If you are looking to promote your website or blog using social media then your at the right place!

To get started all you need is a computer, something to promote and a few friends.

Friends

Friends are powerful in small business and start ups but since we can amplify anyone’s voice online, friends are more influential than ever before. The only challenges is giving people who are willing to support you sufficient leverage for their “small” voices.

Viral traffic from a base of 200 friends can be crazy.

Clout

Those with clout are the ones who influence. Finding people with clout within your niche is an essential step in formulating your social media plan, because ultimately you want to influence them to spread your message. If you can influence the influentials your job will be much easier.

How To Find Your Clout:

Find popular blogs within your niche.

• Found the most influential blogs using blogcatalog, Alltop, Delicious, Technorati and Ask. More on this in a post to be written.

Find twitterers with large followings within your niche.

• Use wefollow to search for tweeters within you niche, rank them by “Most Influential”.
• Use Twitter Karma to arrange you followers by follow count (weed out some spammers while your at it..). The ones with high follower counts (and lower following counts) are likely to have clout.

With Them Over

It is essential you win these guys over. A long term strategy is far better than pestering them and becoming another spammer.

The key is to get noticed by them first. An easy example online is to do them a favour. For example if they are a blogger, comment on their posts, if they are a tweeter, ReTweet their messages (especially links to their own content/self promotion) etc,

Then approach them about your product. But be prepared.

What To Prepare

• You need your freebie/giveaway (high perceived value).
• An easy to tell story/point of interest or discussion.
• A system that will leverage each person’s voice.

Freebies

You need to find a freebie or something to give away that actually has high perceived value for the customer. This can be relatively low cost (or even free) for you.

Ideas:

• Give your product away – This is the best as it means customers actually get to interact with what you’re selling, it wins them over and they are more likely to spread the word. This wouldn’t be an effective strategy if you were selling houses..
• Free eBook – Overdone but still effective if well targeted/of interest to your niche
• Webinar – Same as eBook must have valuable content
• Invites – To your new service website, early access to the 2.0 release etc. Very effective for getting people to pass on and spread the word. Invite your influentials and give them another 10 to give to their readers. Much like the Google Wave release.
• Money – Will always draw a crowd, but gets expensive.. and it’s a pretty “cheap” marketing strategy.
• Your Time – If people value it as much as you do this can be a winner
• Physical Stuff – A “Limited Edition” branded t-shirt, pen.. It might cost more than an email, but someone with clout wearing your shirt is priceless.

A Great Story

If your story is hard to tell or boring it wont spread. Having a story that will stick is powerful in getting your story to spread. And ideally your story will make you look good.

For more on what makes ideas stick have a read of this excerpt from “Made To Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath.

You want to have a memorable story, or point of interest about your product/business before you approach those with clout.

Leverage Their Voice

Initially our voice would only go as far as it was audible, then came cave drawings, anyone who came into that cave would benefit from our work. Next was twitter, ok so there was a few developments in the middle.. but with Twitter we can send one 140 character message, @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) can ReTweet us and 4million people benefit. Technology has changed how loud one man’s voice can be. And when marketing online we can selectively amplify our positive customer feedback.

Find Your Customers

Find out where the customers are online and what they are looking for. Focus especially on social networks, what will they be reading socially online, what will they share? Will it be YouTube. Develop your campaign that around these social mediums.

Interact with your customers and leverage their voices (the ones that like you). Set up a blog and share their stories, tweet their exploits, do a video on them/promote their videos on your site, use testimonials etc the list goes on. But the key thing is to get them interacting with you.

Competitions are a great place to start.

A Great Competition

Get creative. A competition should be related to your niche in some way, empower people to take part and reward everyone for their involvement.

Launch the competition through your existing friend networks, with databases of existing customers and with your newly acquired influential friends.

