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The chart below is designed to help visually show you how to generate traffic from certain platforms. It allows visual learners to clearly understand how traffic can be generated to there website. There is well over 100 different methods of generating traffic to your site below.

The graph is interactive, this allows you to either zoom in or zoom out. You can also drag and move the screen to areas of interest.

One of the most surprising phenomena about our increasingly digital world is the kind of information that users freely give about themselves when they feel it is not being unfairly extracted from them. Wise social marketers have realized that finding the right information to gather from users can yield a comfortable, secure experience for the users as well as providing marketers with valuable information that they normally wouldn’t have. One of the best players in this delicate balance is Foursquare.

Foursquare is a social networking program that allows people to play a game through their mobile devices. Users visit various locations in the real world. When a person arrives at a particular location, he or she “checks in” at a list of GPS-suggested nearby available locales. If the person has visited the location more often than any other users, he or she is made “mayor” of the location. Users can also unlock “badges,” which are special rewards for visiting specific places or accomplishing particular tasks. The users can also see where their friends have recently checked in, post suggestions and tips, and push all of their Foursquare updates to Twitter or Facebook.

After only a year, Foursquare reached 500,000 users in March 2010. In June 2010, that number had jumped to 1.8 million spread over several countries. Its users are also a dedicated bunch: with only half a million users in March 2010, there had been 15.5 million location check-ins.

How to Leverage Foursquare for Business

If the description hasn’t made it apparent, Foursquare is an enormously powerful tool for businesses, particularly small businesses like restaurants and bars that require a strong connection to local customers. Here are some of the best ways these businesses can leverage Foursquare.

1. Encourage users to fight for mayorships

Foursquare is a game: users compete to become the mayor of their favourite locations. You can make this competition more intense by offering incentives to users when they become mayor of your business. Starbucks, for instance, ran a deal in June that offered a $1 discount on frappuccinos at any Starbucks location. This sort of deal does not cost much money for Starbucks, and it encourages people to visit Starbucks locations frequently in hopes of becoming a mayor. Although users are not required to buy a beverage every time they check in, this special does make Starbucks more attractive when the users are considering multiple coffee options.

2. Make additional offers to reward the less competitive

Not everyone can be mayor of your business. Most mayorships tend to circulate between a few people who are very dedicated to Foursquare. If they are the only people who are getting any special deals, some people will give up on checking in at your business.

The best way to counter this is by offering “check-in” deals. After every tenth visit, give every user a deal, such as a discount or free product. Your loyal customers who aren’t intensely competitive will appreciate it, and will be enticed to keep coming back.

3. Get users to boost your business on Facebook and Twitter

Many users already push their Foursquare check-ins to Facebook and Twitter. But some people, afraid of swamping their friends’ feeds with updates, do not do this. This means you are losing out on a free chance for publicity.

Tasti D-Lite has found a way around this. They already have a rewards program, called TastiRewards. If users connect their TastiRewards account with their Twitter and Foursquare accounts, they have the opportunity to earn more rewards per purchase. The cost for the user is that they get an update sent to their Twitter and Foursquare accounts. Since this is an occasional update by a company the user has loyalty towards, this is not much of a hurdle. The benefit for the business is a continuous and cheap form of advertising that almost resembles word of mouth.

4. Use Foursquare’s statistics to better understand your customers

All of the business owners on Foursquare get access to the stats for their location. This includes a breakdown of gender, when people visit your business and how often. Although this may not seem particularly useful, these sorts of stats can be invaluable for owners of a business.

For example, PCC Natural Markets used Foursquare statistics to determine that people were coming into their stores because they were looking for a new organic donut. When you are running a low-margin business such as a restaurant or bar, knowing any information like this can be key to beating your competitors and pleasing your customers.

5. Make personal contact with your loyal customers

Most small-business owners are often meeting their customers face-to-face. But loyal customers who don’t make a fuss may never make an impression. With Foursquare, you can create a connection with these people by contacting them when you notice them repeatedly checking in. Keeping these people happy – the quiet majority who aren’t complaining – is incredibly important. They can also give you invaluable, honest opinions about what is working and what is not working about your business.

