In less than nine hours (which means I should be asleep! too excited), the Women Grow Business Boot Camp is starting. I am out of my mind excited about all the things I’m going to learn and the people I’m going to meet.
And the fact that I’ll be conducting one of the breakout sessions with Joanna over at Matrix Group. Yay team!

The session I’m talking about tomorrow deals with a topic I don’t often speak about:  defining, finding and keeping your customer. Normally, I’m assuming you know how to define who you’re marketing to, that you’ve done your keyword research, even that your business is done mostly online.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking to a crowd of people who are mostly solo entrepreneurs or are interested in starting a business — people who are new. The main conference room for Women Grow Business Boot Camp will be live streaming.

If youi’re there in person, be sure to say hi!

Age of Conversation Cover

Yes, I realize I used the word “Peeps” but I do believe it is Friday. So, yeah.

I have been blessed to participate in the Age of  Conversation project again this year.  Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton put a call out to authors on the topic of Social Media, and those who make the cut get a chapter in a collective book.

To make things even better, all proceeds from the project go to charity. In short, I totally get to talk about myself and all the proceeds go to a good cause. It just doesn’t get better than that.

Seriously though, if you read last year’s edition, or the one before, you know that these collections tend to be packed full of wisdom and advice from a dizzying array of experts from many perspectives you might never have thought of before.

The book officially comes out some time in April, and pre-ordering starts soon.

In this blog over the next month while I wait for the book to come out, I’ll be sharing the experience with you and telling you about the people I’m writing with.

In fact, let’s start that part right now, shall we? Meet the authors of the Age of Conversation 3, below:

Just had a new friend of the Free Traffic Tips family named Steve write me a message, when today, my first day of feeling less that 50% crappy for the last week, a gut instinct told me to check the Help Desk tickets — where messages go to when you write to ask@asktinu.com.

And I found out that since I’ve been gone, no tickets have been answered. None, as in zero, of the thousands of messages that have been sent to me in the past week have been responded to — and on top of that, there are about a dozen messages that have been in the queue since Christmas!

So first of all, if you’ve sent me a question or comment that warrants an answer, and it was never escalated to me, I apologize. If you have an open ticket right now, feel free to respond to that ticket with the word “escalate” to make it easier for my new person to find and send directly to me. For the next week, all you have to do with an existing ticket that hasn’t been answered is put the word “escalate” in the message, and it will be transferred for me to deal with by me personally.

But please understand, that means replies will not take place within a business day as they have before (unless of course you’re a customer or client, those are now handled by a separate, 24/7 group.)  For those of you who don’t know, I have fairiy severa case of spinal degenerative disorder. It’s not a life-threatening illness, but it’s way more complicated than pulling a muscle in your back.

I’ve tried just about everything for it, and a mixture of physical therapy and medication helps a lot.

Still, I have some rough spells sometimes it’s hard for me to type, sit up in bed, that sort of thing. I’m telling you this because until I get some more help, there’s no way you’ll get a response in one business day.

I get hundreds of emails to that address every day, and there’s just no quick way of sorting the spam from the real requests for help, so someone has to open each one and read it. Three people used to spend the better part of the day helping me with this. Now it’s just me. I’d appreciate your patience with this until I get a new staff in place.

Today’s my first day back after being back a week. Normally that’s not a problem, and someone else will acknowledge your messages and let you know I’m away. But the person I hired to replace the last girl that left, who also runs my temp staff, hasn’t been heard of since the day I last paid her, which is the day I last sent you an email.

I’m letting you know this so you understand that I literally just heard about this, and I’m doing what I can to get caught up. That means the newsletter might be a little light again this coming week.

I also wanted to ask you for a favor.

I need to hire an intern or someone to work on commission until next month, who’d be interested in learning about this business in exchange. In May, this will turn into a paid position. If you know anyone who’d be interested in such an arrangement, a self-starter who knows a bit about the web and can work with me virtually 10 — 20 hours a week, have them contact me.

In future months, I’ll be hiring a temp staff of five people to take care of this situation, but I want the person I teach my business to not to be someone who really just wants a job, or someone who has a passing interest. I want to groom a successor who I can comfortably outsource projects to in the future.

I’ve tried just about every other type of arrangement, so I wanted to do this before I start an intern search at some local colleges.

Thanks for any help you can give, and I’m sorry if you sent me a message that I didn’t get yet.

That pretty picture is one of my two attempts at a Google Buzz persona type icon. Right now, I’ve written several pieces on and in Google Buzz, and though few of them are public yet, I’ve got a quick summary of those that are.

1. My Google Buzz Profile
2. 50+ Articles, Blog Posts, Buzzes & Videos About Google Buzz
3. What’s Even More Important About Google Buzz for Business

See you around the general Buzz area.

Not that this blog has some kind of huge audience, but the guilt of not updating is exactly the same.

And I’m writing about it because I know you’re having the same types of issues. I want to let you know that I’m not immune, that you have options, and that it doesn’t somehow make you less of a blogger to publish less frequently.

Because here’s the conundrum: you do all the stuff you’re supposed to do with blogging, and the result is that you help more people, or find more clients, or make more sales, or get more speaking engagements, or more in-store foot traffic, or all of the above, which now makes you too busy to blog.

Only, you better either keep blogging, or have some clients that pay every month, or else how are you going to keep yourself helping, finding, selling, speaking, meeting and greeting?

If you’re not consistent, the gravy train eventually stops — unless you’ve been smart enough to get stuff from several sources.

So what do you do?

First of all, you calm down, and ask yourself, do I really need to be publishing as much as I am?

Am I posting because I think I’m supposed to, or for linkbait, or to get more traffic, or because I truly have something to say?

The answer will be informed by your reason for blogging to begin with. You see, the idea is to publish Consistently, not necessarily frequently. My new commitment for this blog is weekly, for the main blog is three times a week, with two guest or round-up posts, and for the corporate blog, monthly.

When you’re setting up your blog, you’re going to want that to be your primary concern — how often are you going to commit to update, and why?

My Free Traffic Tips blog is the one that captures the much needed search positions that keeps traffic, and thus, regular sales, coming. It needs a serious overhaul, but even in its present state, visitors convert to subscribers at 7% which is great considering that only the least visited 10% of the site has subscription boxes. Sales result from about 81% of that traffic.

So to keep that party going, ideally I should be publishing daily.

Here, I’m blogging to share knowledge, to give the best thoughts I can on a range of marketing and web visibility topics. So I only publish when I have those thoughts. That could be several times a day, then not for several days, but it’s typically once a week.

The corporate blog is to establish a web presence for the corporate services wing of my business. It’s still in development, and right now I only want to have one corporate client at a time. So I’m quieter over there, making just enough voice to attract future prospects. I know it will typically take 90 days for me to form a trusting relationship, and each project will last between 3 months to a year.

Monthly is enough to establish a presence, so that’s how often I blog there.

The second thing you’ll want to do is what I’ve just done, establish the consistency and stick to it.

Next, think about format — you don’t always have to do a text post. Think about images, screenshots, screencasting, slide shows, or audios.

Finally, take note of all the other publishing you’re doing and map it out into a schedule. That includes submissions to social media, guest blogging, article marketing, video marketing, press releases, you name it. If it warrants input from you, it goes on your publishing schedule.

Bonus tip: help publishing isn’t a bad thing either. Team up with some friends and share a blog, get guest bloggers, pay a staff to re-purpose existing content, or hire writers to create unique content based on your ideas and voice.

I got an email today informing me that my Business Exchange profile will be featured at BusinessWeek tomorrow, starting around 9:30 am Eastern for about 24 hours. Compared to other Business Exchange contributors, my level of activity and contribution pales, though I think I hold my own as far as the quality of my shares.

