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What a week!

Thanks so much to everyone who came to one of the five meetings last week. I'm sorry some of you had to pull out but thanks for letting me know...I hope we will meet up next time?

Although a touch tiring, I enjoyed every minute of the LJN Tour, making friends and meeting some new faces and re-acquainting myself with some old friends.

I will write a full summary this coming week but in the meantime I wanted to share one aspect of the Tour in particular.

Out of those who attended (and happy to be corrected if I've misheard anyone)100% agreed with the decision to charge a small fee to help fund LJN going forward.

I explained further my reasons (although I'm pretty sure most didn't seek that explanation) to make a charge and I also explained that I'd probably mismanaged and mishandled the labels I applied to the upgrade.

I think there was a general perception that the Premium charge is merely to allow members to benefit from the SEO potential from LJN.

However the explanation came across I reiterate what I've always said about LJN: it's whatever you want it to be.

Here is a short list of what many agreed LJN provided (and probably in order of importance too):

Emotional support - loneliness in our industry is one of the most strength sapping emotions. LJNs support has helped so many people through some of the most dire conditions most of us have ever known. Just knowing you are within a click of like-minded people who share your concerns, stresses and daily frustrations, is an enormous and valued crutch.

Business support - LJNs members range from pre-startup through to long-serving practitioners. Information and knowledge sharing throughout is one of LJNs major strengths. Those who expressed an opinion felt much of LJNs peer-to-peer sharing is done without much thought about how the knowledge was acquired, but on reflection the credit has gone to LJN.

Friendship - LJN has created so many offline friendships over the last four years that most of us felt the origination of these friendships has long been forgotten.

SEO - Funnily enough, most attendees said that SEO was the very least of their considerations before going Premium. I explained that there is much evidence of contracts being won via LJN but it seemed generally felt that if business is won through LJN then that is a bonus.

A lot more discussion took place on so many different subjects that it might take all week to address them all;-0)