For any location-based business foursquare is rapidly becoming an invaluable tool. Getting in now will ensure you remain relevant to your consumers – and ahead of your competition.

I was fortunate enough to get in contact with Krizia. For anyone who has talked to her, you realize that she is a very busy women. A women who never stops and is dedicated to her work. I was even shocked she replied to my email to conduct this interview! The interview is below, it is very informative and an eye opener to many. The interview has not been edited.

1. When was mybeautymatch.com founded?

I launched myBeautyMatch.com in June 2007.

2. Tell us a little bit more about MyBeautyMatch. Why did you start it?

The intention behind myBeautyMatch.com was to offer a perspective on beauty from the eyes of a woman who was no longer in her 20s. Most beauty bloggers where in their teens and 20s and I was in my 30s and wanted to bring the voice of beauty over 35!

3. How many articles do you write a day for MyBeautyMatch?

I started writing one article per day, but quickly moved to two articles. After one year, I was writing between 3-5 articles per day. They weren’t as long, but they were frequent. By mid-2008, I started writing longer more details articles that covered a topic in more depth.

4. You give out a lot of free products. Why?

I give a lot of free products to build a community and show that that I offer a lot of value.

5. Please share with us an interesting story regarding MyBeautyMatch.

In October of 2009 I was contacted by a television production studio who was shooting a new snip off show on money management. The coordinator had read a post I wrote on buying designer clothes on ebay and she contacted me to see if I’d agree to be an expert on a future show. In November 2009, I spent a Saturday morning giving advice to a 20-something year old shopaholic on how to curb her spending and how to sell her designer wears on ebay to help pay off her debt.

6. Do you have any other websites you work with?

Yes, I’ve launched EatSmartAgeSmart.com in April 2009.

In June 2009 (two months after launching Eat Smart Age Smart) I was awarded with the nomination of ‘Top Health Blogger’ in the Healthy Eating category by Well Sphere.

Well Sphere has over 3000 health bloggers as part of their network, but only 200 of us (located in 35 countries) have received the mention of ‘Top Health Blogger’!

7. Do you have anyone helping you or is It just you?

Oh, yes! I do outsource the tech part of the site along with publishing the content and a few other functions. It’s too much work for one person.

8. Any tools you can suggest to people?

One of the most important thing beginners must think about is building a database of followers. This is something that should be done from day 1 of the launch of the blog.

9. How can people find you? Facebook…twitter… etc

Facebook

Twitter

10. Any helpful tips for beginners?

Make sure you work on your online branding. If you are creating a lead blog, make sure your brand looks professional. You can outsource this work to outsource people or you can find local students willing to work for a lower hourly wage in order to secure the experience.

When people think of Internet tools to help their business, they thing of obvious ones like blogs and websites. But many of the tools we use every day can be adapted for business purposes. One of the most fun, and potentially overlooked free Internet tools, is YouTube.

What is YouTube?

Unless you have been deliberately avoiding the Internet for the last few years, you have likely heard of YouTube. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload videos for other users to watch.

Before YouTube existed, there weren’t many places to go to easily stream videos. This meant that once it launched in 2005, it quickly exploded in popularity. In early 2009, YouTube had 83 million unique visitors per month, was the fifth biggest brand on the Internet, and Credit Suisse estimated that over 40% of streamed videos in the U.S. go through YouTube. Some of the most popular videos get enormous numbers of views: Lady Gaga’s video for “Bad Romance” has only been on the site for three months, and it has received over 130 million views.

That’s all well and good for major media figures, but the power of YouTube is its ability to make unlikely stars out of unknown people and things. The wedding entrance dance of a couple in Minnesota has received over four million views in less than a year. And this produces YouTube’s major benefit for businesses.

YouTube and “viral” videos

YouTube can let advertising become “viral.” A viral advertisement is an advertisment that naturally spreads without a push from marketers. The YouTube video for Dove, called “Evolution”, is a perfect example of this. From an initial budget of little over $100,000, it spontaneously was passed along by viewers until over twelve million people had watched it in its first year. It was also discussed on shows like Good Morning America and the View. Estimates suggest that traditional marketers trying to replicate the effect it had would have spent over $150 million.