That makes it even more of an honor. Thanks BusinessWeek!

If you’re not familiar with BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange social network, here’s an article I wrote on it for Ploked.

Many of my local business clients say that they just don’t get social media. They tell me they just don’t understand how using social media is going to get them more business.

And the answer is simple, really. More effective exposure, faster.

To really wrap your head around this, it helps to realize that behind the search rankings, dot coms and email addresses are people. Why are people online? Because they want information, they want to be entertained, and they want to connect.

We advertise in newspapers, magazines, on radio, on television because we want to reach people who want what we’re selling. The same thing goes for the web. Nowadays, that mean using social media.

The biggest deal about social media is so big, we often don’t even see it. Sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, Mixx, Twitter and all the others have one thing in common: they’ve redistributed power that used to remain in the hands of the few to the hands of the many.

When this happened, a lot of the gatekeepers between us and our potential clients and customers fell away, in a way that allows more discourse between people, without leaving sensitive private information exposed.

I can write a blog post about an aspect of what I do without revealing the secret formula that gets people to buy from me or hire me. And you can read it or provide feedback without exposing your private information. For example, if you send a Twitter link about my post, and my blog recognizes it, you can make a short comment without even telling me your email address, as you would need to do if you were to comment on my site.

And blogging and tweeting are just two types of social media you can leverage to benefit your business.

I know, for some people this is really scary.

Socializing online puts you in a weird position as a business person if you start maneuvering without quite “getting” it. You don’t want to be the guy who thought it was okay to put his link on someone else’s Facebook profile and find it removed the next day, and have potentially powerful allies blocking you because you breached some etiquette or made a mistake.

You don’t want to end up talking business too soon, yet you also don’t want to be the person who had an opportunity to promote themselves, but saw that it was okay only after their competitor beat them to it.

I got an email today from a new friend who told me he couldn’t wrap his way around social media. Like in many new social situations, he didn’t know how to act. If like him, you think you don’t “get” social media, and how it can be used for business, I think that if you’re like most people, you’re wrong.

You already get Web 2.0 and Social Media. You just don’t realize it. The very fact that you don’t want to “be that guy” means that you’ve figured out that there’s a certain etiquette to all these new tools, and that they vary from community to community.

Remember how you figured it out offline? You found someone to help you, someone who had the results you wanted that you could copy, or you worked it out through trial and error.

Luckily, online there are people who are willing to teach you the ropes, so you can skip the trial and error. Now all you need to do is find people who are where you want to be, and do what they do.

Social media isn’t as hard as you think it is.

I don’t know this guy Soren personally, and I’ve never been to his blog before today. In the interest of disclosure, I will NOT make ANY money by telling you about this post. He probably will, but I’m too tired today to turn this into money for me.

He made an excellent post about outsourcing, and I’ll be frank, there’s an affiliate link in his post, for a product I think is a must-have. If I had gotten any sleep Thursday night before watching the twins (during my mastermind call!) I would probably have gone and signed up as an affiliate myself.

The sales page linked from his page alone is that good of a lesson. But this post isn’t about that.

The reason I’m telling you about the post, even if you don’t even click on the link to the sales page is that Outsourcing Saved My Ass. And by extension, my business. (Yes, I have that much junk in my trunk. lol. This is why people need sleep. Silliness like this.)

I was your classic, can’t afford to outsource case. I thought I was saving money by doing everything myself, and saving time by not teaching anyone what I know so that THEY could do it. Of course, I could have also hired someone who already knew how to do what I needed done, but in retrospect, at the time it didn’t make sense. if I did that, what would I do? What was my value?

Duh. I could do anything from “nothing but cash checks” to “build my brand”, to “focus on marketing” to “do the top-level, big-picture stuff that makes my prices worth it to my clients, and different from the next guy”.

Then I got sicker than I ever have been before and almost lost my business.

Twice. In four months.

I am STILL trying to pay for the mistakes I made then, and the only way I’m moving forward now is outsourcing, because of course, health care takes up 80% of anything I take home (another post).

But if my money goes to keeping the business open, paying for the ramifications of that time, and the cost of the projects I’m doing now, how can I pay for outsourcing?

At first, I was paying the people I outsource with on commission, training, and JV leverage. Now, with the profits having them makes me. I have more time free to make more products. When I make more products, I make more money.

I have more time free to create content to market myself. When I make more content, and use it to market myself, I make more money.

I have more free time to coach and train. When I coach and train a handful of carefully selected people, they make more money, and when they make more money, they stay clients longer. When they stay clients longer, I make more money.

So yes, this time last year I would have been one of the people who said “my job isn’t outsourcable”. The truth was, I thought that if it was possible to get rid of most of the work I had to do that I was useless. And I had all these ideas in my head about how making money has to be so hard.

And I learned that not only is that not the case, if you don’t outsource, hire employees or virtual teams, the thing to think about is that you’re not outsourcing to get rid of yourself, you’re outsourcing to FREE yourself. Whether it’s to have more time for family, to market yourself, or to have time to do the things that make your company money, outsource, create a job or virtual assistant for EVERY function that doesn’t fall into the core dream that you painted for yourself, AND every thing in the core dream that’s not the best use of your time.

And don’t forget things that you just hate to do to start with.

You can always add things back in. You always have that option later.

So yeah, your personal talent and touch may not be outsourceable. But if you think about it, that’s probably 1% IF THAT of what you’re doing. It may be the most important 1%, but it’s only 1%.

If you think about it, every major company in the world is just an outsourcing outfit. There were what, a couple of guys who started eBay? As they grew, they realized, hey, I can’t do all this crap myself.

You want to be a bigger firm? You want to create opportunities for your business? You want to expand your market? You want to make more money? You want to be a big brand someday — maybe even a household name?

Go and read Soren’s post about Outsourcing. Take the first step, and consider outsourcing.

I heart the lot of you but I simply can’t pretend I’m embedding this rebroadcast of today’s Grow Smart Business conference (soon to be archive of the entire event, btw) because of that.

It was simply amazing to be there and I was in great company. Not to mention that I made some really key contacts, as well as new friends that I hope to be able to point in the right direction.

However, I can definitely share it with you. So here it is.

You can rebroadcast the Network Solutions Grow Smart Biz Conference in your blog too. If you hadn’t noticed. (Or click through and view it there if the video isn’t displaying in the feed.)

I’ll be referencing it constantly throughout the week. And PS, here’s the Agenda [pdf] of the day if it’s of any help.

I’m sure you’ve probably seen me talking about the contest I’m having, here on Facebook or on Twitter. If not, here’s the deal.

Though my business is based on the West coast, I live in Maryland about half of the year. As a member of Network Solution’s Social Web Advisory board, I’ve been offered a few free tickets to the GrowSmartBiz conference they’re having all day next Tuesday in Washington DC.

I had several extra tickets, and I have two left, so I’m having two contests, one for each of them. All you have to do to win it is respond to this blog post with a comment. First winner and a random winner get the prizes.

Of course you’ll have to provide your own transportation to and from DC (which should be a breeze if you’re a local), but if you like we can spend the entire day of the conference together. Between sessions I’ll help you apply the information you learn to your specific business.

Again, the ticket, worth $299, is totally free to you — here’s how it happened. When I heard the 2 for $99 special for the Network Solutions Grow Smart Business conference, I was so excited that I got at ticket for me and my sister. It was for one day only, 09.09.09, so I made sure I got it.

Then I  realized that Network Solutions (of course!) was comping me a free ticket. Aces. Now I have these extra. Thus the contests. I gave my social media pals a head start but they didn’t move fast enough — their loss is your gain.

If you need more information -here’s the link again.

And if you’re already coming to the conference, let me know so we can meet up for lunch! I’m hoping a bunch of us can go together.