Essentials:

• Have a good prize (the better the more response)
• Have more than one prize. People don’t like entering if there’s only a 1 in a million chance. The more people you can reward the better. Can you reward everyone? An eBook, an invite, the VIP section?
• Get everyone participating, not just entrants. Getting people to vote is one way to increase involvement from readers.
• Get everyone promotiong. Give entrants all the “vote for me” tools they need. Prewritten tweets, Facebook updates, Emdedable banners/buttons, and emails are all good.
• Make it fun, and then promote the winner

Close well

Lots of competitions are big and exciting but once the hype of the competition is over, it’s forgotten. Think of a way to extend the life of you competition beyond prizegiving. Think about “The Best Job In The World” competition, where Ben has been blogging about his experiences as the winner.

The End

Phew! Longest post ever. So much to say and yet still so much unsaid!

This is  far from complete guide, but it is one that works.

If you have any pointers or ideas leave a comment. Would love to hear your approach.

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This is not to be confused with your regular “10 Reasons Why I Wont Follow You” blog post. This is more of an apology. I decided to remove all my spam twitter followers, mainly because of all the new “Is this you” / “I saw you on here” DM’s, you know the ones right?

Well I didnt exactly unfollow all my spam followers, but the end result got rid of all my DM spam.

I’ll tell you how I did it..

I accidentally unfollowed everyone! So my apology if your offended, but it wasn’t personal.

The good news is my DM inbox is empty. Bad news is I’m lonely and about 3000 have unfollowed already (spammers I hope).

Consider it the ultimate spam purge, and Im not the first, John Chow and Seth Simonds collectively unfollowed 100,000 people (intentionally I presume..), and are better for it (or so they say..) so it can’t be that bad. So far it’s going all right…

If I unfollowed you, or was never following you, but you read this blog/follow my updates, message @timscullin and I will follow you back!

Looking forward to all your responses, can’t wait to reconnect!

Oh and if you haven’t already listed me, make sure you do so I can cut through all your twitter spam before you unfollow all your followers..

HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists <- Mashable

Choice

Tim

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It didn’t take long to get thoroughly interested in social media / blogging etc, and this was a diary of my learning. Anything I wanted to know about I would go and research then write my findings in a post. Which ultimately ended in me getting some contract work with a bunch of companies doing their internet marketing, social media, blogging, twitter etc.

It’s Been A Bit Quiet

So if you have been following the site you will have noticed it’s been a bit quiet here for a while! Well… I got busy! ha Doing social media for everyone else took the time away from working on my own stuff, stupid I know! But I have seen the light (and got a cool new MBP! see photo..) and I’m getting into it again, partly for myself, partly for you. I learn quicker if I write it down and theres so much to learn!

I am going to tackle the challenges I have when marketing real business online, and post the outcomes and solutions here. But as for you, no doubt you’ll have different challenges, or things you just cant find answers to. I can help!

Tell Us About Your Problems

Tell me about your challenge, and if it sounds like something I want to know more about too, I’ll research it, find links/resources etc and provide a potential strategy to solve your problem.

Currently I am working on a problem that many struggle with, the challenge of how to actually build your presence in social media, without being a spammer, and actually getting your potential customers/existing customers to interact with you, and then turn that into traffic/sales.

I’m hoping to post a step by step walkthrough in a few days.

So if you have any questions, either leave them here in the comments, or follow me on twitter and send me a tweet.

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So a big question a lot of people face when they first start blogging is how to set up their blog. Should it be self hosted on your own domain or can you get away with just having a .wordpress.com domain?

What’s the difference?

A Wordpress.com blog a is a free blog that you set up. Its all hosted by wordpress themselves. To have a blog on your own domain you need to buy the domain (about $10), get it hosted (from about $7/month) and then upload the wordpress platform (most hosts will do this automatically for you). Wordpress.com blogs are a limited version of the self hosted wordpress available at wordpress.org and give you a domain name like yourblog.wordpress.com

So which do you choose?

Wordpress.com

Pros:
Free!

Quick and easy to set up

Requires almost no technical knowledge

Posibility to gain traffic through Wordpress “Blogs of the Day” or Blogger search bar (very limited traffic in my experience).

