Every Wednesday instead of interviewing someone like we do on Mon, Tues, and Thurs, I’ll be doing a solo podcast to share my thoughts on Business, Internet Success, Marketing, Branding, Networking & Connecting, and other things that I’m seeing out there online.

Today I talked about Surrounding Yourself To Success! The podcast runs about 19 minutes.

People mentioned in this podcast & thanks for your input!!:

@jenniferbourn

@chaunna

@justinbrooke

@seotips2go

@amyvenezia

@jamespierini

@garyzelesky

Follow these folks!!

What are YOUR thoughts on surrounding yourself by the right people?  Please leave me a comment below, I’m interested to hear what you thoughts on the subject?

Tweet it, Share it, Digg it, Stumble it, share the word friends!

Real time web is evolving quickly and being offered in more and more places. As we all experience how everything is moving faster and faster communication on the web gets quicker. At one time, long ago, we thought email and RSS feeds were an efficient way to get information out there, but now there is the speed of Twitter. How will this increased speed help your social networking and marketing is the question?

Frederic Lardinois, in his post “Five Sites that Let You Experience the Real-Time Web Today” details some of the fast, near real time communication sites operating today. The question becomes, do you really need communication to be this fast? Does it have a purpose? Or is it all just an example of creative oneupmanship, where we keep going faster just because we can.

Is the speed of communication holding you down? Or do you just find it hard to keep up with now? Have you been upset with RSS feeds only updating about every hour? If you have, Notifizious may just be what you are looking for.

As we see on Twitter, there seem to be two general uses, one of holding conversations which is essentially a chat. And the other of posting messages, which the speed of delivery is usually not so critical.

For those who have a need for fast, or just want it because it’s there:

* Notifixious is a very new service and still has limitations where it can be used, but if you want it fast -might see if you can give it a try.

* Monitter is interesting – quite addictive. You can set any keywords you want to follow on Twitter and it pulls them all in for you. You choose, a tool or a distraction!

* And for those who have stayed away from Facebook because it’s too slow on the update- coming soon, real time updates of users news feeds.

As with everything, these are tools that we each choose how to use for ourselves, so it is us alone that must ask the important questions;

* Do we have a need to receive immediate information?
* Do we have a need to transfer information out immediately?
* Does a given service offer the speed that supports it’s use, or
* Does the increased speed open up new uses?
* How much time should I spend in front of it?

As with any service, I think these communication services will eventually get a thumbs up or down from the online world depending on their usefulness. I must admit, all these new faster services are real neat, but they can be addictive ending up consuming more of our time rather than saving it. I suggest, don’t get involved just because it’s there, rather choose the communication methods that best serve your needs.

With the recent increase in social media programs, internet marketers are beginning to target social media sites for their marketing campaigns. But how exactly do you market your products through social media?

Most advertisements in social media are presented casually. Many ads don’t even have hyperlinks, and the viewers actually have to type in your URL into their internet browser. While you probably won’t get as much traffic as you would with a normal hyperlink advertisement, those who view your site will be HIGHLY targeted, as they have taken the time to visit your site.

Most social media marketing is done through YouTube. Short ads are often added to the beginning or end of videos, or even mixed in to the middle. Be warned that advertisements in videos can be very annoying to viewers, so don’t over do it. One small, tasteful ad in each video will suffice. Do not overwhelm your viewers with tons of long ads.

Many types of social media marketing do not appear to be done by the actual promoter, but rather the general public. Often a “fake grass roots” movement is started intentionally by a marketer. A blog or other webpage will be created, with a “normal guy” talking about a specific product. Statistically, people are more likely to purchase something recommended by a “normal dude” that they can relate to, rather than an advertiser. Viral videos are often used as well in order to promote a specific product or website.

The entire goal of marketing in social media is to be the next big thing. The internet is constantly changing, and new trends seem to spring up every day. If your marketing campaign is part of the latest trend, you can receive millions of visitors. Do not underestimate the power of suggestion. If whatever you produced is considered by the public interesting or funny enough to recommend to a friend, you can expect to see your traffic and sales rising rapidly.