Yes, I’m Serious — The 2009 SCORE Awards Were Great

So on Friday, I promised that I’d talk more about how Awesome the SCORE Awards were and the Awesome people I met and the Awesome time we had. I really thought it was an important thing to share for several reasons. (Besides the sheer Awesomeness.)

First, this doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that would be awesome, right? I mean someone says “businesses are going to get awards” and you think, wow, the Emmys with no fast forward button. Yikes. I fully expected to feel great about the fact that businesses were getting awards, but also to be making jokes about the “Snore Awards” with my sister the next day. How wrong I was!

This was one of the most beautiful awards ceremonies I have ever been to, including ones where I was among the honorees, which I’ll get into in a minute.

Second, because of my health I haven’t been to a public event in over two years. I’ve done conferences and done some private corporate training, but I haven’t been on the lecture circuit in any big way, either as a spectator or as a presenter, since I first got really sick in January 2007.

I’m always afraid I’ll get sick or have spasms or need help on the stairs and be out there by myself after an event. But then I got the idea to invite my very savvy sister, Temitayo Osundina who is an amazing business person, the Marketing Director of FGS in Laurel, MD. (@mdsmallbusiness on Twitter if you want to say hi.) And with her there I don’t have to worry that I’m going to fall out in the floor or something. I know she has my back.

Third, I think everyone who doesn’t know what SCORE is, should know about them. When we’re online, we often forget the local tools that exist to help us with our businesses. There’s a lot of free or inexpensive resources out there.

Fourth, I was honored to sit at one of the sponsors tables, Network Solutions, as invited by Shashi, their Social Media Swami. They’re also working with SCORE for the Grow Smart Biz conference, which is another post altogether.

So, for now, brief overview of what SCORE is and what was so great about the event, and I’ll get into people I met and ideas that came out of it another day soon.

What is SCORE?

SCORE is a non-profit organization that is available to local businesses in local offices nationwide and to US small business on the web. Through them you can get free advice for your business from successful business advisors — people who have done what you want to do and have already been where you wan tot go. They’ll mentor you either online or in a location near you, and both, as I’ve said, are free.

Now, a lot of times, entrepreneurs take “do it yourself” to the nth degree. We want to be able to say we did everything by ourselves and on our own. What we don’t realize, usually until after the first year we’ve been in business, is that No One does it on their own. Everyone gets partners, helps, leans on resources, mentors, partners, even pivotal clients who send tons of referrals after a job well done.

And those of us who think, oh, I am beyond help, or, I’m too advanced or too new to be asking people for help — how would you like to go from a local business person to an international company? How would you like to go from a successful employed person to a successful business owner? SCORE has been instrumental in making that happen for each one of the honorees.

If you haven’t been to their site before, or visited their special resource for women, the very next time you’re confused about something, just take a second and ask them. Or ask them a test question you already know the answer to — they will impress you. I’m so excited about them that I want to donate service to them, maybe for all of next summer or something like that.

Why the 2009 SCORE Awards Made Such an Impact

The Score Awards were a wonderful thing for three reasons.

1. How/where it was presented,
2. The company I was in, and,
3. The stories, the Stories, THE STORIES! Especially those of the recipients.

This was a formal event, held at a top-tier hotel in DC. If I’m not mistaken it was a five star hotel. Everyone loves to dress up and look elegant. Not to mention that when you make an invitation formal, it gives the impression that you’re taking the fact that you’re giving awards, as well as the awards themselves, seriously.

Another thing that made it work really well is that there was a dinner before hand with a live jazz band. Then the presenter came back on after the dinner, and between presentations would tell us more about projects they did with their sponsors and partners, like American Express and Network Solutions.  You couldn’t come away from the evening thinking that companies with more resources don’t care about companies with less resources. It was absolutely inspiring, to think that there are people out there at the companies we consider big guys, real players, are reaching out, quietly, on a daily basis to all of us little guys.

(Yes, I consider myself a little guy — that’s how I know I can help you, my company is probably the same size as yours, if not smaller, and we use the same resources to expand and grow as we recommend to you.

Maybe I’ll start calling myself a big dog when I have 100 employees and a company that generates $10 million a year.)

Also in presentation — the whole event didn’t just rely on the presenter. They would change who was presenting, and they would come with their own stories. And some of it was told in video, on huge projectors. Not only that, people in the audience were in the videos. That’s always really powerful, to see someone you’re sitting next to on the big screen, doing their thing.

Then the guests we were sitting with! I’ll just have to make a whole separate post about it. I only wish that I could have spoken to some of them longer.

Then, the stories?

Oh my goodness. If you ever think that you just aren’t going to make it, or that you aren’t good enough, or someone told you your idea is stupid, or you know you have a great idea but don’t know how to make it into a profitable business, these stories can inspire you to feel like you can do ANYTHING.

There was Kim Haas, who started with a modest small business that started out with language translation in Milwaukee, and expanded in unbelievable ways.

There was Yamila Jackson, who turned potentially tragic experience of having a premature baby who no one thought would survive, into hope for parents of preemies all over the world.

I feel myself wanting to tell you every single story of every person who received an award and the companies who sponsored the awards. But instead, I think I should just urge you — if you can be in Washington DC for the next SCORE Awards and find yourself invited, put on your fancy duds and go. And if you need help in your business, ask SCORE. If you can provide help to business owners, volunteer for SCORE.

In the next few posts, I promise I will get to the whole retweets/comments things, and more about the people I met at the awards, as well as the resources I discovered for SCORE.

Events Mentioned:

I’m blogging from my brand new 32 gb iPod Touch. First of all.

Swollen hands?

Can’t navigate your new too-long fake nails?

No problem. Landscape that keyboard, use the side of your pinky to type, post via email, and Bob’s your Uncle.

Tonight, I had the honor and pleasure of sitting at Network Solution’s table for the fantastically inspiring SCORE Awards dinner. It was absolutely thrilling and I met the best people.

Of course I’ll have to tell you about that, and my thoughts on whether retweet is the new comment tomorrow, as I’d like to link to them all and a zillion other things, and that’s aigtle bit trickier with only one finger available.

I was asked in a survey what I would change about email, Twitter or Facebook. I can’t say whose survey because I agreed not to blog about it. But here’s the answer I gave them.

I would love email if I could view it like a forum, see at a glance what to skip and what needs priority now. I hate email and I’m working on setting up our email communications to go through Kayako.

Twitter I’d integrate with an online RSS reader like Google Reader, but with more sophisticated filtering that uses reader reactions and share to tell me what’s becoming more relevant in my topics of interest and help push them to the front, in real time.

Facebook, I would have stopped improving on right before they de-emphasized apps. They created a cottage industry then killed it, instead of improving client experience of it. Why?

If you could change Email, Twitter or Facebook, what would you do differently? I don’t mean cosmetic changes, I’m talking functionality. If you could make email, Twitter or Facebook do more — or even less — what would you do?

Everyone wants to know how I’m able to help my clients get their stories in the Buzz section of StumbleUpon, in Tweetmeme or on the front page of Digg.

Sh! Social Media Success Secrets!

You can’t sell access or ranking in any of these social media sites,and buying votes is a tactic that doesn’t bear up, strategically.

What I am able to do is coach my clients on how to use social media, how to build their online and offline networks, how to be authentically influential and how to create content that their desired audience finds compelling.

That way, when their content is naturally discovered or promoted, or on the sites that allow it, submitted by them, they don’t make it to the pre-popularity stage, only to be taken out of contention for the site.

What I do in that regard is no secret.

How is it done? That seems to be the big deal. Greater minds than mine have attempted and failed.

My answer is that it’s not just what you know. It’s not just who you know.