Other Benefits of YouTube

Although viral videos can have a profound impact much stronger than their initial marketing investment, getting something to go viral can be one of the most difficult things to achieve. Fortunately, getting a video to go viral isn’t YouTube’s only benefit for business. Here are a few other benefits:

1. YouTube can help you recruit new employees. You can use YouTube to advertise for new employees by showing what you have to offer and what they can expect. This works really well if your company or business is very different than what people normally expect from a company. A good example of this is Google’s recruitment video.

2. How To Videos. People are always looking for information on how to do things on the Internet. If you are marketing a product or service that can be complicated to new users, think about creating a branded how to video. It will give people a taste of what you have to offer, and people will be drawn to its useful information.

3. PR and company communications. News releases can be very dry, and when newspapers pick them up, they filter and skew your message. Putting a PR video on YouTube, however, enables any interested party to hear the truth directly from you. And hearing news from a person is always more exciting than reading it. A good example of this is Amazon’s statement about their acquisition of Zappos.

4. Market research. Posting a new ad on YouTube before you put it on TV can give you free, instant and honest feedback on whether it is working or not. With the site’s metrics, you can also gauge who is watching the video, where they live, and how they are finding your video. Just don’t let it go viral if the response is becoming negative!

5. Training and employee communication. Although there are other services that provide more secure online video viewing, businesses that have to deal with a lot of freelancers with a wide variety of computers and interfaces know that showing a video directly to all of them at the same time can be a major headache. In contrast, almost everyone can watch YouTube videos, and they can watch them in their spare time. It may not be the most secure method to deliver employee communications, but it can save you a lot of hassle.

6. Deliver sales pitches to clients. Sometimes you want to create a strong pitch to a few selected clients. Creating a custom made video and uploading it to YouTube can be exactly what they are looking for. This can work well for real estate agents, decorators, or even dog groomers – any business person whose personality is a part of their business. Embedding custom videos to your blog or website can also make those sites more engaging, and will encourage people to spend more time on them.

7. Cultivating a brand. A local restaurant that wants people to find it fun, wacky and engaging might make a couple of videos showcasing their friendly staff and delicious food. A natural products manufacturer might show off the ways they make their products and the good things that go into them. Adding YouTube videos to your site will not only create a hard pitch, but will also help people associate certain emotions to your company or business.

In fact, the flexibility of YouTube means that there are probably many more benefits that aren’t even apparent now. Consider this tool the next time you are stuck in a business problem, and it might be the best solution for you.

Don’t Forget to check out this leadership video below:

What can I say about Chris? The guy is honest, returns emails quickly (I was rather shocked about that), and he is very friendly to talk with. Chris Garrett has no ego and he communicates what he is trying to state without any effort. He really is a classy guy who just wants to help. Though i shouldn’t be surprised, as this is the guy who helped co-author the “Problogger Book” with Darren Rowse from problogger.net. The very first blogging book i read and learned my skills from. Reading that book opened my eyes to a whole new online world. The book is a bit old now (I think it was published in 2008) but it is still extremely valuable.

Watching what Chris was doing was one of the reasons I wanted to get into the online world. I was thrilled when i saw in my in-box his short and to the point response to my request for an interview “Fine with me “. I might have jumped up and down for joy, when i saw that email response.

Below is the interview I had with Chris Garrett:

When was chrisg.com founded?

I have had a website on that domain since the late 90s, but I only put the current incarnation of the site up in early 2007.

Tell us a little bit more about chrisg.com. Why did you start it?

For a while I had been associated with all the joint venture projects I was involved in and I needed to bring my own identity out a bit more. Be me rather than just “Chris from …”. People did know who I was, but always as part of something else, and I needed the freedom to write about the topics without stepping on toes.

You write very long articles on your site chrisg.com, do you feel this benefits your community of readers?

Partly it is just my style, but also I try to give a lot of value. The articles are not always extra long, but I do advise people to make their articles long enough to get the point across. Seth Godin can do it in a couple of paragraphs, but it takes me 4,000 words, ha!

I don’t post as often as some people but I think I probably spend more time. It’s important to me that I give people something they can’t find anywhere else, otherwise what is the point?