As I said, YouTube videos are the most common medium for social media marketing. But why exactly is this? Because popular videos on YouTube receive massive amounts of views within hours. The top videos of the day usually have from 100,000-500,000 videos within the first 24 hours. As with any form of advertising, not everyone who views your ad will actually click on it. In my personal experience, a normal click through for YouTube videos is about 20-30%. This means that out of those 100,000+ views, you will receive 20,000-30,000 unique visitors to your site, all within 24 hours. Of course the click through rate will change drastically depending on ad placement, video subject, quality, etc, but if a popular video has your product in it, you can expect massive amounts of traffic.

Opinions vary as to whether or not social media is a good medium for internet marketing. Some think that traditional advertising works better, while some prefer social media. However, with social media on the rise, I expect that more people will be marketing through social media sites.

The newscaster said shark attacks are directly related to the economy, because in order to have a shark attack two conditions apply:

1. People Have To Be In The Water
2. Sharks Have To Be Where People Are

Then he proceeded to explain that as the economy declines less people go to the beach (People In The Water), because they don’t have the money.  He followed that up with a stupid line that basically disproved his theory, “But surfers are not deterred by the economy, and are out in the water everyday, regardless of the economy, so they stand to have a much greater risk for shark attacks!”

Shock Attack!

Stories like the above are ways the television and radio news teams sucker you in to listen to the entire newscast by giving you a teaser headline, “Economists Predict Decline In Shark Attacks In 2009! The complete story after these commercials.”  They just baited you with a shocker.

First, why would an economist be predicting shark attacks?

Second, why are shark attacks declining?

Shocking headlines tend to grab your attention and pull you in.  You are going along on your merry way and you hear something that does not make complete sense to you. You have to know more.  They baited you.  You listen and they tease you until you are fully hooked, you listen all the way through the story until the stupid anticlimactic conclusion and you leave ticked off that you wasted your time.  But they got you.

Tweeting A Big Juicy Worm!

Social media is like that, you can keep people engaged with golden nuggets that pull people in.  You can ask open ended questions that require people to reply to you. Tell funny stories that can only be completed on your blog.

These are ways you can bait people into your sphere of influence.  Using humor, love and good information.  Seducing your audience like a fisherman uses a lure or a worm to tantalize a big bass from under the log in the lake.  He may look at it suspiciously for a few minutes, but if you don’t scare him off, he’ll bite.

Ride It Like You Stole It

As you know Lance Armstrong had a one of a kind bike stolen during one of his races this week.  The guys who make his bikes didn’t waste a second getting another bike to him.  They inscribed a great motivating quote on it that you just have to read:

Lance uses twitter as a way to stay in touch with the thousands of fans he has all over the world, and he receives an insane amount of motivation from those people who follow him!  But he makes sure that he keeps them fed with good content, he will send out videos, blog posts and pictures like the one above that inspire.

I don’t think Lance has a strategy in his use of twitter.  Instead, I believe he is genuinely interested in his fans and he allows them the chance to look into his life 140 characters at a time.  When he needs to communicate more than that, he has his images, blogs and videos.  His communication with twitter acts as a distribution center as it directs people to his more detailed information.

Fishing With Headlines

Your tweets should be the bait for the bigger story.  Like Lance, you should be giving a glimpse into your life without revealing everything in a tweet.  You should be saying to yourself as you write a status update, “take a peek, but if you want more, come to my blog, or my flickr page, etc.”  Each tweet is the headline of the newspaper, and the reader can decide if it is interesting enough to follow to the website.

You can really be sneaky and see if anyone is paying attention.  Start a story, and don’t give anyone a place to go to find out more.  If you have done it right, you will get a lot of @replies asking you questions about what you started.  Mark Joyner calls this the Zeigarnik Effect, where people have to have completeness in their lives.