It’s whether you can get those pivotal people, that critical network, and the user base at the site in question to move the way you want them to — and that’s whether or not you’re talking about social media sites, or just life in general.

I approach social media the way I approach most areas of success in my life. I use strategies that magnify the tactics everyone else is using exponentially. While everyone else is looking at their next move in Checkers, I’m thinking about my next game of Chess.

In the Social Media Success Package, I’ll teach you how to do with 100 — 1000 people what other people can’t seem to manage even with 100, 000 friends, followers, or connections.

Because it’s not about the number of followers. It’s nice to have several thousand or even a hundred thousand people following you for show.

But it’s really about what you can get people to do, and why. Can you get your content in places that it will be discovered? Can you write content so compelling that people can’t help but share it and save it? Can you do this over and over again, consistently?

And can you build yourself a fan base, an alliance or a network that willingly supports your endeavors without having to rely solely on collecting and trading favors?

It’s really about how you add so much value to the discussion that the right people want to return it to you.

It’s not enough just to have influence but it IS a huge component to social media success.

Since strategies and tactics go hand in hand, included in this package is a quick guide to how you can get duplicate my method of getting 27,000 StumbleUpon users to a site in one week. To highlight that, for the next 24 hours, I’m going to cut the price of this package by $20 — until 3:33 pm tomorrow, you can get it for just $47 $27.

You can get a sample of the document directly from here until this time tomorrow.

After that, you’ll have to sign up to my newsletter to get a free peek.

Look in the upper right hand corner for the download link.

It’s the number one topic on everyone’s mind at some point: what will happen to my business during hard times?

It doesn’t seem to matter what business you’re in, or whether the news says it’s getting a little better or a little worse.

Every business owner’s mind drifts to the recession at some point.

We wonder: are we headed for another Great Depression? Or will we just be tightening our belts to ride out the latest storm?

Wish I had the answer to that but I have no clue. I’m a website promotion specialist. How
would I know?

What I do know is that I’m not participating in the recession — I’m too busy and I haven’t got a *thing* to wear!

I say that with tongue in cheek, but due to an expensive health problem I’ve had since 1992, I really don’t know what it is to have an adult life where you can consistently indulge in extras — mine always went to meds or physical therapy, or back-pay on doctors’ bills. So for me, it’s Always a recession.

But I believe you can turn just about any circumstance into a positive, and sure enough, it puts me in a unique position to tell you how to get your business to prosper in a time when it feels like the economy is in a tail spin for some indefinite amount of time.

The answer to recession for me?

Market harder, and market better.

Doing better, faster and more creative marketing has always helped me move my business forward, even when I was having a hard time — even now when it seems like Everyone is having a hard time.

I was no genius when I started thinking this way, so don’t think that just because website promotion and marketing is my business, this strategy can’t work for you.

So what does marketing harder mean? Or marketing better, for that matter?

I’m not saying that if you were spending $2000 a month on advertising that you should now spend $3000. Nor am I saying cut back. There are basically two steps.

First, spend your advertising money *smarter* –make it go as far as it possibly can. Really look more closely at what is working the best to bring your business leads, sales and in the case of the web, traffic, and focus your money and attention there.

Reduce or eliminate everything else. If it makes you feel better, put it on hold and resume it when you have more in your pocket.

In other words, if ezine ads have always set your sales on fire, but pay per click has always been iffy, move more of your ad budget into ezine ads until the economic storm passes. Once your company is in better financial health, you’ll be able to afford to hire an expert to tweak your pay per click if you need it.

Some sites seem to be made for pay per click, but get hit and miss results with press releases. In that case it would be better to reduce, but not end, press release campaigns, and shift that money to PPC until you have more profit to risk.

The second step would be to append that advertising with more cost-effective marketing, especially in whatever area you’re not doing now. If it will only cost you a few hundred dollars in the short term to implement a tested technique that will get you results for years to come, investing the time is a wise move.

Let’s say you’re doing article marketing by posting to hundreds of directory-style sites.

Awesome.

Now get those same articles distributed directly to ezine publishers that have better
reach, and are more exclusive about who they accept. Need to test them out first? Run a classified or top sponsor ad.

And don’t stop there. Once your name gains recognition among your peers, take your expertise marketing to the next level and do some interviews.

Find ten people with targeted audiences and do 10 interviews. You can even cut those ten people in on the profits by offering their audience a special offer and paying them a percentage per sale as a referral fee.

There’s all kinds of creative marketing you can do that you can start with quickly, from blogging, article marketing or social media to organic search strategies. And of course ther are also all kinds of twists you can put on whatever you’re already doing.

How do you find them? For at least 30 minutes today, sit down and write marketing ideas. I learned a tip from a brilliant man named Allen says that after your mind has been working on something for 30 minutes, it just keeps coming up with more ideas on autopilot.

I’ve found that the longer I go, the better my ideas get. So even if you have to stop after 30 minutes, take that pad and paper with you.

And no matter how silly any idea seems, write it down. It may inspire something else later.

When you’re done, pick the best one and go do it, or assign it to your marketing team if you have one. Research who does something similar, and follow their successes.

It’s the ultimate recipe for getting a business through hard times — market harder, market more creatively, and do it in addition to, not instead of, advertising. Some marketing takes a little time to work.

The people are still out there. Your business still helps people. A recession or hard times just means you have to work a little smarter for the same amount of money.

You can do it. Don’t abandon hope just yet.

It boils down to this.

No matter who you are, it seems comparatively easy to get 100 people to do the same thing, to go in the same direction.

By comparison, especially if you’re new to online marketing, it seems much more difficult to get 10,000 people to do the same thing.

You may find yourself wondering if you even KNOW 10,000 people or if you have that kind of reach.

With the Mini-Viral Success Formula, the pressure is off. At the same time, you’ll find that once you get the hang of generating 100 unique visitors, 250 doesn’t seem that hard. And eventually you’ll come to realize that you can get to 10,000 visitors by repeating what you did to get 100 visitors, 100 times.

Instead of trying to gain 10,000 followers in Twitter during your first week out, you learn how to get the same results with only 100 or 1000 followers. By the time you actually get to ten thousand connections, they’ll be as effective as the next person’s 100,000.

Creating a series of small successes is also a much more sustainable model than attempting to recreate the conditions which must exist for one massive viral campaign to be successful. Aiming to get to the Buzz page in StumbleUpon several times a week is easier than attempting to get on the front page of Digg every month, and the rate of success rate is much higher.

How much does it matter to you whether you get 40,000 visitors in one day, if they aren’t the type to buy, click or subscribe? If you can get 40,000 visitors in two weeks, and convert them at one percent, isn’t that better? For most business people, creating a series of mini-campaigns is better for business because it takes less time, and involves more profit.

I was living on blog island.

And it sucked ASS.

What’s blog island?

What’s more important than what it is, is how you get there.

To get to blog island, the first thing you have to do is start blogging.

And you do all the regular stuff that they say bloggers are supposed to do.

You figure out all the basic stuff like:

• how often to write
• what to write.…
• how to create buzz…
• how to write persuasive and engaging blog posts…
• when to send trackbacks.…
• why to comment thoughtfully on other blogs…

… all that sort of beginner blogger stuff.

And people start to notice you.

Then you make a left turn at My Poo Don’t Stink Avenue, and suddenly you’re on Blog Island.

Maybe you stop responding to comments on your blog. Not because they’re too many, but because you just can’t be bothered.

Or perhaps now that you’re becoming a BFD, you don’t see the point of stooping to comment on other people’s sites anymore. After all, you paid your dues right?

And why have a blog roll? Linking out to other people’s sites is stupid right? Because then you can hold them captive! Forever!