Wordpress handles backups

Cons:
Cant upload plugins (this is a major).

Limited to the standard themes (70+ themes and growing… slowly)

Can’t run adsense => can’t make money with adsense

Can’t edit your theme or any other part of the blog.

Your Own Domain (wordpress.org)

Pros:
Can upload plugins

Thousands of themes to choose from online (free and paid)

Complete control of your theme.

Can run adsense and profit from your blog

More professional on your own theme.

Can add it to your existing website (eg yourwebsite.com/blog)

Great community

Cons
Costs

More technical to set up

You need to handle backups yourself

Traffic spikes might cause your hosting to crash (5 Things You Should Know About Making The Digg Front Page)

My 10 Cents

I used a free platform for a grand total of 1 week before I realised I couldn’t make any changes to my theme or add plugins so I made the switch. I think owning your own domain has value and looks less amateur than the free blogs plus I wanted to run adsense. To be honest it took me a while to learn how to set up my blog an get it working as I like (heck I am still changing things) but I think there’s good value in having your own domain.

If your not very technical and you want your own domain I recommend you either ask a friend to help or pay someone to set it up for you. However if you like learning and want to have a go it’s not too tricky to figure it out and a good learning experience.

Stay tuned and I’ll put together a guide that covers the whole process See below for a free guide to get you through the whole process, you may want to download it now and save it for later.

What do you think.

Are free blogs a good place to start and then move on?

Should you set up your own domain from day one?

Or can your survive on a free blog forever?

Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Edit: Here’s the guide I talked about.

Enter your details below and I’ll send through the guide: Setting Up WordPress On Your OWN Domain
Name:
Email:

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That being said, he has a way of being the most talked about individual at any award ceremony he turns up to. He gets slammed by the media then turns around and sells a few million albums.

Is there something we can learn from this unpredictable superstar?

“At Least Ya’ll Feel Something”

Whether it’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, storming out of awards ceremonies or this latest stunt with Swift, it seems like he has a way of making you feel something, a way of pulling on your heart strings and getting a response.. from the masses.

Here’s the three step strategy to going viral like Kanye West

1. Be Bold

Talk about the thing that everyone is thinking. Don’t let the crowd sit there and think.. “hmm I thought Beyonce was better.. oh we’ll we can talk about that at the after party.. *clap and smile*”. Say something, pick a side and put it out there. The closer to the moment the more people who will talk about you, (also the more likely you are to offend someone).

Imagine if Kanye had waited till the end of the show to make his “announcement”, what about at the after show to reporters? How about On the Jay Leno 2 days later (would there have even been a Jay Leno?), what about if 6 months down the track he mentions it on his blog.

Be the first, be bold, risk it all.

2. Shoot First, Apologise Later

He has a way of apologising which almost helps him recover, if not to the world, at least his loyal, album buying, supporters. Kanye’s next album launch is going to be more high profile because of this event, built on a reputation as someone who just speaks his mind, (sometimes when he shouldn’t). If every statement needed to be okayed by a publicist he would never be such a spectacle.

Don’t censor yourself (too much), and apologise once you realise you’ve stepped over the line.

3. Release An Album

Even better, release it on a stupid date.. (sept 11) people will talk and people will buy. The story of Kanye VS 50 Cent spread like peanut butter and “Graduation” (Kanye’s 3rd album) sold just shy of 1 million copies in it’s first week.

Once everyone knows who you are sell something, sell a lot of something.

Outro

In the song “Bring Me Down” from his second album “Late Registration” (2.5 million sales..) there’s a line that goes “Everybody feels a way about K but at least y’all feel something” which seems to be at the heart of Kanye’s controversy. He’s attracted to making bold statements about things that will make us feel something, good or bad.

Keep an eye out for the uncertain topics of your niche, make a bold statement, even if its lame, just make them feel something.

Was Kanye right?

Can being offensive help your blog? Or is it a poor long term strategy?

What’s your approach?

