice Jones-Drew following and watching Tiger Woods. Mojo is short, but he is big. That is one guy I would not want running at me. My buddy Justin actually got his autograph, which you can see to the right. All we had was our tickets, so that’s exactly what he used.

After following Tiger to the 16th tee, his group of followers grew to a rather large number so we decided to skip to the 17th and watch some other people try to hit on to the island green why we waited for Tiger’s group to get there.

17th hole at Sawgrass Stadium Course

On the 17th, they had a caddy challenge to see which caddy could hit it closest to the hole. Needless to say, at the time, 15 out of 18 caddies had hit their balls into the water. Maybe they should be hitting the driving range with their pro every once in a while. The island green was playing around 145 yards for the day with a middle pin location. It’s an easy hole to get on the green, but it is mentally tought to not think about the water that circles the green. Reminds me a lot of business and how it can be easy to implement a certain strategy, but sometimes mentally tough because we see the challenges instead of just the goal.

On the 18th hole when I was watching Tiger, I ended running into my cousins and my uncle, which was crazy considering how many people were there.

Baby Geese at the Golf Course

We then walked around for a little while and watched Nicholas Thompson hit his fairway shot on the 9th. Since we were the only ones watching him and he was going for the green, he was just waiting so I asked him if he was going for it just to be able to talk to him. He responded back that he was and he missed the green. So as he was starting to walk to the green, I told him “Nice try”. That was cool.

As we were walking down the 9th fairway, we saw the baby geese that you see to the right. The parents were very aggressive towards us and wouldn’t let us get close at all. As a matter of fact, the longer I stood there trying to take a picture the more they would start coming at me.

Here are the rest of my pictures from yesterday.

Tribute to Greg Norman (My Favorite Golfer of All-Time)

"Fluff" Jim Furyk's Caddy and Tiger's Old Caddy

8th Hole Green

From the 8th Hole Tee Box

Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk Walking to the 17th Green

Anthony Kim (AK)

My Cousin and I in Front of the Clubhouse

Clubhouse at Sawgrass

17th Green

Tiger Woods on the 18th Tee

Hope you enjoyed the story and the photos! Got more photos that I will probably just put up on my Twitpic and Facebook profiles. Thanks for visiting.