Could be you get such good results from blogging that you stop and use the excuse that you have all this work to do.. (Yep. That one’s about me. And not in a pat-self-on-back way…)

Blog Island is the place you end up in when you stop doing the things that made you a successful blogger in the first place.

Like…

Writing about other people you admire . and linking to their posts.

Or being passionate about something, then writing about it with every drop of that passion.

Or reading your favorite blogs, and linking to your favorite blog posts.

Blogging is as much about consuming, commenting on, and linking to great content as it is creating it. All 4 activities work symbiotically together to turn you into a great blogger whose posts are read by actual humans.

Stay off blog island. No excuses.

You have an existing business, and you want to make, say $10,000 a month with it, with an average $100 sale. About 100 sales. For easy math we’ll say between follow-up and first time visitors, 2 percent of the people who visit your site end up becoming buyers by the end of the month.

So to get to your goal, you need 5000 targeted visitors a month — not to the site, to the sales pages. To make it even harder, we’ll pretend that only half of the visitors to the site will even look at a sales page by the end of the month, though if we set up our sites, email newsletters, and blogging strategy correctly, we know that’s not true.

Which means that regardless of how often they come back, we need to have 10,000 unique visitors a month. Let’s round that up to 334 unique visitors a day.

Where can we come up with 334 unique visitors a day, starting from zero?

One place is the Mini-Viral Success Formula.

You see, most people are banking on this huge response from social media and the rest of their traffic generation projects. And if they miss the mark, they go home with nothing.

But what they don’t know is that, it’s fairly easy to get several low to medium viral success programs working. And this is usually how the huge viral effect is achieved, over time.

No one expects to prepare a perfect dinner their first time cooking, on their quest to become a great chef. But you expect your 50th meal to be better than your 2nd, though hopefully not as good as your 1000th. And over time, more and more that you cook for may enjoy your food.

And if it gets, in practice, from good to spectacular, people will start coming back for more.

Then they start bringing their friends. And one day your preparing your 1000th feast, and it seems like you’re suddenly famous for your signature dish. But actually it’s just been building so slowly and naturally that it feels like forever.

This is what you want to do with social media, in particular with blogging. That’s the Mini-Viral Success Formula — it’s a plan to build several small successes in a way that builds momentum towards the goal of continually becoming a mini-sensation.

The goal, after all, with a business blog isn’t to become famous. It’s to make money. Most of us would rather have our 100 monthly customers than 10,000 visitors than turn into 100 leads. And that’s what the system is designed for — to help you make money with your blog, to turn your browsers into customers.

This is where the change in strategy should be — this is the kind of thinking that can revive the state of blogging, never mind social media. This is why the connection is so important, and forming real relationship beginnings that mature offline.

Social media to amass hundreds and thousand followers as an end in itself, with the hopes of making a quick buck is for people who are building fan clubs, not businesses. They’re for movie and media stars, not business people.

Of course, you may yet end up with several hundred thousand subscribers, followers or monthly web visitors after a few months or years.

And if you lay out a good strategy now, it may well be worth it.

Really soon, we’ll talk about the shortcuts you can safely use in social media and blogging.

Last week, we were talking about one of the reasons business blogging growth is slowing.

Part of the reason growth is slowing is that the instant fame model of blogging is proving to be hollow. You can’t be an instant success blogger. It just doesn’t happen.

It may look like this blogger was an overnight success or that company got instant social media attention. But there’s always a huge amount of work coupled with a huge amount of work behind it.

And yet. There is a way that business blogging can greatly enhance your visibility day after day, if you’re willing to forgo the Hyper-Viral model.

What if I told you that there is a way to get the same overall effects and the same amount of traffic as being on the front page of Digg, with better results? Would you want to know how to do that?

What if you saw the results over a couple of weeks or months, instead of days — BUT you could make it keep happening over and over again with a regularity that you just can’t guarantee with Digg?

Some people are saying yes, what’s the difference when I get the traffic and publicity as long as I get it? Especially if I can repeat it?

But some people are thinking, no, I want a big burst of success.

So I’ll present another part of the reality. Let’s say you have a choice between these two scenarios.

I can get you on front page result with Digg, and in time and labor, it would cost you $4000, but I could only pull it off once a year. In that one time, you still have to pay me whether you’re on the page for five minutes or 15 hours. And I can’t sell you votes or any of that stuff — you have to do the work involved, and know that after many, many times, it will eventually happen, but not be sure when, and not really be able to control it.

OR.

I can get you the same amount of traffic, the same amount of links, from the same number of weeks or months of work but over the time you’ll be working.

In other words, that traffic will be spread out over several weeks or months, starting in a few weeks.

Your internal time and labor costs are around $1000., then there’s $2000 in set up and fees. BUT. Once you learn how to do it this one time, you can do it over and again, as often as you like.

Now. It’s front page of Digg, one time shot, take whatever results you get for $4000. Or spend $3000 and get the same results, but over, say, a month’s time, then repeat that result as many times as you like for free after that.

Option Two looks better now, doesn’t it? In the days to come, we’ll be talking about letting go of that shortcut mentality of getting one quick Digg front page vs spreading your traffic — and risk — out over multiple social media properties, including your own blog.

Not That Kind of Shortcut.

I usually just say “Shortcuts are just the long way to failure.” That’s not entirely true, it’s just a sound-bite. (More on the sound-bite tactic later.)

REAL Shortcuts actually work, by definition.

It’s the Shortcut Mentality that doesn’t work.

Let me explain.

A shortcut is defined as a route to a destination that is shorter than the long one.

There are all types of reasons why the shortcut route isn’t always the default road.

While it may have fewer steps, it may occasionally take longer in time spent. Think of highways versus city streets.

A shortcut may encourage us to go off on side missions.

The shortcut might be new, and not have existed at the time the long road was first built. You may have had a static website. Now blog software like WordPress can build you a web site without even using the blog functionality until you’re ready.

So yes, shortcuts work. So what is the shortcut mentality, and why doesn’t it work?

The Shortcut Mentality is the premise that taking the work out of a process will still bring you the desired result.

Some people think they can use PLR content, or other sub-par content to create or update a blog and it will still “work”.

Every time I’ve seen this process followed, I’ve seen it fail. Blogging is work.

It’s not work that necessarily has to be done by YOU, but someone does have to do it.

Preferably someone with personality who is knowledgeable about your topic matter enough to be able to competently fuse the personal touch with the spread of information.

That means when your local company starts to blog, whether the prime objective is more visibility or better customer service, it has to connect.

Blogs are connective technology. Implementing them to divorce yourself from the public partly defeats the purpose.

This is a fairly controversial topic and some people will Strongly disagree with me.

They’ll say the point of blogging is the software and what it can help you do in the search engines.

They’ll claim the aim of blogging for business is different from that of personal blogging.

I would counter that no matter why you are blogging or what the ultimate gain is, if you intend to blog without making connections, it’s as effective as having a conversation using only a monotone voice.

Communication will result. But if you’re going to use resources to achieve that aim, and what amounts to ten percent more effort will make that mission ten times more effective.… why not?

If you have the tools, use them. Especially if it can give you a leg up on people who don’t get it.

There are blog shortcuts that work. And there are those that dismally, sadly, can only be said to work if you download your definition of something “working”.

So why say that shortcuts don’t work, when in a literal sense, they do?

Not just because the world rarely plays out literally.

Also because people who intuitively know I’m talking about the mentality, instantly get it, even though I’m speaking in sound-bites. And people who don’t, and want to know, I can normally engage and explain.

I find that when I talk or write in sound-bites, people listen, and I’m able to then engage the ones I really need to talk to further, in order to relay the true message.

We’re turning into a Headline Culture. It’s a necessary tactic, and perhaps not even an evil one.

If you can’t sum up what you have to say in a headline, is it worth your time to get the details?

