Social media is turning marketing and public relations upside down. The rules of the game are changing and shifting, and amidst all of this wonderful, innovation-driven chaos, many get into social media without keeping a focus on the "social" in social media.

How many times have you gotten onboard a social media website, went on an "adding friends" wild spree, starting sending links to these new so-called friends and wished for the best? I don't know about you but I've had several attempts with different social media sites. Many failed, and some succeeded.

Don't Just Add, Interact

Don't succumb to laziness and evil shortcut-ish temptations. Social media is a long-term effort which requires patience.

Come up with goals that can easily be broken down into small, very achievable steps. For example, everyday, genuinely make 3 or 5 acquaintances.

Adding many "friends" alone and immediately sending content to them in hopes of getting them to vote for it is not the right approach.

1. Add a few people at a time - preferably like-minded people and power users.
2. Interact with them, and make it a daily goal.
3. Meanwhile, keep in touch with those you've already added.
4. Maintain your focus on power users and
5. Turn acquaintances into friends.

Using a spreadsheet will be helpful to keep track of who are new/old acquaintances and friends.

Keep It Human

I graduated university with a major in Knowledge Management and before joining MindValley, that is pretty much what I used to focus on during my previous professional working life.

From my experience, when Knowledge Management initiatives fail, they mostly do because of too much focus on a techno-centric view.

There is a related and important lesson here.

Social media sites provide innovative technologies which merely act as enablers for communication and social interaction, so ultimately it's not really about the technology. I repeat, communication technologies are merely enablers. They don't and won't replace common patterns of human psychology which exist in the real world and which are also behind successful and healthy social media efforts. Don't fall for a techno-centric view.

Keep it human.

Create an enemy and don’t be neutral. Remember, what we want is polarity, not neutrality. Neutral is boring, and boring is unattractive. It’s as simple as that. In fact, I remember Frank Kern talking about creating an enemy too in his excellent Mass Control course.

Some worry that going down this road will cause them to lose “balance” and “fairness” but this isn’t necessarily true. It depends on how you justify portraying the enemy the way you do.

Today I came across a cool list of 21 awesome tips over at Copyblogger on how to be interesting. I'd classify many of those useful tips as conventional wisdom, but a few ones stood out by not being so conventional and I thought they deserve to be highlighted. Two are also related to Social Polarity.

1) Be wrong: The world is full of people trying to do the right things. It’s become so common that many of us are bored by it. We long for someone that is willing to do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, be the wrong thing. If you have the courage to be that person, you’ll find lots of people paying attention to you.

I like the first one because it's about going against neutrality and the status-quo and that usually does get attention. Like I said, neutral is boring. Again though, I must emphasize, that you need justifications, and not just do this for the sake of merely doing it.

6) Make people laugh: Bloggers are far too serious. We’re so busy trying to teach that we forget to entertain. As a result, large portions of our readerships fall asleep. And what’s the best way to wake people up? Humor. Public speakers have been using it for ages, and as long as it’s appropriate for your audience, humor can wake your readers up and get them paying attention again.

Writing a blog post should not be like writing an academic paper for a scientific journal. It should be fun and if you don't enjoy it, chances are you're blogging about a topic you're not passionate about or you're just being way too serious.

8 ) Show a (half) naked woman: Ever noticed that a disproportionate number of advertisements feature a scantily clad woman? That’s because it works. It draws the attention of not only men (as you’d expect), but also women. For whatever reason, nearly everyone finds their attention drawn to it. Here’s proof that it even works with blog posts.

Ah, I don't need to elaborate on this now, do I?

Not too long ago, we were experimenting with blog posts that can hit the frontpage of Digg. We managed to get lots of traffic from a particular blog post. Besides humorous content, the post had a picture of a hot AND wet chick in a wet T-Shirt. In fact its title was "How A Wet T-Shirt Can Shoot Up Movie Sales."

14) Be irreverent: Want to stir people up? Make fun of their god, their politics, their family — anything they hold dear. Yes, they’ll be offended, but lots of other people will think it’s hilarious. If you can’t stomach being hated by a portion of the world and loved by another, then you don’t deserve to have a blog.

I thought this one was absolutely hilarious! To what degree you want to do this, is something that's up to you but it's certainly something that works when done skillfully. Just don't go overboard and end up offending your core audience heavily. Be relevant and frame your content in a manner that can grab attention.