You recently mentioned you were thinking of stopping your consulting work, why?

It is getting really hard to keep juggling all the clients, projects, products, teaching, and so on. Lately I have got back into a lot of travel now also. Plus we are planning to move to Canada, so my UK clients will obviously not be seeing me face to face quite as much! We have to work out how we can serve people best with the resources we have and right now, time is my scarcest resource. I can’t keep putting my prices up, at some point I have to get out of the game!

What is your favorite blogging platform?

WordPress, by a margin. I have used a lot of platforms and am not ultra-religious about it. Drupal is a fine platform, for Microsoft folks there are a bunch of .net platforms, but WordPress is the one I focus on.

Tell us a little bit about Authority Blogger and Business Blogging Made Simple.

Authority Blogger is my system for getting folks from zero audience through to growing trust, traffic and subscribers, having fans, and launching products and services that people are happy to buy. The business blogging ebook is for people who have a business, or who work at a business, and want to use blogs as a powerful marketing tool.

Do you have any people helping you create all this content and consulting work or is just you?

Just me. My schedule is insane as you might imagine, heh.

Any tools you can suggest?

Other than WordPress mentioned above, this list is getting pretty old but it is a start, click here for the list.

I still rely on Skype, but TweetDeck on my iPhone is pretty important now, plus webinar services like GotoWebinar are a significant part of my business.

How can people find you?

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Any helpful tips for beginners?

The biggest tip I can give is to focus on your audience. Who are you serving? What do they most want? How do they want it? People blunder in without thinking about who they are trying to attract, then wonder why they get no visitors and make no money

Chris Garrett

If you are involved with social media and you are involved with business, you are probably a little disappointed with some of the more “unprofessional” aspects of these networks. Facebook and Twitter can be powerful business tools, but there is a lot of un-businesslike “noise” in them.

Fortunately, there is a network that is more oriented toward business. It is called LinkedIn.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social networking site that is fully focused on creating and nurturing business relationships. Like Facebook, users create profiles and make relationships with other users. On LinkedIn, these relationships are called “connections.” However, unlike Facebook, the information that people provide on a LinkedIn profile is similar to what they would provide on a resume: education, work history, training and recommendations.

After users have made their profile, they connect to the profiles of colleagues and business associates. Former colleagues can also write recommendations for one another. The point of all of this is to create an accurate snapshot of your professional credentials, and to provide context for outsiders to know who you’ve worked with.

LinkedIn is big and growing: it has approximately 60 million users and they are getting a new user every second. It also has plenty of important people on it. Executives from every Fortune 500 company are on LinkedIn. If you aren’t already, you might want to consider the opportunities you might be missing.

What Are the Benefits?

The primary benefit is obvious: employers can use LinkedIn to find new employees, and people looking for work can use it to find job. For employers, the fact that they can see how people are connected to one another means that they don’t have to hire someone who is completely unknown to them, or at least unknown to their trusted business connections. For job seekers, the network means that they can apply for jobs where the employers will look more positively on them.

Beyond looking for a job or an employee, LinkedIn can help users with all of the soft aspects of their business that require business connections. For instance, users can try to scout out funding for a new venture capital project, sell products, discuss projects with like-minded people, get PR or channel traffic to their blogs. All of this and more can be done through LinkedIn.

Starting a Profile

One of the biggest mistakes that users make when they start using LinkedIn is by only going halfway. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn doesn’t work very well with a bare profile. And this makes sense: in business, you need to provide all of your relevant details, and any gaps that appear in your professional background make you appear less professional and somewhat untrustworthy. With that in mind, remember these tips when building your profile:

1. Ask yourself: what exactly do I want to get out of LinkedIn? Unless you have a clear idea of how or what you want to leverage LinkedIn, your profile will look very haphazard. Present yourself as a coherent whole, and make it easy for your connections to know what you stand for and what you want.

2. Add connections. The more connections you have, the more you are going to get out of LinkedIn. It’s as simple as that. Communicate with your friends connections to see if they want to connect with you. They’ll probably appreciate the chance to expand their networks as well.