Tell me what you think.

And share your favorite recipe for chicken too.

Because if I was a headline right now I’d read “I’m Sofa King Hung Ray”.

This week:

• Social Media — Isn’t it already shortcut?
• Why doesn’t the shortcut mentality in social media work?
• Why and how does the shortcut mentality in blogging specifically, fail repeatedly?
• Which shortcuts can you safely take to blogging and the rest of social media?
• How do you avoid the shortcut mentality in social media?
• What are some of the worst examples of the shortcut mentality in social media?

On Twitter the other day, someone asked me why I don’t put my site in my Twitter profile.

1– I don’t want the focus to be on my site from my profile. When people meet me via Twitter, I want them to interact with me before going to my sites.

2– I want the focus to be on their site and whether I can help them, not me and how great I think I am.

3– Being semi-retired, I cherry pick my clients.

It used to be that I had to work with everyone who asked for my help, HAD to because if not I was gonna go broke.

Now I work on cases that fascinate me, with people I like, at prices that make sense for both of us.

4– When you can get traffic on demand, you no longer see everything as an opportunity to get more traffic. That sounds like horseshit to some people, so let me try an analogy.

Have you ever noticed that money isn’t as urgent a concern to your rich friends? It’s because they’ve solved the problem of money in their lives. They have other things to focus on.

It doesn’t mean they don’t care about money.

It means that now that they know how to get it, and what to do with it, it’s just a tool.

They don’t feel urgent or desperate about it any longer. If they lost all their money, they’d be able to get it all back in a couple of years– because they understand money.

Just look at how many times Trump’s companies have been bankrupt. He always bounces back, because he understand how to get money.

Asking me why I’m not using the same traffic techniques every one else is using is like asking why Hugh Hefner doesn’t have a profile on eHarmony. Hugh Hefner is like, 147 years old and has three young girlfriends.

Who know about each other.

So yeah, even though he probably knows how to get more women — if he doesn’t need them, what’s the point of internet dating?

That’s how I feel about web traffic and marketing and leaving my site link in every possible corner.

I unofficially launched this site on Wednesday night. It’s Sunday. It already gets 100 visitors a day and I have yet to promote it.

That’s more visitors than the majority of commercial sites get after years of being live.

I can get visitors any time I want. Twice this week I’ve had it happen totally by accident, to this site. Traffic? Is not my problem.

Okay, so when I want people to visit my site from Twitter, what do I do?

I tweet a link. To compelling content that I believe my audience will want to read. I try not to have a good ratio of conversation to random thoughts to retweets and link tweets.

By engaging with the people who follow me on Twitter, I’m much more likely to inspire them to action when I tweet.

An example, The first post I made on the day I unofficially launched this site was retweeted 7 times.

Now if it was on post I’d made after years of being online, I’d be expecting a combined comment plus tweet total of 70 or so, after a bit of promotion.

7 tweets with no promotion other than sharing the link is okay by me.

Just wait until I start showing off.

In the meantime, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put your link in your Twitter profile. But if you do, just think about why you’re doing it, and what effect it has.

If the growth of business blogging is slowing, and Twitter becomes old news, what will be be talking about next in social media?

We’re already audio blogging a bit, and video is getting to be a more feasible option. I don’t know that it will get to the point where just to be seen you need to have video, not any time soon.

Not the way it is with blogging.

What I wish the next great thing would be is topical social networks. But I doubt it.

One reason is that until you can port your identity around on the web, or sites can recognize one standard profile, no one is gong to want to constantly have to create and update a new profile every time they log on.

Since the early web, the mainstream user seems to want to come online, visit a few standard places (email, social, news, search), and a few favorites, then go home.

Our job, if we want to push constant content to them, is to convince them why we should be allowed into their current favorite online destinations (such as their Inbox, via emailed newsletter sign-ups), or why they should add our site as a new favorite.

There’s always a point of “too many”, so we’re constantly fighting for a limited amount of attention.

Even if that attention grows it is scattered among more things.

For example, there was a point at which people didn’t want to view video online, because they would have to wait for it to stream into the browser enough that they could consume it.

Now that it’s faster, they’ve got YouTube. And while it’s great if your video is ON YouTube, the problem is that you’re competing with all the other people on YouTube.

Even if you can get them to view video directly from you (via podcast for example), you’re competing for time in the day.

If we assume they are awake for 17 hours a day, and work, eat, and are in transit from one place to another for ten hours, there’s still only 7 hours left of leisure, which they’ll split among other activities. Your target consumer may only be on the web a couple of hours a day.

If your video is ten minutes long, what will convince them to watch it? If your social network takes ten minutes to register and confirm, what will convince them it’s worth joining?

Not only do we need to compete for attention and time, when someone decides they have time for us, we have to convince them over the hurdle of creating yet another profile, for yet another site.

Yes, I can log into your site with Facebook.

But Facebook won’t pull in the link to my own website. It can’t tell you which email address I prefer to get reminder in, if at all. And it currently can’t push your email newsletter to my Facebook private messages.

There are similar problems with other ways of authenticating.

Until there is one ID system that knows

• how you like to be contacted without being spammed
• what your homepage is
• what geographical location you want to be associated with (which isn’t always where you physically are, so GPS is out)
• your date of birth
• who your existing friends on the new network are

and the other types of data you want to take with you, asking people to join your social network, instead of following your blog, may not be the answer.

Not to mention the fact that you’re asking for a bigger social commitment.

Reading a blog every day or so, commenting when you feel like it, that’s like a casual dating situation.

Joining a social network is much more like asking your readers to be in a serious on-going relationship. What good social network doesn’t require the commitment to participate?

Is your audience ready for that kind of commitment?

Are you?

If you’re not, Ning may be the answer, at least for now.

Yes, I said “may”. And also “for now”.

With Ning, you can create a topical social network on a networking site many people already belong to. You can even map the subdomain they give you to your domain name, for a monthly fee.

To explain why I say it MAY be the answer, let’s do an exercise.

Let’s say you do set up a site on Ning. Here are the questions you now need the answers to, mostly in the affirmative, for your idea to have a prayer of working.

Is your audience big enough that the small percentage of them who will post to the forums and start their own blogs will be enough?

Expect about 10% of your current RSS Subscribers, and 1 — 10% of email subscribers to join. Only half of them will bother to do more than register unless you nudge them.

Given that, think about it again.

Do you have time to create content and spark discussion?

And provide video content?

Or moderate out spam content?

Or the money to pay someone else to do it?

Even if you do, your data is still tied to Ning. If you ever want to create your own, separate from Ning, who is going to export that data? And how?

And if you have a community now, who’s going to port all username/password information into Ning?

Maybe one day, Ning will let you subscribe to a service that lets you completely white-label its service.

You will still have to have a hot enough topic to keep it from being a ghost town.

Indeed, will your site topic ever be hot enough to get its own topical social networking site, forsaking all others — like Facebook, for instance?

Or do you need to be content with the option to have a Facebook presence rather than your own network?

Not every interest group can support their own social network, and of those that can, the first mover may be the one that prevails. There were at one time, thousands of forums about internet marketing.

But only the few best ones, and the special niche versions, survived.

And if you are the first mover, you have to really think about how you’ll create, maintain and push forward community.

No matter whether the custom social network is the answer, or whether it’s some other sub-section of social media that becomes our next obsession, it’s coming from the innovators.

So, social networking may be the next big thing in social media, or it may not. If it is, you have o make sure you’re ready for it.

I think that there are so few companies that can support that type of evolution, that while social networking will become more popular, it won’t be what business massive adopts the way we did we did with RSS, blogging, social bookmarking and other social media tools.

I believe the next big thing in social media is some existing invention we’re not aware of yet, or something that may have already been invented recently but is still on the fringes.