On television, you see Monk always completing sequences, or putting a book back on the bookshelf to complete a series.  Same as puzzles, they are so addicting, because they are incomplete.  If you only give readers a couple of hints, it will drive them nuts until they get the complete story.

If you don’t want a riot, you really shouldn’t wait to complete your story until your next blog post…

Jason Ewart is a Sydney-based transformation writer and speaker who obliterated obesity & demolished debt.  

It was often said to me that “most of us are like the rest of us” . Even in our similarities, there is a uniqueness that you & I bring to our communities in areas from business to recreation.

What has helped me to extract potential from others & myself is discovering some things about the way that I am “wired”. This has assisted in honing in on strengths & removing hindrances.

My aim today is one of two things

1. You will discover a new lens for understanding how yourself, team mates & clients are “wired”.

2. You already have found benefit in using this and you are willing to share with us all by joining the conversation via the comments section

There is a tool available called DISC Assessment.

Let’s briefly look at the four frames

D = Dominant (Bold)

I = Influencing (Communicator)

S=Stable (Steady)

C = Compliant (Details)

D & C tend to be task driven. I & S are people oriented.

All four frames have strengths & weaknesses. (Read: the importance of teams/collaboration)

I would encourage you to explore the link, google & ponder as there is more to extract.

I will give you an example from my life on how this has added value.

The results of my survey indicated that I was a high D. Meditation of this result was very freeing. It explained a lot. In simple terms, I want things done & I want them done YESTERDAY!

INTERNALLY, impatience & unrealistic expectations were leading to frustration.

This is good to know as myself (along with my wife, team etc) are able to work with this toward eliminating frustrations.

EXTERNALLY, the potential is there to hurt people (ie. family, customers, co-collaborators) and also miss important details. The “C” people are great to have in my world!

I believe there is great benefit for discovering how ourselves, our families, our teams and our clients are “wired”.

Keep in mind, as my friend Dana Byers reminded me recently,

“knowledge of our own and other’s personality types must be used as a means to improve working and personal relationships but should never be used as a means of judging or manipulating others’ behavior.”

On that note, what is the cost for not improving working and personal relationships?

]]> http://successfool.com/wired-part-1-of-3/feed/ 3 http://successfool.com/dont-talk-to-me-im-trying-to-add-more-friends/ http://successfool.com/dont-talk-to-me-im-trying-to-add-more-friends/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:49:04 +0000 Yisel Guajardo http://successfool.com/?p=505 Yisel Guajardo is an entrepreneur who writes about internet marketing, social media, and blogging. She authors the blog Advanced Income. You can also follow her on Twitter.

The debate hit the Internet Marketing world last week when Ed Dale announced on his blog he’s flushing most of his Facebook friends and starting fresh.

(Why did flushing, friends, and fresh just seem weird to me? Anyway.)

It really isn’t anything new, the desire to have lots of friends on the social networking sites is viewed as a type of social validation. You know, “Hey I’m cool, look at all the friends I have”.

Come on, admit it. How cool did you look on MySpace when Tom was your only friend?

Hey, I’m just saying…I’m not pointing any fingers, I fell for it too.

But this led to a mad rush to add friends as quickly as possible with friend adding software and viral gizmos and gadgets that are still prevalent to this day. Especially on Twitter.

Yet time has shown, that just like in the real world, it’s not the number of friends or followers, but who is actually listening and cares what you have to say.

You can’t fake influence. Just like men can’t fake…well, you know. It’s either there or not.

So here we are, a ton of useless friends that put in question our use of social media socially.

Huh? Well, the cartoon below says it all. Are you so busy adding friends that you are missing out on the real value of the sites you use either personally of professionally?

With over 175 million people on Facebook, as marketers we start rubbing our little hands. And yes it’s tempting. Oh yes very tempting. I mean, if Facebook were a country if would be the sixth most populated in the world! (And we don’t need a passport or have to put up with airline security.)