A final note...

For the sake of clarity, doing the above won't necessarily bring success. There are some very successful bloggers out there (and I consider them exceptions) with writing styles that I personally find pretty boring but I still read them anyways. Why? Simply because they compensate the lack of fun style with superbly useful quality content. Still though, good marketing is about standing out from the crowd, so it never hurts to always improve in that area.

There's a prevalent notion which says that if you comment in relevant blogs and forums, eventually people will click over to your blog. Over time, more people arrive and gradually you see comments being left in your posts. From there, the community starts to take shape. That's fine, but let's enhance it a few steps further. Let's go beyond the importance of great content which adequately satisfies the principles of supply and demand. Let's get to the "packaging" of this content so to speak.

So, How's Your Blog Community Like?

Blogs are great tools for knowledge sharing, and in essence the blogosphere is one gigantic self-organized online network of individuals sharing their raw and unedited thoughts openly. It's a vibrant and ongoing conversation, and the saying "there's strength in diversity" holds in this case.

Let me elaborate.

Picture this:

1. blog posts with many comments from trolls.
2. blog posts with many comments saying something along the lines of "I agree" or "great post."
3. blog posts filled with many smart comments and vibrant conversations containing diverse views.

The first case is bad and hurts your brand. You might as well have a few comments and a tiny community rather than many trolls infesting your blog and adding no value to the conversations in it. The second scenario creates good social proof which is obviously lovely. The last scenario is the best. You have social proof, a smart community and hence a great learning environment for your readers.

Now, there's nothing groundbreaking with such observations of course. The challenge is in how you nurture a great community around your blog, and for me to briefly explain that, I'll have to get into the concept of "polarity." There's no mystery here, the word explains itself.

Infusing Social Polarity Into Your Blog

Step One

Before the community arrives, the blog comes first. The first thing you would want to do is figure out your topic and then set out to create an enemy for your storyline and future quality content. Create an enemy and don't be neutral. Remember, what we want is polarity, not neutrality. Neutral is boring, and boring is unattractive. It's as simple as that. In fact, I remember Frank Kern talking about creating an enemy too in his excellent Mass Control course.

Some worry that going down this road will cause them to lose "balance" and "fairness" but this isn't necessarily true. It depends on how you justify portraying the enemy the way you do. Pick your enemy, and explain why it's so with research and solid facts. The key is to be genuine and passionate. Plus, no matter how "fair" or "balanced" you try to be, in the eyes of some you'll always come across as biased.

Step Two

The second step is marketing your blog at the right places. This involves the usual steps which I'm guessing you're already familiar with, but I'm also guessing these steps don't incorporate the concept of social polarity.

Most - but not all - of your marketing efforts should be directed at crowds sharing your polarity (and your "enemy"). The rest of your marketing - a minor portion - should then be directed towards those who like and support the "enemy." Disagreement to a certain extent is good, but you don't want the destructive kind. This is why you should take it nice and easy. You don't want to have excessively polarizing discussions, but creative disagreements.

Let me give you a simple example off the top of my head. You like internet marketing and think it's a much better option for financial freedom than multi-level marketing which you've tried previously but found highly lacking. Your subject can then become internet marketing, and your evil "enemy," multi-level marketing.

You get the idea.

And That's Pretty Much It

Again, keep in mind that the smarter, more mature and more intellectual the crowd you're trying to attract to your blog is, the better the quality of debates and conversations will become, which inevitably impacts your brand's positioning. Moreover, once things get going, you can steer the direction of the discussions by participating in them appropriately, and you can also manage the quality of these conversations by moderating comments when necessary.

If you liked this post, we'd heartily appreciate some StumbleUpon and Sphinn love. Thanks!

I'd like to introduce you to Amir Ahmad, the latest addition to our MindValley Labs blog.

Having been invited for conferences co-organized by Harvard University and attended international ones, Amir is a blogaholic and a passionate observer of the blogosphere. He has also built and grown a number of successful blogs.

Amir will be blogging about blogging itself, SEO and social media trends. Look out for his posts.

