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.

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.