But Ed has a point. He says:

People who study Internet marketing intensely as we do, use Facebook completely the wrong way. Actually let me rephrase that, we do not use it the way “real people” use it.”

I’m certainly rethinking my use of Facebook. I haven’t logged in for months, simply because it was a time hog having through sift through an Inbox full of solicitations, spam, and useless conversations to find anything of value and personal.

And although I don’t know wether I’ll be flushing friends from the bathroom of my account just yet, not because I don’t want to, but because I’m too lazy to do it myself, I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer.

Its really going to boil down to answering this question for yourself: What’s my purpose for using it?

I’d love to hear from you. Especially those using Facebook both professionally and personally.
Will you be flushing your friends? How do you use Facebook and what do you get out of it?

Talk soon.

I had spoken before about the benefits of reaching out to the bloggers and getting exposure for your business that way. But, now I want to talk about the best way to do it.

Traditionally, companies or their PR agencies call the media (or fax/email/whatever) and “pitch” them a story idea. The media knows the deal and knows why you are calling. They know you are “selling” them something. In my world, I sell stories. They don’t always love it, but 99% realize that it’s part of the game.

Well, bloggers are different and need to be approached differently. If you want to connect with the bloggers and get them to talk about you or your website or product or whatever, you can’t be a salesman. You need to be their friend.

Do not try to force things on them just to get them to post it. Think about them and their blog (you should really apply this to traditional media as well). What type of information do they like to talk about? Then think of the best way to package your information so that it’s of interest to them.

When I send something out to a blogger, I usually couch it with “I thought you might find this of interest for your blog.” And I really mean that. I want to come across as a friend or associate, not someone spamming them. Do not spam the bloggers, it’s a great way to get shunned. Send information that really might be of interest to them and they’ll see you as a helpful associate, not an obnoxious salesman.

I know all of this may sound obviously, but as a blogger myself, you wouldn’t believe the stupid stuff that I get sent to me.

Another good idea (and this applies to traditional media as well), is to send bloggers information that doesn’t benefit you at all. If you happen to see an interesting story on, say, dieting, send that to your diet blog contacts and let them know that it doesn’t have anything to do with you, but you thought it might be something they’d like. People appreciate this because it shows that you are thinking of them and their agenda, and not your own. This will make them more receptive the next time you do have something that benefits you.

Most of us start out alone in this online business endeavor. We spend hours studying and learning what to do – internet marketing, web page building, copy writing, advertising, business systems, SEO, article marketing, e-books, newsletters and more. Everyone we buy information from tells us that, “this is it” – this is how you do it, but it’s not – is it!

How true, if you haven’t figured it out yet, you soon will, there is more than one magic bullet that will launch you into instant success. Of course it takes information, methods, tools, effort, time and . . . good friends and associates. Yes, friends and associates. Second only to persistence this is how people become successful in this internet marketing game.

Let me explain a bit. If you study successful online marketers, you will discover that they don’t do it alone, not even the so-called ‘gurus’. They have found and associated with others who help with idea exchanging, tech support, mentoring, business association and masterminding. Successful people realize the power of associating with others. When you collaborate with others, everyone wins. Even if you are the one helping someone, you are building a relationship, which will become beneficial to you.

People can inspire, motivate and assist in ways you can not know until you are interacting. When going it all alone you can easily get stuck on something you don’t understand for a long time. This can stymie your motivation and progress. Having no where to turn for assistance and motivation. is one of the biggest reasons many people give up on their business development dreams.

So how do you locate other people to associate with? Well, this is just like creating any other friendship or relationship, you need to take an action first. Potential collaborators and partners are all around, you just need to let them know that you are. Now don’t run out there, find a well-known top marketer, walk up and ask them to do a deal with you.

Of course we all want to get hooked up with people who are already very successful to do business with, but stand back and take it from their perspective. They have probably been approached by many seeking to do a deal which is usually more one sided favoring the requestor. They are like most in business, they are already very busy with what they are already doing. And why would they drop everything for a project or joint venture with someone they don’t even know?