3. Get recommendations and give them to the people in your network you feel deserve them. If you aren’t getting any recommendations, request some trustworthy connections to provide some. Although employers won’t necessarily trust the recommendations, the people who don’t have any on their profile are at a definite disadvantage.

4. Join Groups. This will help you make more connections, particularly with people you have lost contact with or met in a very limited context. They will also help you branch out to find new people to make contact with through the group’s discussion boards.

5. Update your status regularly. This is particularly important if you have left your previous job and you are looking for new work. But don’t make your status updates personal. Only update it with relevant information that a potential employer might find interesting, such as when you attend seminars, or when you receive new training.

6. Communicate! When you join groups, post replies and start discussions. Answer people’s questions, and ask your own. If you are active on LinkedIn, people will start adding you as a connection, and your network will grow.

7. Go beyond the ordinary. Have selected Twitter status updates added to your linked-in profile. Add applications, such as a WordPress application that publishes your latest blog entries to your LinkedIn profile. Use the polling application to perform market research. Find out what the buzz is about your company on Twitter. You can see a full list of the available applications here.

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for your business. Make sure you are using it to its full capacity.

Daniel Scocco has content and plenty of blogging content. DailyBlogTips.com is one of the original blogging websites for bloggers that is still around today. Everything a blogger needs to know about or even is thinking about Daniel has written about it. His audience is as passionate and driven as Daniel. As I am writing this, Daniel just published an article and literally in 10 minutes has received over 11 comments on that one article. DailyBlogTips.com is among the 100 most popular marketing blogs in the world (according to AdvertisingAge)! Clearly, Daniel knows what he is doing. Lucky for us, we were able to grab him for an interview and tap into his brilliance.

Q: When was Daily Blog Tips founded?

Daniel: I started the blog back in 2006.

Q:  Tell us a little bit more about Daily Blog Tips? Why did you start it?

Daniel: I started building my first websites and blogs in 2005. Initially it was just a hobby, as I doubted very much that people would end up visiting them….

After a while the traffic started picking up, though. One of my sites started getting over 500 visitors per day. That got me surprised and excited at the same time. In 2006 and I decided to quit my full time job to dedicate all my time to my blogs and websites. I also wanted to share the tips and tricks I was learning along the way, and that is when Daily Blog Tips was created.

Q: Blogs have become more influential every year, do you see this continuing and why?

Daniel: Yes I believe this trend will keep going, for several reasons. First of all more and more people are discovering blogs every year. Second, they are realizing that writing a personal diary where you talk about your cats and dogs is not the only thing you can so with a blog. In other words, blogs are just a type of website. The content that you put inside them is up to you. It can be a personal diary but it can also be highly influential tech news like the guys from TechCrunch do.

Finally, the user generated content as a whole is getting more and more established on the Internet, and blogs are part of that.

Q: What is your favorite blogging platform?

Daniel: Definitely WordPress. It is open source, easy to use, fast, and reliable. What else could you ask?

Q: You literally run a massive website, do you have any help?

Daniel: On Daily Blog Tips I pretty much do all the work. Writing content is the bulk of it, though, and I have a lot of fun publishing posts there and interacting with the readers. So it doesn’t feel like work at all.

Q: Any tools you can suggest?

Daniel: Some that I use regularly: Google Webmaster Tools, Aweber, Google Analytics and Gmail.

Q: How can people find you?

Twitter

RSS Feed

Daniel: I also have an account on all major social networking sites, but I rarely update my profile there or interact with other people. It would consume far too much time.

Q: Any helpful tips for beginners?

Daniel: If you are just getting started with your blog, focus on creating outstanding content (stuff people will read and want to share with their friends) and on promoting that content to as many people as possible.

Once you reach a good amount of traffic (i.e., over 1,000 daily uniques) you can start thinking about monetization and other aspects.

Daniel Scocco

If you pay attention to social media trends at all, you’ve likely heard of Twitter.com. The LA Times uses it to send updates about wildfires; the NY Times uses it to track Washington politics; celebrities use it to tell their fans about their latest projects. But if you don’t have a Twitter account, you are likely wondering what all the fuss is about. Specifically, are there any benefits to using Twitter for your business?

What is Twitter?