With that, if you are looking to expand the reach of your blog or your online presence in general, start here:

ProBlogger: How to Market Your Blog in 2007 (Yeah, whatever, the advice is fairly timeless.)
Online Marketing Blog: 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog
Dosh Dosh: The Secret to Building a Popular Blog, Creating a Prospect List for Traffic and Links, Expand Your Blog Reach in 2008, How to Use the Web to Build A Powerful Reputation In Any Industry

Read those 6 articles and you should have enough work on your plate to get through summer. Building your credibility online takes a load of work so don't expect the trumpets to sing any time soon... but the added foundation it provides your brand (personal or otherwise) will help future endeavors dramatically.

The changes we did were:

1. Append "about the author" to the end of each post
2. Append "related posts" to the end of each post
3. Append a link to our free internet marketing course to the end of each post

Sadly, I don't think there are any conclusive differences for you data-driven folks.

Comparing the 2 weeks of having these plug-ins to the previous 2 months without, the big differences are a ~30% increase in page views/visit and ~45% increase in time on site. HOWEVER, those 2 months include 3 posts that got very high on Reddit (I think they all reached the front page), so I don't know if the data is reliable. For instance, in those 2 months 90% of our traffic was new, versus 70% for the 2-week test.

Does that matter? Does "social media" traffic provide any benefit to a blog like this?

Not much for us. There was no major difference in traffic sent from the blog to our marketing course, which is one of our key metrics.

When you scale the control down to just the 1 week prior to installing the plug-ins, there is no statistical difference anywhere.

Do with this data as you will, but so far it appears these plug-ins aren't making much of a difference in increasing reader consumption. If you aren't familiar with finding and installing WordPress plug-ins, it doesn't look like these are worth the time it will probably take you to figure them out.

PS - This data is probably worthwhile also. When we got all that Reddit traffic, our RSS subscriptions hardly changed.

No change in page views.

The average user page view had no change, which was surprising, but the data doesn't lie.

Relatedly, we have tweaked the blog again. Although there are several concurrent changes, I'm going to revisit this topic in a week or two and report any significant changes, if any. Hopefully, we can come to a few conclusions that will help you tweak your blog.

Have you performed any tests on your blog around increasing page views, RSS feeds, or email updates? If so, let us all know and perhaps we can gather some useful conclusions as a community.

We've found that a blog can be a great source of competitive advantage.

Ever been in this situation?

You own a site selling a specific niche products - say dog food. There are 20 other sites competing with you. PPC costs are through the roof. How do you move miles ahead of the competition? You see, the top site always gets exponentially more than the competition.

It's just like salaries in the NBA, the top players get so much more than the 'also took part crowd'; take Shaquille O'Neal for example, in 2004/5 he got 28 million dollars, a whopping 10 million more than his nearest rival!

How can you get to #1? Getting there will not boost your revenue - it will EXPONENTIALLY grow your revenue.

The good news is, for many niche areas, there are no #1s. Who's the number one expert on dog food? Who knows? But you can aim to be.

Believe me, this is such an easy tactic to pursue, and here's the best part - 95% of your competitors won't be using it. This was certainly the case for Joe. Joe wanted to position himself and his online store as the preeminent place for dog food.

A Strategy of Preeminence

Preeminence Defined

The word comes from Jay Abraham,who said

"Why do some entrepreneurs gain levels of success so much higher than others? Most often, it's due to the fact that they have a better philosophical strategy.

They approach dealing with prospects and clients with a deep desire to really help and solve their problems.

They have an external focus of how they can serve and not an internal focus of what they can get. I call it the Strategy of Preeminence."

 

If you value your customer and serve them like nobody else in your niche then you can set yourself up as the number 1 authority in your field. The more and more information you give the better your reputation will become and you'll have established a healthy relationship based on trust and cracking information - browsers will listen to what you have to say and heed your advice. This is the purpose of your blog.

Here's what Joe would do to position himself as the preeminent person for dogfood.

The obvious way is to write a book. But this is hard to do and requires a publisher. They other way- almost as effective is to run a blog.

This is the strategy we're suggesting. Joe would create a blog focused on food for dogs. He would write about nothing else but dog food - various brands, nutrition articles, tips etc.

He would then link to his blog or position his blog on his ecommerce site.

Now picture what the prospective buyer sees. On Joe's site the buyer sees the same products as the competitors site. But Joe had one advantage - on his site, there is a link to his blog (eg. feedmydog.com). Now all else being equal, the buyer would have a stronger sense of trust with Joe. Joe would know what he's talking about.

