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:

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.

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 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.

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.