I had just finished writing about how great business blogging was when I waded knee deep into social media.

Now that social media sites like Twitter are spreading into widespread adoption, the people who alerted you to social media are already on the next boat.

The question for you to think of is, what is that next boat? The only hint I can give you right now is, watch the innovators and the early adopters who told us about RSS, blogging, social bookmarking, social networking and all the other new media.

As for me, I’ve got something cooking that I believe will change our relationship with online video forever, IF it can be pulled off, or is even technologically possible.

My idea, though immensely shareable, is also easily copied. If it’s not the right idea, launched at the right time, it may also only be effective in the short term.

So for right now, I’m just raising the question to encourage you to find your answer. So what is it? What are you going to do next in social media? What’s left to tackle? What do you think the next big thing will be?

In an upcoming post, I’m going to discuss what I believe the change in strategy should be, as far as small and local businesses, for blogging. Then this coming week, we’ll be talking about “what ifs” for the social media horizon.

Want to lease space in your client’s minds, by leveraging the time they spend on the web?

Then it’s time to wake up.

To continue from our last discussion on this topic, the thing to wake up from is this dream of hyper-viral-marketing through the combination of blogs and social media.

Most people never will never be on the front page of DIgg. Most people don’t need to be on the front page of Digg, despite the links and traffic it can generate. Most popular sites have never been, and aren’t actively seeking that as a strategy.

That’s because they know that for a business to thrive, while you do need those links, you can generate them elsewhere. And while you do need visitors coming to your site, you need the type that convert. It’s not that DIgg traffic never does, it’s that there are more cost-efficient solutions, not to mention time-efficient ones for the majority of websites.

And yet the dream of a mega-viral accident is often the selling point of building a blog.

It goes like this.

Jack hears about this cool site called Digg. He’s new to the Web, and doesn’t get how these things work — all the better for him on one hand. On the other, it’s that much easier to get caught up in the hype, if the whole internet used to be hype to you. You find yourself questioning all of your beliefs about marketing, when you see how easy it is to start blogging.

That is, if you’re like Jack.

So you put together the fact that most Joe Schmoes who end up on Digg got there from blogging. Mostly people who’ve been blogging for a while. So you start blogging. And you start submitting.

After all, how often does the regular person or tiny company get featured coverage on sites like Digg or Mixx without a blog?

And even if they never achieve that objective, there are many avenues for blogs to have a series of mini-viral events, such as being retweeted on Twitter, or shared on Facebook enough to get one of the prized homepage-sidebar spots.

There are few for static sites. None for offline companies that aren’t somehow plugged into the sharing network.

And so that balance is coveted by Jack. But Jack can’t get there, and because he started blogging to get on Digg, he stops.

Few achieve the dream — which IS attainable by the way. It’s a long shot but it’s not impossible. The main secret is that anyone can get on the front page of Digg — very few people can STAY there.

Back to our discussion.

The fact that it’s getting harder to achieve viral success could be another reason why blog growth is slowing. If one can’t get one’s blog link retweeted 10 — 100 times a day, it feels like blogging is pointless. It looks so easy to get people to retweet you, from the outside looking in, so you feel like a loser if you can’t do it on your first try.

When more people read blogs often, we were all more in touch with the fact that success is not instant. We often climbed the two year journey of becoming an overnight online success together. So we saw the pains it took. We were both in the audience and behind the curtain, as either fans of a blog or as bloggers ourselves.

This was part of the magic of blogging.

If you’re paying attention, you can see why these heights of coverage are increasingly difficult to attain. Much of it goes back to the Laws of Media, particularly in being copied and shared. Those are the things we need to be successful in Social Media, as well. It’s not just the fact that we have to catch the eye of the person who is adapting to streaming content.

It’s in forgetting these laws, because we’re not reading blogs and other resources as deeply. Based on just two of the laws in Kelly’s presentation which we talked about in the previous post, it becomes clear why the pace of blogging and promoting via social media is increasingly difficult to sustain.

First, the elements that can’t be copied are few, and getting fewer. There was the first blog post about business blogging, then the first blog dedicated solely to it.

Now there are thousands of each. The ones that stand out do because they’re doing something special that is well marketed to a large audience that wants to read about it.

Second, being both shareable and uncopyable is a delicate balance.

To be shareable though, at the same time as you maintain this marketable specialness, you have to make your work portable, but still own-able by you or at least traceable to you– that’s if you intend for content to ultimately market you.

They have to at least be able to copy the whole if not the parts– perhaps by embedding the video but not being able to change it. They need to be able to reference it, if not rip it — if it’s an article in your blog there at least has to be a link to be copied and passed around.

So how do you write this mystical, magical blog post every day, at least while you’re launching — that will always be the thing everyone wants to talk about, read or share?

You can’t.

It was hard enough before you had to compete with Facebook and Twitter for eyeballs.

That is so much the where and why of blogs for business are dying — the airy seduction of possible mega-viral stardom is no longer just outside our grasp, it seems like it’s on another planet.

You have to be remarkable, full time, to even be seen. And if you have no other new media strategy, being seen is all there is. As little as a year ago, to have that kind of exposure, it was enough to be first, best or on-and-off “pretty good”.

Trying to keep up the pace of performing at your peak on a daily basis is exhausting.

Unless it’s your full time gig, how will you pay bills and blog? People who are able to do this are writing, researching and commenting all the time, every day, some even have rotating staff whose only job is to write, or to follow RSS feeds to get scoops.

Rarely is it the entrepreneur anymore.

Because when you as a business person are able to create this shareable special-ness, one of three things happens.

No one cares.… or it seems that way because you were so busy creating, you couldn’t market, making it an exercise in speaking into the wind… or…

Everyone cares… and now you have a scaling problem of time, cost, resources, or knowledge.

Who is going to write more of this brilliance?

Who is going to pay for all this bandwidth?

How can manage the growth that occurs from becoming popular?

How does this popularity translate into money?

Even if you’re prepared for it, it’s no picnic.

In the final scenario, if neither of those two extremes happens, you may have a medium lukewarm caring that barely puts you ahead of where you are.

If you’re mainly blogging as an entry into search results, that’s not much of a big deal. Of course, blogging will then always give you this lukewarm reward. Just make sure you’re still writing above the level that will get you subscribers, links and sales or you’re spinning your wheels.

Of course, if that’s all you wanted out of blogging, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

Because then business blogging becomes this thing you have to do because your competitors do it and you don’t want to lose market share in the search engines. You know that’s the easiest in if you have the right strategy, but the question becomes how to implement it in a fresh, new way.

So what IS the right New Media strategy for Business if it’s not just about paving an entry into search engines?

That’s the question we’ll answer next.

There used to be four distinct reasons that people would ask me to help them with blogging.

1– A person had an idea or a story and wanted to be heard. It isn’t always about money or business — see the political blogger, and the personal blog.

2– A person wanted to make extra money blogging. This doesn’t happen as much, at least not on a full-time income level. But to some, even $5 — 20 a day is a huge help.

3– A person, (especially an entrepreneur) or a larger company wanted more visibility. If you want to be seen, and to have multiple opportunities to be seen again, you blog, and you keep blogging.

4– Better search engine results or traffic. I would get a letter from someone who had X amount of traffic that would bring them Y conversions. And all they wanted was more of each.

Search engine traffic is an excellent fall-back reason to keep blogging. I’ve always maintained that it shouldn’t be the only reason one blogs, but that it also doesn’t make sense to ignore its powers in that area.

Did you notice it?

The one over-arching reason is exposure.

And who can blame them. Who hasn’t dreamed of being the star of a story picked up by Digg, or Mashable or the Associated Press? I’ve been lucky enough to choreograph or witness all three circumstances in my career, and as long as success isn’t expected overnight, it is attainable.