In brief, Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging tool. It enables users to send small (140 character) messages called “tweets” to the group of people who follow them. In return, users can see the tweets of everyone they follow. Twitter only started in 2006, but its strong growth in popularity has been because the 140 character limit enables users to easily update their Twitter accounts through text messages over their phones.

Although exact stats by Twitter are not released, Alexa.com ranks it as one of the top 50 sites on the Internet. And as mentioned, it is also growing quickly: Neilson.com says the site grew over 1000% between 2008 and 2009.

How to Leverage it for Business

Like any social networking tool, Twitter`s power comes in its ability to develop and deepen relationships. But as a business person you first have to decide: are you creating relationships at the individual level, or at the brand/company level?

“Social Media is about the people! Not about your business. Provide for the people and the people will provide for you.”

- Matt Goulart

Individuals

The ideal way to use Twitter is as a fully-rounded individual. Ashton Kutcher is the most popular Twitter user because people like him and his tweets. It’s as simple as that. If you are working in any sort of business where personal connections are key (which is most businesses these days), Twitter can be a great way to build those personal relationships.

The benefits are obvious. If one of your clients follows you on Twitter, they are more likely to want to do business with you or to recommend you to friends. Instead of always talking to hundreds of clients, you can stay in touch with all of them at minimal time expense to you. And if you have important news about your business or a press release to share, you have a ready audience.

But how do you build those relationships? There are two key things to keep in mind:

1. You should be seen as a source of important information that your client can immediately and freely use. For instance, interior designers use Twitter to pass along great home decorating articles to their clients. This isn’t about selling your product or service. It is about giving useful stuff away and selling you and your expertise.

2. Don’t forget to have fun with it. You don’t want to seem like a robot. Pass along a link to that hilarious dog video every once and awhile. It will give your followers warm feelings towards you. After all, people follow the Twitter users they like.

Brands and Companies

For brands and companies, it is a little harder. Since Twitter is a social networking tool, users can feel strange if a brand or company is talking to them and not a person. Brands and companies also have to maintain tighter boundaries on what they can or cannot say.

Twitter works best with lifestyle brands and companies (Apple, American Apparel), brands and companies that have ethos or philosophies behind them (Dove, Whole Foods), or brands people just think are cool (Marvel). Since viewers are engaged by their wider brand personality, the brands have more things to tweet about. Dove, for instance, tweets about many great ways to keep your skin healthy.

But if you don’t have a wider brand or company personality, you still have something to offer of plenty of interest to your followers: special offers, news about new products, freebies and coupons. Jet Blue has one of the biggest corporate followings on Twitter, and it is because its followers are hanging on for new flight deals.

As well, since Twitter is about building relationships, it helps give companies a friendly face. Smart corporations and brands use Twitter it to handle customer service problems quickly and easily.

In fact, the smaller your business, the more appropriate Twitter might be for you. A local pizza shop, for instance, can tweet about special deals and contests. Without the pressure of a giant multinational brand behind you, you can develop a more fun and zany personality on Twitter. And of course, it’s a great way to do marketing at a small business level because it’s free.

How to Get Started

It’s pretty easy. Go to Twitter.com and start up an account. Since this is a business account, you’ll need to provide as much relevant information on your profile as possible, such as your corporate address, phone number, and any of the blogs or websites you might run. People also like a picture, so it is recommended to upload one.

Start building your network. To do this, you can quickly import your contact information from your gmail, yahoo or aol account. Or you can just start looking for people by name using the search feature. With these tools, you can begin to follow people.

Getting followers is a little harder. To do that, don’t hesitate to tell everyone and their dog your twitter address. Put your Twitter address everywhere: on your business card, on your blog, on your facebook profile.

If you are running a blog, you can add some Twitter plug-ins like Twitterfeed.com to make all of this a little easier. Twitterfeed automatically pushes new blog posts to Twitter. As well, the Tweet This plug-in for WordPress lets readers of your blog easily tweet about your blog posts. There’s a whole array of other plug-ins here.

And the rest is up to you! As mentioned, the best way to leverage Twitter for business is is to be informative and interesting. People will let others know about you and will pass along your messages (retweet) if they are of value. And interact! If other users notice that your conversations are funny or interesting, they’ll want to follow you, too.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!