Leave your comments below

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My Mum

(That’s “Mom” for you Americans)

A while ago my Mum tells me she is reading this great book but she can’t tell me what it is, she thinks it’d be a bad idea if I read it. Naturally this made me want to read it, but I don’t even know what it’s called, and she wont tell. For almost 2 weeks I badger her, but all I get is snippets of the book, about how this guy outsources his work, travels the world, wins the Chinese Kickboxing National Championships and and works just 4 hours a week (clue) but she wont tell me the name.

After 2 weeks I eventually break her, the reason she won’t tell me is because she thinks it sounds like me.. and thinks it might be dangerous if I read it.. I tell her a book can’t tarnish my impeccable character and work ethic (lies) and she tells me the name, yuss!  The book was called The 4-Hour Work Week (originally titled “Selling Drugs For Fun And Profit” but was vetoed down by the publishers), but she insists on telling me that I shouldn’t do what he says and she doesn’t agree with it all “but it has some good ideas”..

I finally read the book, and it changed my life, or rather confirmed everything I had ever believed, while totally corrupting me.. sorry mum. I recommend it to all entrepreneurs I meet and that includes you. The book comes with a warning “DO NOT READ THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU WANT TO QUIT YOUR JOB”… I’ll let your curiosity do the rest.

The book is available at amazon for $13.57 here - The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (affiliate) or have a look at his “Experiments in Lifestyle Design“ blog. The book has been a #1 Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-seller and and the blog frequents the Digg front page, go check them out now, if you haven’t already.

How To Blog Without Killing Yourself

Anyway the inspiration for this post came from seeing a great video titled “How to Blog Without Killing Yourself” by Tim Ferriss. Has some great tips related to blogging, getting traffic, streamlining the process etc.. but make sure you catch the question near the end “How do I Tim Ferriss my love life?”… awesome!

Let me know, Have your read The 4-Hour Workweek?

What do you think?

Share your thoughts below.

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Tweeting great content is an underrated asset of many tweeters. For more check out 11 reasons why good tweets are important.

How to send good tweets:

Now theres the obvious, like don’t take the “What are you doing?” question literally. But apart from common sense your best chance of improving is by recognising that tweeting other peoples content actually gives you cred. With that in mind here’s how to find good stuff to tweet:

What to tweet?

Tweeting what has already been socially tested is a great way to have success. Here are a few sources I go to find information that is usually pretty ‘hot’.

Alltop.com

Alltop, aka “all the top stories” is a great place to find content relevant to your niche. Once you navigate to your topic they show you top 5 lists for the webs top sources. Skim through and find titles that catch your eye.

If you discover a good source it may be worth your while adding it to your RSS reader.

Stuff To Tweet

Stuff to tweet is similar to alltop but is just one page. These are all sources that are known to be popular on twitter and saves you going to the different sites to find what’s hot. Stuff to tweet also includes videos and pictures.

The downside is that if you are targeting a niche you are unlikely to find relevant content.

Google Alerts

Google alerts isn’t socially tested like the other sources but google vets out most of the smaller stories.

You can enter multiple search terms, just separate them with a comma. Set the type as comprehensive and daily if you are getting it delivered to your email (as-it-happens will blow up your inbox). Or else you can subscribe with your RSS reader.

Digg Search

Digg provides tonnes of socially tested content but to really make the most of it you can use the search. By targeting the right words you can get great content for any niche. You can use the options on the left to show only popular articles. Simply arrange by “Most Dugg”, then show only submissions with more than 100 Diggs.

The best part about the Digg search is that you can subscribe to the results by RSS.

Tweeters

If you find a twitter friend who is always sharing good stuff you can actually subscribe to their tweets as well. If you want to you can add it to your RSS reader or else you can follow their tweets from within your Twitter client. For example I have a column set up in Tweet Deck for influential people/ great tweeters and I always keep an eye out for things to RT.

