When the Beyond Blogging Project launched some months ago, I was very interested in what I saw as an opportunity to be a part of a program where entrepreneurs and small business owners would work together.

The project was inspired by Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliffe-Jones, the authors of the successful book Beyond Blogging. If you know anything about these two gents you’ll know that they don’t do shabby.

As a Founding Member, I’m quite proud of this premier training program and the many new relationships that have resulted. Going in, I expected to find some like-minded types who were on a mission and I was not disappointed.

As is the case in most places where people hang out, a core group of us gravitated to each other and became quite good friends.

It started with the regularly scheduled Skype calls arranged by the project and hosted by Jordan Cooper of NotAProBlog who serves as Administrator. But then things just took off and many of us were reaching out and engaging one another to share ideas and offer support.

How It Came Together

We were encouraged to work together on a project of some sort, so we decided to each choose a business related topic and write about how the topic could benefit the growth of a business at various stages. We then began the work of independently producing the content and placing it in a Dropbox location that we all had access to.

The goal was to make each independently produced document smoothly transition into the next, resulting in the final ebook. It was quite interesting to see this process come together.

Each contributor was assigned the task of reading the document in totality, then provide their own independent feedback with regards to how the entire document flowed.

I’ve personally read this document so many times that I could probably recite it by now.

Now I don’t want to over-simplify the process because it was a bit more difficult than it may sound here. After all, we were each working our own schedules and from various time zones around the globe, so coordination was often challenging.

Throughout the process we would schedule Skype calls to come together and have frank discussions about the direction of the project.

I served as the Project Coordinator which had it’s own set of independent challenges. Can you imagine melding together people from around the globe, in different time zones and each with their own set of life’s challenges?

I live on the East Coast of the U S so for some of the others it would be early morning the next day when we spoke. To compensate and to be fair about things, we would have Skype calls at various hours simply because it would always be an odd and inconvenient hour for someone involved in the project. But through it all, we pulled together and made things happen.

Personally, I enjoyed the experience of working with this fine group of individuals, each of whom brings a special talent and skill to the table. With those talents and skills come individual ideas and opinions, so discussions were sometimes lively but never contentious, as each of these folks are true professionals.

You could just tell that everyone had the utmost respect and admiration for the others so a bond was created rather early on in the process.

Greg Corey, who blogs at TheFineArtOfEducation.com handled the ebook assembly and the graphics. He deserves a great deal of credit for his skills and patience, as we all envisioned different styles of graphics for the ebook and he had to listen to each and every conversation. LOL

I recall one particular Skype call where we spent nearly two and a half hours just picking out graphics for the ebook. It seemed the more we saw, the tougher the choices became.   The challenge was to find a set of complimenting graphics which represented “elements” so as you can imagine, this lead us in many directions.

Kelly Estes arranged for and conducted the bonus interviews with Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliff-Jones, the BBP co-founders and really did a nice job for us here.

Jordan Cooper was the “get it done” guy who would bring us together on Skype and listen intently to what we were discussing. He would then chime in and let us know if we were on track and heading in the right direction or over-thinking the process and potentially spinning our wheels. Much was learned from these sessions.

Were we to do this all over again, knowing what we all have learned now, we could probably pull this off in a much shorter period of time than this took initially. But the invaluable experience of learning while making some mistakes cannot be underestimated. You have to get your hands dirty to fully learn the lesson.

In the end we are all better off for the experiences we shared and the growth of our relationships. You hear it all the time, how networking and working together can benefit you and your business and this is a great example of that.

So the end result of all of that effort is the Online Business Elements eBook. Let’s take a peek inside and I’ll introduce the co-authors.

Tracy Rudd of The Successful Single Mama leads us off with her attack on Procrastination and shares her insight on driving this bad habit out of your life.

Next we have Phil Richards who addresses Starting Up and how you need to make a PACT. You can find Phil teaching how to effectively use Linkedin at PhilRichards.biz.

Then it’s yours truly. I share a story on Personal Branding and how building a really good one can lead to success beyond belief.

Kelly Estes from HotCookin.Net shares her expertise on Social Media and why you need to be using it. She points out that clients and customers may be lost if you’re not up to scratch on this.

Tim Zager who blogs at LawOfCommonSense.com, shares some of his experiences with the many aspects of Networking. Are live networking events really necessary?

Rounding out the lineup with a very compelling story is Sherrie St. Cyr who blogs at the NextChanceCafe.com. The Rebirth of a Previous Business covers how to retrieve your business from the ashes of failure. “Learning how to bounce back from failure is the most important skill you can learn to ensure the success of your business”, says Sherrie. When you think about it, she is absolutely correct. We all face these challenges and knowing how to cope with them is a must.

So there you have it, an example of how people have come together and worked to hone their skills and produce something that’s both useful and memorable.

If you would like to know more about our collaborative product, please visit the Online Business Elements website.

You should also be on the lookout for some great bonuses we have in store that will be rolled out in the very near future. Be sure to check back here or visit OnlineBusinessElements.com.

Stay Productive!

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