He moves from being just a seller - to being an expert. His  products get more credibility. And what he recommends is more desirable to the buyer.

Here's how Joe would structure his blog

1) Focused Articles:

Joel's an expert in his field, but he needs to let the world know this through great articles. He could write say:

"The Pros and Cons of Wet vs. Dry Food"

"Do Dogs Need Multivitamin Food?"

"What Ingredients should every dog have in their food?"

 

2) Creating a buzz:

OK, this BONUS TIP is a bit far fetched, but believe us gimmicks can work with great effect. Joe could put up a picture of his dog on his site and describe him as the official food tester. He could then have his dog ghost write and post reviews of all the products. This may cause a bit of a stir and really connect with their readers.

We tried this at MindValley - Ozzy the Labradoodle director of PR caused a bit of a stir. (read about it here)

REMEMBER - SERVE, SERVE, SERVE your customers

3) Link Articles directly to your ecommerce site

So you've set up your own blog with extensive,quality information and established yourself as an expert in your field - What does this mean for your sales site?

From this firm footing is an immensely powerful springboard from which you can direct bucketloads of traffic straight to your sales website by linking from every post. You can also have your own adverts pointing straight to your website. This is one surefire tactic that will rapidly increase your website traffic.

The Beauty of this Strategy

This is certainly not too stressful a tactic - Joe only really has to write one post or article every week to see results. If he uses SEO for these posts the results could become even greater. We'll cover this in a later post.

The strategy of preeminence is one that we love and abide by at MindValley. By offering so much content on this blog and great information we strive to SERVE, SERVE, SERVE our browsers - we really have a deep desire to help and solve your problems. And from this platform we offer to you our INTERNET MARKETING COURSE.

Does it Work?

The Statistics:

We're certainly using this strategy to sell our products.

We've found that at least 1/4 of our products sold are because of this blog. And many people who have bought our products have identified single blog posts to be the main reason for buying our products such as AdWords System Exposed and Chain Reaction Marketing.

Read More to:

Explore more on the strategy of Preeminence

For a more extensive blogging strategy read more on a:

 Source of Competitive Advantage>>

The following case study comes from a one-on-one site makeover between Vishen Lakhiani and one of our clients who purchased our Ecommerce Strategy Course. (the Site Makeover is included as part of the program)

The Client: A Nutritional Supplements Retailer that Wants to Move Online but is Being Killed by the Highly Competitive Cost of Advertising on Google

The Solution: How We Uncovered a LowCost Way to Gain a Competitive Advantage and Out Do the Competition Using Micro-Sites, Blogs and SEO

The Company - Nutrisite (name changed for confidentiality)

The company we spoke to earlier this week wishes to remain anonymous, so for the sake of this article we'll refer to them as Nutrisite. Nutrisite is a retailer of all kinds of nutritional supplements for medicinal purposes. Tony, the founder of Nutrisite, has been running the company for over four years now and until recently he only had an offline presence.

Using only offline tools he's acquired a database of 39,000 clients of which 13,000 are regular customers. Products are generally bought from them using a catalogue and a newsletter sent out through direct mail. They have a solid profit margin per customer of around 25% on its products.

Getting Online

Tony's goal was to develop an online presence which means the potential to expand the market he could reach out to, WHILE increasing leads and sales on a truly exponential level.

They have already finished their website and the next step is to get it fully operational. Here's what it looks like.

The Website

Nutrisite clearly has a lot to offer - but they are new online - have virtually no natural search rankings and were losing money on PPC.

How could they get affordable traffic while building a competitive edge?

The first thing we told Tony was that to be a success he needed to concentrate on 3 things. . .

3 Things To Optimize For a Successful Web Business

1) Getting Traffic

2) Getting High Conversion rates

3) Getting Great Average Value Per Customer

Vishen suggested that Tony Focus Solely on these metrics so that he keeps his eyes and attention on the key things that can make or break his online presence.

Tony knows how to monetize his value per customer and has a good average value per customer already.

His problem was #1 and #2. He'd studied the MindValley e-commerce labs and had a fair idea about #2 - we'll cover how to get high conversion rates in another case study at a later date anyway.