The first thing you see when you visit Mikeslife.org is:

“Mike’s Life is a fantastic resource for bloggers who are passionate about writing and are serious about wanting to create a long term, sustainable income from their blogs.”

Mike’s message is bang on, his site’s a fantastic resource for all types of bloggers. Mike comes off as a really genuine and passionate blogger who really loves blogging and lives life to the fullest. I also loved how he added and mentioned his products in this interview (free publicity), they really are great and worth a read.

We corresponded through email, our conversation is below:

Q: When was Mikeslife.org founded?

Mike: In December 2008, and shortly after I started my first blog which is a travel blog about the island I live on.

Q: Tell us a little bit more about Mikeslife.org? Why did you start it?

Mike: I set it up as website to help new and learning bloggers who are passionate about writing. It seemed to make sense to chart my learning from the travel blog, which we managed to take from zero to a full time income in one year.

There’s a big community that has developed at Mike’s Life life now and we share and learn about blogging together there. It also provided the platform for the book I co-authored with Nathan Hangen – Beyond Blogging, which tells the stories of 15 of the world’s most successful bloggers. That had an amazing launch and is available at Amazon and major booksellers all over the world.

My strategy with Mike’s Life is to put out really valuable content, for free, as much as I can. I write about 40 posts a month on the site. Then for the people who want a little more, I offer my own products like The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging and The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter. Enough people choose to buy those to ensure I can afford to keep writing the free stuff.

Q: You are very open with your audience, do you find this benefits you?

Mike: I think it’s important if you plan to sell something to your audience, that you are open about yourself and your life. And at the end of the day people do business with people – not with logos or companies.

Buying anything on line requires a higher degree of trust than doing so face to face, and one way of establishing that trust is to share a lot about yourself.

The other aspect that encourages me to share my life is that it’s interesting! I live on a small desert island in The Atlantic Ocean. That’s pretty unusual, so people enjoy reading about my exploits diving and sailing, and to see photos of our carnival processions and so on.

I think one mistake many people make is to assume their lives aren’t interesting to other people. If you’re living a suburban nine to five life in Surrey, that might seem very boring to you. But to an Andalucian Yak farmer, it would be extremely interesting!

Q: How do you deal with writers block and how do you get out of it?

Mike: I’ve never suffered from it, so I can only offer some general advice. If I ever feel my writing is getting a little stale, I get out and do something completely different, to stimulate my senses. I’ll go for a walk, do some diving, kayak a few miles, anything to stop thinking about writing. I always find I come back energised and full of good ideas.

Q: How do you leverage social media?

Mike: I’m good at Twitter and enjoy it, and it gives me a terrific return. I don’t believe in any kind of automation for my Twitter account – I simply invest time and energy into it.

I have several searches set up in Tweetdeck around things like “Twitter help” “New blog” and so on. When I spot people asking questions on those subjects, I try to answer and help them. I never send them to a link to sell them something. I just answer their questions. Most then visit my site, some will become subscribers and a few will end up buying a product from me. The secret is in being social and being helpful.

I’m just starting to apply the same to Facebook, which is a huge market, and to Buzz, which is brand new. I do have what I call “Outposts” at Linkedin and Friendfeed, but you just can’t keep up with everything, so I will continue to major on Twitter.

Q: Any tools you can suggest?

Mike: Livewriter is a fabulous tool for writing blog posts – probably the best thing Microsoft has ever produced. Aside from that I use Google Apps for my domain emails, Chrome as a browser, Reader for RSS feeds, Google Docs for documents and Wave for collaborating online, so I’m a bit of a Google fan!

I also love Remember the Milk for my task list, and I’m a committed Blackberry user.

Q: How can people find you?

Twitter is @mikecj

Facebook is fanpage

And you can get all my other contact details at my contact page

I’m always happy to hear about people and contact directly with them – I don’t hide behind my assistant.

Q: Any helpful tips for beginners?

