At the beginning of October I went to Orlando, FL for IZEAfest; an interactive event designed to educate, inform and connect social media enthusiasts. I’ve not written much about my experience out there because I wasn’t sure that this blog was the place for it. After some deep thought, I’ve decided that it’s important to share what’s going on behind the scenes of RideToRemedy.com because there are many people out there with various diseases that are trying to build awareness around what they’re doing and they’re trying to raise money for their causes.
RideToRemedy has been around since 2007 and 2007 was a quiet year in terms of getting established and doing a couple Tour de Cures. 2008 was a bigger year in terms of the number of Tour de Cures I did; and the more I traveled and met people the more I was asked about how I raise money. I have always covered the costs of traveling myself and any money I raise has always gone to the ADA. In 2007 my ability to pay to travel to different states was funded by the blog posts I was writing for PayPerPost a subsidiary of IZEA. In 2008 I had stopped doing paid blogging and I had ramped up the number of Tour de Cures I was doing; I was paying out of my own pocket for everything with no supplemental income and it was rough. Here in 2009, I did a single Tour de Cure.
In 2008, there was a realization of something I knew that hit me hard. You can’t ask the same people for donations when you’re doing more than one event a year and that means you have to have other avenues for raising money for your cause as well as find another avenue of income for your traveling expenses. There are many outlets for creating supplemental income and social media marketing is one that I’m going to tap into. I avoided it for a long time because I didn’t want my blog marred; it was clean and pure and I wanted it to stay that way. But after some deep thought, I believe that I can tap into what social media marketing and affiliate marketing have to offer because there are products that I stand behind, love and use often.
With that said, there are going to be some posts that are out of the ordinary theme of this blog. In the past they have all been mostly diabetes, cycling, running, triathloning related and sometimes some general life posts. These new posts are going to be the building RideToRemedy posts because there’s more to this site than just diabetes and the various sports that I’m doing with this this disease 
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