So. . . #1 ( TRAFFIC ) is where the problem lies - in such a highly competitive market how can a marketer generate traffic without spending a fortune on Google AdWords?

2 Most Common and Usual Ways To Generate Traffic

Google Ads- The competition on Google Adwords is so intense in the industry, for example just for the keyword prostate there are 10 ads there to compete with. And there are 12 advertisers already for keyword phrase digestion disorder. To compete on this playing field there is likely to be a bidding war for the top spots. The only winners in this case will be Google. (I'm still kicking myself for not buying their stock when it was $100 a share , %#$@!)

SEO Optimization- It's possible to find yourself high up google if you find niches in markets and target these keywords. But Tony's site is new - how could he rapidly get good keyword placements?

Multiple Traffic Tactics

Tony had also been introduced to the idea of co-registration as a way of increasing his email list. This has worked for marketers in the past but we do have some concerns over this tactic.

Our Response:

"What we discovered from experimenting with this in the past is while co-registration does build your mailing list, what happens is sometimes these clients don't recognize you - they signed up on site A and they get an email from site B, often you get treated as a spammer and you get extremely low conversion rates. Being seen as a spammer is not a good thing if you're looking to build a long term business"

What we advised Tony to do was this: MICROSITES

Our Tactics To Generate Traffic In A Highly Competitive Market - Use A High Level Microsite Strategy

Build A Microsite

When people type in a keyword in Google, virtually all the time they are looking for information. By building a microsite it's possible for anybody to develop credibility, an air of authority, excellent content and vital information.

In this case if we target a specific niche you'll find sites, such as constipation advice below (sorry for the choice), with information that features highly on google. This example is one of a good site with content, however it doesn't truly fit into the category of a microsite. The site has been over-engineered and would have taken a long time to develop.

The beauty of a microsite is that it can be designed and launched with a lot of content within the space of a day hassle free.

We suggested that Tony should start using Microsites as the strategy to get better PPC conversions AND over time, build his keyword rankings so he begins to get search traffic.

His competition on PPC was fierce - but none were truly experienced and we think a targeted Microsite strategy might help him dominate his niches.

Take the keyword "constipation". Rather than sending traffic to a simple landing page showing NuriSite's range of constipation products, we suggested Tony directs the traffic to a Microsite focused on NOTHING but constipation advice.

What does a Microsite Look Like?

Here is a sample microsite we created. It's running on a Wordpress blog so it's really easy to update. There are 3 areas to note.

• The Signup Form.
• The Blog Articles
• The Ads

The site was setup on February 1. By the end of the month we were getting 5,000 impressions per week and were showing up on the first or second page of Google for several keywords.

For example - this is one of the keywords we were targeting "John Assaraf" (He's a motivational speaker and entrepreneur). Within 2 weeks, we were on the 2nd page of Google for that keyword. While other advertisers were bidding on the keyword, we were getting free traffic.

So really, the Microsite is pretty much a blog. With one key difference - you add a signup box to capture leads.

Let's take a closer look at all 3 areas.

The Three Most Important Areas of a Microsite.

A Blog

First, we suggeted Tony put up a blog and add around 20 articles related to the search term "constipation". Finding articles with republishing rights is easy. We'll cover these in more details later. We showed Tony how it takes a mere 10 mins to get 1 article up when you use the right free tools. The articles are important for several reasons:

1. They will help with Search Engine Marketing - especially if Tony pays attention to keyword optimization within the articles
2. Tony's Google Landing Page score will likely improve. Google assigns a "score" to landing pages based on content among other factors. When you're bidding on a keyword like constipation - having a domain with tons of rich content related to the keyword can theoretically boost your Google landing page score and allow you to underbid competitors for the same position.
3. The articles help lend an air of credibility to the site - this means that any ads Tony displays on the site will be seen as a trusted recommendation and should have a higher CTR.

A Signup Form

Alongside the articles we recommend Tony adds a signup form requesting people to signup for a special white paper on "Top 10 Ways to Ease Constipation" - or any related topic.

THe signup form should ask for ONLY the firstname and lastname. The second page of the form should then ask for the address. In Tony's case the address is critical as he makes money via catalogue marketing.

Ads for Tony's Products

Along the signup form and articles - he should display ads for his products related to easing constipation. The CTR on these ads will be MUCH higher because to the average browser, they are now on a informational site on constipation - they feel like they're seeing recommended advice rather than blatant ads.