1. Look at every post after you’ve written it. Is it either going to inform or entertain your readers? If neither, then start again.
2. Prepare yourself to work really, seriously hard if you want to become a successful blogger. Forget the dreams of four hour work weeks, and blogging from the beach for now. But if you can write, and you are prepared to work hard for a year or two, you can earn a good living as a blogger. Do it for five years, and then you can seriously think about the beach scenario.

Mike Cliffe-Jones is a blogger who lives on a small island off the coast of Africa. His blog, Mike’s Life helps other bloggers who are passionate about writing, create and develop blogs to earn themselves a long term sustainable income. He is also co-author of the best selling book Beyond Blogging.

Mike Cliffe-Jones

Mike Diving...Living Life to the Fullest

Social networking, used correctly, is a powerful marketing tool. We’ve all heard that word of mouth is the most effective way to market, and social networking lets you leverage that effectiveness. If you are looking for way to drive your ROI, consider adding Facebook to your marketing mix.

After only slightly more than three years of public existence – Facebook opened its doors to anyone with a valid email account in September 2006 – Facebook has grown to become the biggest online social network in the world. It has over 400 million users.

Facebook offers users the ability to post photos, links and messages and otherwise communicate with their friends and relations over the Internet. Facebook users love Facebook: the average Facebook user spends nearly an hour per day on Facebook. The site is also the most used social networking site on mobile phones. Marketers who are not inserting themselves into this conversation risk being ignored.

How Facebook Can Help Your Business

The easiest way to get yourself into Facebook is to create a Fan Page. Fan Pages allow businesses to interact with users profiles in an organic way, by letting the users interact with the business as if they were just another user. The New York Times has a fan page, as does AXE body spray.

There are a lot of benefits to this. When people join fan pages, they treat your brand or product as a part of their life. Consumers become more receptive to the messages or updates you send. They trade tips on ways to use your product or service with one another. They also come back to the fan page to check out games, competitions and free offers. They advertise the page to their friends.

To top it all off, the Fan Page is a great way to do research. The site comes with a way to explore the statistics of your fans with the “Page Insights” feature. Through this, you can gather valuable data on your consumers and their behaviours. Or do you want to know what flavour of ice cream you should put out? Put it in a poll, and your consumers will give you almost instantaneous advice on what you should do.

And all of this is free! Apart from the cost of getting someone to set up and run the page, your advertising costs are essentially non-existent.

Setting Up a Fan Page

The first step, creating a Fan Page, is easy. Just go here and follow the instructions. But for most marketers, Facebook’s layout might seem a little spare: whereas Myspace lets you add HTML and CSS, Facebook largely limits you to simple text. But follow some of these simple steps, and you’ll be able to create a dynamic Fan Page. For instance, this Facebook tab for Sunkist includes webisodes, photos, and Sunkist’s branding and imagery.

1. Use Static FBML to add new tabs and boxes to your page. To get started, you’ll need to download the Static FBML application. This site can also give you some tips on how to get programming with Static FBML. It works like HTML, and can help give your page a customized feel.

2. Another way to enhance your page is to use third-party applications. For instance, if you already have a twitter feed for your product or service, this application can push your tweets to your Facebook feed. You can do something similar for your blog with this Blog RSS Feed Reader.

3. Even more exciting – for your fans, at least – is the potential to incorporate Flash into your site. Use this application to post videos, widgets and games to your Fan Page. Flash helps make your page more interactive, which makes it more “sticky” – people will likely come back to your page more often and spend more time there if they find it has fun things to do.

4. And don’t forget your URL. It’s a small detail, but having a weird or awkward URL will make it more difficult for users to find you. Go here to create a customized one.

Social Marketing is a Two Way Street

Social marketing is all about dialogue. The more dialogue you create, the more likely you will get people to come back to your site and to integrate you in their lives. But if you are engaged in a dialogue, there is always the possibility that the people you are talking with might say something negative about your brand.

As a marketer and business person, your first impulse might be to stifle this, but it is not a constructive impulse. You have to allow dissent.

For instance, on the Coca-Cola Facebook fan page, the brand team filters out obvious vandalism (“Coke sucks”), but they let differing opinions remain, (“I like Pepsi”). The result? People feel the page is authentic and open, and they stick around. The page has nearly five million fans, and is one of the biggest on Facebook.