Now I’m not saying that you can’t make a business like request to someone to do a joint venture with, because you can, I’ve done it However, you need to make sure that you are offering the right kind of benefit to the people you are approaching. And, if doing business together works out and provides the other party with what they expected, you may have begun a good business relationship or even a friendship.

Many times though the people you want to associate with are real busy and hard to get in touch with so meeting them socially first may be the way to go. With all the social networking and blogging going on there are plenty of ways to begin interacting with many people. People will tend to do business more readily with people they know. You’ve heard the term, “old boys club”, well that’s friends doing business with friends and acquaintances.

So, how best to find people to interact with? Seek them out and let them know you are around.

Some ideas;
* Interact on blogs, leave comments,
* Interact on forums, make comments, ask questions, etc.,
* Operate your own blog and encourage interaction,
* Join social networking sites and interact,
* Join a coaching group and interact with everyone,
* Go to live training events and seminars and interact with people,
* Be helpful to others as often as you can,
* Offer bonus products that enhance what someone else is selling,
* Find out how you can assist with someone else’s promotion

. . . And more.

I’m sure you have some additional ways to find people and build relationships.

One important thing, don’t always be pimping your stuff all over the social networks, rather, first be social and helpful. The trick is to get to know people first. Sure, let them know what you are doing, but don’t push it on them. When you are building relationships is not the time for the big sales presentation, trying to get the other person to but into what you want.

Yes, relationship building can take time but this is how you really find people to associate with. And there are so many ways to do it, just choose the ones that you can fit into what you are doing. Set them up, set up a schedule for yourself to participate, and go!

So, how do you build relationships?
How do you give to others and provide value?

Together we can build up a nice resource list here.

. . . Add yours below.

John

Pictures ref:
upload.wikimedia.org
www.kids4peaceatlanta.org

I’ll be talking about this quite a bit and to start, let’s talk about the importance of connecting with the bloggers. So, why are the bloggers important?

Well, it’s pretty simple: the media landscape is changing and more and more people are getting their information from blogs, just like you are doing right now. I’m not knocking traditional media outlets like newspapers, magazines, radio and television, but let’s be honest, the media is shifting away from that.

The days of the two-newspaper cities are quickly coming to a close. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is in trouble, as is the Philadelphia Daily News. I’ve even read that the Old Gray Lady’s print edition is in serious peril.

I don’t think print is ever going to go away completely, but circulations are down and online readership is up.

Perfect example is the websites of newspapers. Newspapers aren’t stupid, they know the deal. Go to your city newspaper’s website and I guarantee you will see blogs. The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, NY Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer…they all have blogs. They know that blogs are just too fast with the information and that people won’t wait until tomorrow morning’s newspaper.

Like I said before, I’m a Philadelphia Eagles fan. By reading blogs online, I know that Brian Westbrook missed practice at 3:30 PM on Thursday. Why would I wait to read the same thing in Friday morning’s Inquirer? I wouldn’t, nobody would. Blogs have the news faster than anyone, and that’s a big reason why people read them.

Sure, bloggers will never completely take over. Traditional journalists are held to credibility and accountability standards that most bloggers aren’t. But, there are more than enough bloggers who have that “street cred” and the number of them who have it is only going to grow. It’s very important to recognize the PR importance of blogs for you and your business. You need to reach out to them in order to maximize your company’s exposure.

Next time we’ll talk about the best way to reach out to those bloggers and get them to write about you.

In this 45 minute interview, you’re going to learn:

- Why Connecting & Networking is important to your success
- How to go out there and Connect with the influencers in your industry
- Common mistakes in trying to connect with others
- The proven 4 step process to Connect with anyone

Check out the live interview here & also don’t forget to check out http://ConnectionMastery.com, Larry’s 3 day instensive workshop on Connecting.

Enjoy folks!