Now we suggested that Tony repeat this process for 10 - 20 of his top selling products. For each, build a targeted Microsite around the niche and push the products via the site.

Is this hard and time consuming? Nope. Takes us 5 hours per Microsite once you learn the right way.

It's SO Easy

Tools such as WordPress and Windows Live Writer make it incredibly easy to develop content and make it stress free to manage your information.

WordPress is a free publishing platform that has great usability. We firmly believe in its mission statement- it delivers:

"WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it."

Windows Live Writer is a free, downloadable program that will help you include rich content in your blog posts and know exactly what your blog will look like before you publish it to the Web. It's one of the easiest programs I have ever used.

I'm a Mac user. Yet I keep a PC next to me - JUST SO I CAN USE WINDOWS LIVE WRITER. Sadly, Microsoft has yet to release the Mac version

Screenshot below:

Getting Free Quality Content For Your Microsite

This is remarkably easy as well - no surprises there . You can use Google Advanced Search to get free, quality content that you can put up on your site in a flash.

Here's how:

Google Advanced Search is located just to the right of the search bar on the main page. Once you've selected advanced search you can find information on a certain subject, in this case constipation ( sorry once again). You can make sure this material is available to use by selecting information that is 'free to use and share commercially' located on the right hand side.

So there it is, it's really that simple. You can start a microsite today!

The Final result can be a WordPress blog with XXX number of pages and articles. In our tests we have found that when you keep in mind search engine optimization you can very rapidly get the blog top rankings in a short space of time.

BUT IT DOES NOT STOP THERE - THERE'S MORE. . .

OK we've shown you the value of building a microsite, BUT this is not going to conquer a highly competitive market like nutritional supplements on its own.

Why not create your own advertising network by following a multiple microsite high level strategy?

Here's where it gets extremely interesting. If there's any part of this case study that you should pay attention to it's this. I'm going to reveal how to get more and more traffic without using PPC advertising.

Build Your Own Advertising Network with a Multiple Microsite High Level Strategy

Think Big

An interesting strategy Tony should pursue is not to settle for one of these microsites but to develop his own network of microsites. He could buy 10 to 20 domain names which focus on different niches in the health and vitality industry, say constipation, anti aging, prostate problems, digestion disorders.

These microsites could form a complete blogging network, he could then brand this umbrella of microsites all together into one site and call it something imaginative such as Health and Vitality or Healthy Living. Each microsite would link to the other microsites in kind of a circle and would sell the company's products.

The beauty of this is that you'll see your Google landing page scores rise rapidly within no time. Another plus of this is the way you've built up your email lists from every single microsite. This leads on to our next bright spark. . .

Newsletter

This multiple microsite strategy is guaranteed to improve your mailing list. It makes email marketing such an important tool as it's now so easy to direct so much traffic to your own advertising network selling your own highly profitable products.

Tony could do this my publishing a newsletter featuring the best 5 or 6 articles from the Healthy Living umbrella of networks he has set up. He would feature a brief snippet of each article to entice his readers in, then the readers would have to click on the links to read the rest of the articles that they are so hooked on.

The Newsletter of course will be a digital complement to his catalogue and will allow him to sell more of his health products.

Proven Results

This kind of tactic has delivered proven results time after time for some of our clients.

We like this idea because it helps you establish a long term brand and allows you to break your dependency on Adwords.

Related Articles

Getting Traffic >>

Useful Links

• WordPress >>

• Windows Live Writer Download >>

• Traffic Secrets | Traffic Secrets 2.0 on Marketing Squeeze >>

How to Learn More on Microsites and Traffic Generation:

The concepts of Microsites, Blog Marketing and Content for SEO will be added as new modules to our Conversion Tactics Course. The new course is being released this summer. All current customers will automatically be upgraded. The price will also be going up (to $895) as we'll be adding videos, software and tons more training modules.

However, here's a tip..... if you buy the course today - you can get the current version for less than $300 and you'll automatically get the 2007 version worth $895 this July. That's a massive savings.

And yes - with the current course, you'll still get a ONE HOUR site makeover, such as the one we gave to Tony of Nutrisite. This alone is worth thousands.

Visit this link to make a Smart Decision >>