But more often than not, following success, I’m left in the irritating position of having to say “I told you so.”

Don’t get me wrong, being on the front page of Digg, or at the top of Tweetmeme, getting thousands of visitors from Reddit, your server rocked by StumbleUpon, and especially being written up on Mashable is every bit of an exhilarating feeling as you think. It doesn’t matter whether you’re just submitting someone else’s story, in the background orchestrating exposure, or part of the team being covered, it’s fantastic.

For a little while.

When the ride is over, it’s back to reality. You can scream “again! again!” as many times as you like, but you learn that it’s the convergence of the story, the timing and the barometer of Rome’s mob that determines if and when you’ll be on top again.

Most bloggers never make it. And yet, the majority of the bloggers I talk to are blogging because they were sold that dream at some point.

“Become a blogger, and you’ll get on Digg and then your problems are over!”

Not so fast cupcake.

One of the things that struck me when listening to Kevin Kelly’s talk about the next 5000 days of the web (thanks @salemonz), is his summary of the Laws of Media.

In this presentation on the next 5000 days of the Web, given in December 2007, Kelly said:

And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now — TV, film, video — that basically becomes one media platform. And while there’s many differences in some senses, they will share more and more in common with each other.

So that the laws of media, such as: the fact that copies have no value. The value’s in the uncopiable things. The immediacy, the authentication, the personalization — the media wants to be liquid; the reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them, not so that they are “free” as in “beer,” but “free” as in “freedom.”

And the network effects rule — meaning that the more you have, the more you get.

The first fax machine — the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist, recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable. Those are the effects that we’re going to see. Attention is the currency.

As you can see, I’ve emphasized about the idea that the copy is not valuable, and that the value is in the uncopyable.

This is the ultimate doom or boom of the ebook, the magic or mess of article marketing, the victory or vacuousness of video and the evolution or extinction of the blog.

Because the ultimate raspy gasp of the blog echoes here: the easiest way for you to get attention is by producing ideas and concepts that other people will share.

Then you want people to unite around the ideas that come from that share — that’s how thought leadership can turn into profit, by using your brilliance as an anchor for creating your Tribe.

It is then, therefore essential that you create original enough discourse that in both style (what you said, how you understand and convey it) and in formats (a link, an embed) that are easily traced back to you. The most surefire way to do that is to inject your essence, which can’t truly be copied.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but perhaps no one can say it the way you do, or make it as understandable, or duplicate your complex perspective.

And so we want to be both copied and share, for fame, for profit, for fun, for recognition.

If they copy but don’t share, they may throw the “you” part of it out. Great for contributing to society, not so much for any business that is uplifted from having one’s innovation recognized.

If they share, you can’t always track the sharing, but if it’s shared in a complete format, do you really care?

Especially if you know that this is where you can really see a return in value, you probably won’t. it’s more important that 500k people saw your YouTube video than being able to name each person, when they saw it and whether it was a Tuesday. So you “share to gain”, as Kelly says in the same presentation. Much better situation for you, whether you can track it or not.

So much so that so for many, blogging becomes a game of wanting to share something as close to uncopyable as possible that is also extraordinarily shareable.

We want the hyper-viral effect without having our intellectual property ripped off.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to strike that balance?

We’re going to talk about that next, and take a closer look at the mega-viral or hyper-viral model — that’s really a pipe dream — in social media.

As to the question in the title?

Yes, I think the hype of mega-viral success has killed the very valuable reality of what is a quite impressive set of tools between blogging and social media. Can we revive it?

Bear with me for a few more posts. I have an answer for that too.

Okay, we were talking about what is going to succeed social media and blogging. And it may be something that already exists.

Let’s look into what’s potentially happening for Blogs first.

Jigga Wha?

1– Widespread Business Adoption of Lifestreaming?

Possibly. To us it may seem like everyone already “gets” blogging, but I meet people every day who either ask me “What is a blog?” or “Why should businesses blog?”

The vast majority of people offline are not as plugged into the web as we are. It’s a fact — if you’re reading this, the vast majority of the population is less web savvy than you are. Much less if you’ve written something like this.

That means if we progress to business streaming, we’ll have to present a compelling reason why consumers should wade in our stream as opposed to, say, Facebook’s.

Or meet them there.

That means that to capture the minds of that set, lifestream for business will have to be something more than aggregation. A one-stop shop for everything “your company/product/service”? That’s not big enough, or exciting, or enough of a benefit yet to people who aren’t fans already.

But make it incorporate and organize everything that happens in a mirco-niche of your industry, making you the authority?

Perhaps. But then what? And why can’t that be accomplished from a blogging platform like WordPress anyway?

Aggregation isn’t a progression. It’s just… aggregation. It’s the “spare” part of heir and the spare. Nothing near useless, but not a replacement either.

2– App-etizing.

Again, maybe.

There’s some part of your business that can be made into an application for the web, the phone or the desktop. Which is it, or is it all of the above? And are you doing it for marketing or for the sake of the app itself? And isn’t your site more than what it can do? What about the conversation?

Is it the internal or external conversation that converts browsers to buyers?

Plus that’s not a successor to blogging and social media, it’s a companion.

3– Moblogs– Special Blogs Created for Mobile marketing.

You’ve got to give folks phone content, which crosses with apps. But how much does that cost and how does the average small or local business make this option cost-effective? What if the audience wants more than the mobile version of your blog –suppose they want to go from subscription to content to purchase without putting down their Blackberry?

We’ll have to come back to that. Because this is a great complement, but it’s not evolution.

An evolved progression would have to provide a Web-based answer, not just a mobile-based one.

4– Audio Blogging (Also known as podcasting)

Seems like the next natural step, at least as far as text blogging is concerned.

And it’s already here, sort of. If iTunes, Pandora, last.fm, the old Napster and the new Rhapsody haven’t convinced you of that, grab some food to take back to your bomb shelter while you’re topside.

The thing about audio though, is that it’s not a replacement for text blogging, necessarily. You’ll still have people who prefer to consume by reading — it’s hard to “skim” an audio.

Yet, the more mainstream your audience, the less this is a problem.

But it’s an idea. Try blogging via audio all next week and measure the results. It might surprise you how easy it is to do and how much your audience likes it.

Will it replace blogging by text completely? No. It’s not skimmable, it’s harder to share snippets of, which makes it more challenging as a marketing tool.

Seems to be much more addictive though — and you get more focused, undivided attention. Not to mention that if you make them downloadable, they can travel into other parts of your audience’s lives via iPod and the like.

Of course, there’s then the fact that you can’t link from within one part of an audio to within, say, another part of a video. Blogs can be configured to “know” me. Audio on a blogging platform can — audio AS the blog? There’s the hole.

5– Video blogging.

Some folks are doing video on some level — screencasting, slidecasting that becomes video, actual video. But we’re nowhere near saturation, despite what YouTube looks like. If you looked at Steve’s MindMap, you’ll see that some are speculating that blogs will become TV channels, or at least shows, and video blogging would plug right into this idea.

Video blogging is easier to adopt, even if you’ve got a camera shy face — screencasting and slidecasting may make more sense for you. It’s shareable via embed, but not in a way that ties the content permanently to its creator, and yet is still freely floating on the web.

Which I’m working on. But if I told you more about it, I’d have to kill you.

Ahem. Maybe we’ll talk about that another day.

For now, let’s move on to why social media and blogging even NEEDS an evolutionary next step. And one problem with blogs merging into social networks.

I’ve got a meeting this  afternoon but I may be back after, or it may be tomorrow morning. Best way to get the next post is to subscribe, or follow me on Twitter, where I’ll post the next link. See you then.