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Chris Brogan has been in the online world for sometime now and what he’s learned most is that in order to be successful online that you must be of service to others.  If you’re willing to go the extra miles to help others, you will be successful in the online world.

Chris Brogan is CEO and President of Human Business Works, an education publishing and media company dedicated to helping professionals work better, do the work they want and to be brave.  He is the NY Times best-selling co-author of the Impact Equation and a sought-after professional keynote speaker.  He also plays in the band, D3one3 with Jacqueline Carly.

Chris Brogan started his online endeavors before 2005, blogging and using social networks.  In 2005, he co-founded Blog Camp, an event to help understand media and help it work for you, with Chris Penn.  He then took a job with Jeff Pulver running video on the net and then he went on to work with the Pulse Network and started New Marketing Labs and sold that to them and is now working in Human Business Works.  Now, Chris is doing courses for professionals.

Chris started his blog because he wanted to start fiction and it morphed into writing about himself and it was a long time before it became useful for anyone.  ChrisBrogan.com is still alive and helping others and it took him 8 years before he got his first 100 readers.  Now, Chris has 200,000 unique visitors per month.

The mobile first mind-set is taking over the online world.  For example, Instagram is a mobile experience, not a desktop experience.  The shift has now moved towards mobile and it looks like it headed that way.

Chris thinks that the future holds that more and more people are going to get there information from smaller and smaller organizations.  As experts start to sprout up with different areas of expertise, users will begin looking to those people as the experts and everything will be open to more and more people for the benefit of the individual.

Rob Hatch, does a course called Work Like You’re on Vacation, through Human Business Works.  Chris works every day like he’s on vacation and finishes his average work day at noon.  Then he’s free to do the things he wants to do, he can write blogs, figure out ways to come up with more money, learns from others or goes to the beach.

Chris Brogan does another podcast called The Human Business Way, which he absolutely loves doing.  He’s writing several books, one on Minecraft, one tentatively titled The Freaks Ruled the Earth and he’s also revamping some courses that he’s offering to people who want to learn how to use the Internet for their benefit.

In order to work like you’re on vacation, you have to put in the work to make it happen.  So many people think they deserve to live the good life, but people like Chris are able to live that way because they’ve put in the time, effort and energy upfront in order to reap the benefits later.

There is a triangle to making money, what do I know how to do really well, who do I know that needs a service and do I have access to those people.

The beauty is that there is always somebody who is into something and you can reach out to those communities and make it happen.

Chris works as hard as he does because he’s trying to show people that they are great just the way they are and he’s trying to figure out as many ways as possible to help those people achieve success in the what they enjoy and are good at.

In 2010, Chris Brogan lost $400,000 of his own money in some poor investments he got involved in.  He learned a lot of from that experience and has become stronger for it, but his advice to others would be to stick to something you’re good at and work hard at that and not try to get caught up in too many different things.

Chris always hears from people who share with him that they’ve been able to take some idea he’s had and expand upon it to help themselves achieve success.  Chris Lema is one example of a person who showed his blogging success stats since taking a course with Chris Brogan which makes him proud because it’s something you can’t fake and the results speak for themselves.

In Chris Brogan’s blogging master class they talk about writing in a conversational tone, how to get better blog-writing habits, how to build good cornerstone content and ways to make money.  All of these things lock together during the experience and people consistently say that they get way more value than what it cost for them to get into the Blogging Master Class.

In another class Chris runs called Brave New Year, he talks about setting better goals to help you change your life to the life you want and away from the life you don’t.  He also wrote an ebook called It’s Not About the Tights on Amazon.  It helps people do the things they want to do.

Be of service to others and you will be successful.

Engaging Discussion Questions:

• How successful have you been feeling?

Links to Great Stuff:

• Human Business Works – “Human Business Works is a business design company, providing publishing and media products dedicated to helping professionals like you (anyone from a solo business to a very passionate part of a bigger company) understand how to do business your way, provided that way is relationship-minded, interested in delivering great value for your client or customer, and want to do this in a much more interesting way than the status quo.”
• Christopher S. Penn – “My name is Christopher S. Penn. I’m a bridge. I stand between different fields, professions, and ideas in order to help people on both sides understand each other. I can speak and sling code, but I’m not an IT professional. I can design campaign strategies and write copy, but I’m not a marketing professional. Where I provide value is in helping IT understand marketing and vice versa. The same is true for the martial arts, for education, for all of the different worlds I work and play in. I play World of Warcraft, but take the lessons from a virtual battlefield and apply them to business. I take solutions from the dojo floor and bring them to marketing.”
• Chris Lema – “Chris Lema is the VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software, where he manages high performers and oversees product development and innovation. He’s also a blogger, ebook author and runs a WordPress meetup in North County San Diego.”

Success Quotes:

• “How old are your kids?” – Zeb Welborn  “I have no idea.” – Chris Brogan
• “I’m proud that both of my kids are still alive.”
• “When I think of ways to make money, I fail.  When I think of ways to serve people, I make money.”
• “We go through life trying to be something we’re not and I’ve come to believe that you can be as weird as you want to be as long as you understand how that weirdness can serve your community.”
• “If you really work on figuring out a community you can serve . . . everything else figures itself out.”
• “Success is buying whatever pants you like.”
• “I never go out and look for wayward people, I look for people who want to be my friend and learn from me.”
• “My definition of success is being able to say yes to things you want to and no to the things you don’t.”
• “Every time I’ve ever failed in life is when I’ve had to play the whores game which is begging for the money and saying yes to crap that was horrible.”
• “Overhead walks on two feet.”
• “Multi-tasking is stupid.”
• “Learn to say no.”
• “Get one thing done and do it really well.”