For the past six months or so I have been going to a number of Meetup.com group meetings.

I have attended different groups like meetups for eBay, Joomla, WordPress, Adobe and other general groups that were geared towards internet marketing and affiliate marketing. I even joined a different Meetup.com networking group that met to share networking leads.

At the beginning I was real enthusiastic about a number of the groups, especially the internet marketing groups. They were good outlets for networking in my field of web design. I have met a good number of other designers through them.

At some point you have to begin to weed out those that are not meeting your needs because they do take time to go to and there is usually some expense to attending a meeting, even if it is only paying for your meal.

I think I was attending 8 meetups at my peak. Now I have pared that down to 4 meetups I attend on a regular basis. I dropped the group about Joomla because I was not learning as much as I thought I would at the meetings and I use WordPress for my blogs anyways.

I also dropped the networking group because I was spending $20-$24 a month for the meals and never got a single lead. The members were all interested in much larger types of businesses and I never felt it was a worthwhile deal to go to during my business day.

The WordPress group, which I have only attended 1 time, met only to socialize and had no structure, plus it met on Saturday in the middle of the day, which was not a great time for me. I like to spend my weekends with my wife and family. I think I will give them another try though.

The best meetups I have attended are the eBay and the Adobe groups. They both have real structure, learning occurs and the organizers always attend and are real involved in the groups. The internet marketing groups are hit or miss. One month the discussion will be targeted and lively, the next time they will be aimless and have sparse attendance.

I did make a real good association at one of the internet marketing meetups with a nice man named Dan Mason. We have been listing one of his products on my eBay account and they have done fairly well. He imports custom-made products from China that he sells in his business.

Try Meetup.com for yourself. You can search for subjects of interest to you and there are thousands of groups nationwide with tons in every local area.

If you have tried Meetup.com, what groups had you had success with?

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photo credit: turtlemom4bacon

Just a little follow up to Hotel WiFi does not always work when you try to work remotely about the Emily Morgan Hotel in San Antonio.

While we were there the customer service was really poor, but since getting our bill they have messed up even more and have not been nice.

While checking out, my wife gave them her work tax exempt certificate, they honored it and gave her the bill with no tax. It just cleared our bank a few days ago and suddenly was $79 higher than the bill! They had added the tax back.

Ruthie had to spend a bunch of her valuable time calling and emailing the hotel, dealing with a rude desk clerk who did not want to help resolve the issue. She finally got through to the General Manager, who took care of the problem (we got a credit issued, but have yet to see it hit the account), but was not too friendly and emailed her the credit, which came without even a "sorry" note or anything.

This was a really neat historic hotel behind the Alamo with a really cool suite. The service was way below what we expected though and San Antonio has way too many other nice hotels for us ever to spend a dime in this joint again. I have to say - avoid The Emily Morgan Hotel in San Antonio, TX - bad service for $159/night and the $24/day parking was way too high.

[The Emily Morgan Hotel right next to the Alamo]

Well, my intentions to get a lot of work done was there, however the WiFi was not.

Let's just call this test #2 of working freelance remotely.

I just spent 3 days in San Antonio, TX with my wife for a work conference she was attending. I was going to get a lot of freelance web design work done from the hotel during the 3 days while she was off learning about new things going on with cities and municipalities at the Texas Municipal League Conference.

Enter crappy WiFi service at the Emily Morgan 4 star hotel we were at. The suite we had was big and beautiful with the Alamo just across the street. If only I had been able to get some work done!

From 1-2 bars out of 4 bars to 0 bars (most of the time the service was just not even there) it was very frustrating.

The first day I was only able to get about 15 minutes of actual work done. The hotel staff were total ding-dongs...useless at helping. I called the company that provided the WiFi service (they were in Georgia) and they got it back for 10 minutes for it only to drop off again.

They tried to tell me that someone in the hotel was using all the bandwidth and that was the reason for my lack of a good signal. Hah! Call that the answer they give customers as a stock answer. I had no signal at all, not a weak one.

The second day I just grabbed my trusty Apple Powerbook laptop and walked along the river until I found a very nice little spot in another hotel on the riverwalk that had free WiFi, a nice quiet table with plug and even a coffee/tea/soda station right next to me. I spent the afternoon here and was very happy and actually got work done.

We will stay at that hotel next time in San Antonio.

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FreshBooks, the online billing service for freelancers and small business people has gotten a really nice interview on Fox Business News. The interview was with the President and founder Mike McDerment.

I did a review of FreshBooks, which I use to do invoicing and billing for my freelance web design clients.

I can't tell you how much time it saves me dealing with the money side of this business. Well worth the $9.80/month I pay for my subscription.

Way to go FreshBooks. I really love this company and am glad to see them get some high profile press.

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This is my 1st real test of working freelance remotely (on a trip out of town) with just my Apple Powerbook G4 laptop and a wifi connection.

I am in College Station, TX with my wife, a co-worker of hers and my brother-in-law. They all came for a continuing education 2 day workshop for engineers. I came along just cuz I could and wanted to keep ruthie company. We like to travel together.

Now I have worked remotely before from a hotel room in San Antonio, TX while Ruthie was at a conference there, but I was working full time as an employee of Hitchfinder.com and I pretty much had to be connected to the office so they would see I was actually "on the clock".

This time I am working for myself, so it will be interesting to see how I fare at self control in keeping myself "on target" in getting some actual work done here on this trip.

I will finish this post tomorrow night and fill you in on how I did over the course of the day.

...

Well, I was pretty productive. I finished a comp of a 10-page site for a client for his massage business. It is a re-do of an old site.

I did also play a bit though. I dropped Ruthie and crew back off after lunch at Fatburger (big juicy 2/3 burger) and went to 3 pawn shops looking for items to sell on eBay, but did not find anything.

So I am declaring the day a success.

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