RSS Feeds

Get yourself an RSS reader and subscribe to the feeds you can. The sources above are great but no doubt you will know of other great sources for your niche. If you subscribe to the influential blogs and news breakers, you’ll have a wealth of great content to tweet. Simply scan your reader in the morning, find the content, then log in to a servie like Tweet Later and schedule your tweets for the rest of the day.

Where do you find good stuff to tweet?

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So although the title seems straightforward I’ll attempt to avoid the obvious:

1. People unfollow boring people

Nuff said

2. People will Follow Friday you

Only when you stand out will people start “#FF”ing you.

3. People will see the FFs of others, look at your great tweets and decide to follow you too

It’s social proof, “so and so says your cool so I’m going to check you out”.

4. People will ReTweet you

If they like what the read they will share too (more social proof).

5. People will see the RT’s of your posts, then check out your other great tweets and decide to follow you

“So and so gets value from you, why wont I?”.

6. People will RT posts that profit you (your site, affiliates etc)

If people are used to RTing your stuff, they will be more likely to RT links to your blog, and also affiliate stuff (if it gives them value, and they don’t think your selling something.. it can be done).

7. If you slip your posts in they’ll be cool by association.

Even the ugliest cheerleader is cooler than you.

8. Losers wont ask you to RT their lame posts

If everything else you tweet is crap, other crap bloggers will have no hesitation in DMing you to ask for a RT.

9. You’ll join the Twitter elite

Or the twitterati or whatever they are calling themselves.

10. You’ll make millions while you sleep

It’s true, just follow the 5 steps, available here and you’ll turn your computer into a cash machine, literally.

11. The African Princes will stop emailing you with inheritance money offers

Coz they know you don’t need the money any more.

The Really Obvious

You’ll make more friends.

Okay, so I feel like this post took a turn for the worse around #8/9..

Any other reasons to share good tweets? How do you find new people to follow?

Read part 2: Top 5 Places To Find Great Stuff To Tweet

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So you may have looked at your twitter count and noticed you just lost a serious chunk of followers, for some people its up to 10%. The natural response is to go back over what you said, start second guessing yourself. Thoughts like “maybe I shouldn’t have tweeted about my erectile disfunction woes” may cross your mind.. Well fear no more, there seems to be some logic behind your follower drop (unless you did tweet about your erectile disfunction, in that case heed the advice of your internal critic).

Seems Twitter has run a spam purge.

What’s that?

You know how sometimes while searching through twitter accounts you’ll see “This Twitter account has been suspended due to strange activity”. It’s actually just a nice way of saying “This is a suspected spammer”, not “They were saying some weird stuff and we got worried”.

The typical process is for the account to be suspended without question for 7 days. After that the account holder can email twitter support and have their account unsuspended if they agree to follow the twitter rules. However if the account holder doesn’t email the account remains suspended. After a while these need to be deleted. This follower drop seems to be Twitter purging these inactive ”strange” accounts.

So yes you may have lost a few followers, but don’t fret. Asides from making your follower ratio look better they weren’t doing much. At least now you wont be spammed by them should the holder decide to revive their suspended accounts.

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So there’s a lot of great stuff in the video but the bit that really got me thinking was about being remarkable. In the video Seth explains that the word remarkable doesn’t just mean amazing or inspirational but actually that it means “worth making a remark about”. Online we would call this viral marketing. If something is worth sharing or making a remark about, it quickly spreads and thousands of people see it with no advertising spend at all.

Viral marketing is such a great way to grow traffic to your blog, but getting your head around how to make stuff that will go viral is hard to do at the best of times. But here is a great way to test whether whatever you’re working on will go viral. Ask yourself this, “Is it remarkable?“. And not just is it remarkable to you, but would other people find this so interesting or useful that they would make a remark about it to others.

As bloggers this is essential to our growth, especially with twitter, digg and so many other social mediums that make it so much easier for people to make a remark about what you’re doing and have hundreds or thousands of people respond within minutes.

So have a look at what you are doing and find ways to make it remarkable.

Anyway the video is below, and here’s a link to check out a post from Seth’s blog How to be remarkable. Hope you enjoy!

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