There are many ways of using social networking to find and attract those who are in your niche. There is a new SNS (social networking site) dedicated to this. This site focuses on the use of social media for proactively building your niche community.

Members of this site are those who are concerned about learning this or doing this to build the community. They share with each other what they are doing and how it is working for themselves.

Discussion is about the philosophy of this as well as specific tips and tricks. Areas of discussion are: Blogs, Social Networks, Forums, Membership Sites, Niche Building, Conversational Marketing, Membership Management, along with other social media topics.

There are RSS feeds from Blogs about social networking and conversational marketing. These feeds give you grounding in what social media is saying about itself. They also give you the latest news in the field.

If you are not yet using social media to boost your niche membership, you need to learn what they are saying at Building Your Niche.

If you are using social media to find members of your niche, you can improve your results by following the discussions at Building Your Niche.

Come visit this social networking site and look around. If you like what you see, join-up and join-in the action.

Rodger Bailey

Tonight we have the first web-conference about getting more from our Internet experience with conversational marketing and social networks.

http://mykernels.com/tinkers/ will give you an overview of tonight’s topic. Bookmark this page, because it will be updated as we proceed through our web-conferences in the next 6 weeks.

Tonight’s program starts at 9:00pm ET. Here is the link for getting into the conference. Start about 15 minutes early to make sure you get in. http://mykernels.com/tinkers/conferences.htm

I will present some slides to set the frame and then Marvin Sadovsky will talk about language and influence in a 30 minute interview.

Looking forward to seeing you there,
–
Sincerely,

Rodger Bailey, MS
LAB Profile Coaching: http://www.LABprofile.com
Community Building & Marketing: http://taprogram.tinkersacademy.com

If you are want your Internet business to be an Informational Product business, this is a must read article.

Rodger

If you’ve tried your hand at building an Internet-based business but haven’t yet reached the success you want, find out about these 11 deadly mistakes and how to avoid them.

Mistake #1 - Not Treating What You Do as a Business.

The difference between a hobby and a business is that a hobby doesn’t make you money - it costs you money.

If you’re earnest about starting a profitable online business, approach seriously and focus on generating revenue.

Treat your online business as you would any regular business.

Mistake #2 - Being Distracted by Too Many Good Ideas.

You can light up a room with a light bulb, but you can cut through steel with a laser beam. The same is true with your effort and ideas.

Too many Internet-Entrepreneur-Wanna-Be’s lack the will power to stay focused. Chasing too many ideas at the same time often leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and with little result to show for their hard work.

The key to success is to select one business idea and to develop it completely before moving on to another project.

Mistake #3 - Not Selecting a Specific Niche.

Perhaps the biggest mistake of all is trying to be everything to everyone. You can’t - so stop!

It’s very counter-intuitive to focus on a smaller slice of the market and most people are afraid to do it. But when you do, your business will grow faster, and you’ll be more financially successful in less time.

Mistake #4 - Falling in Love With the Wrong Product Idea.

Even the most experienced entrepreneurs fall into this trap from time-to-time and develop products without doing any research. Before you devote any serious amount of time and effort to developing your new ideas make sure there is a demand for the type of product, information, or service you want to launch.

If you need help with selecting an ideal niche market for your business and finding out which products you should develop first, take a look at this fast track training program.

Mistake #5 - Falling for the “Get Rích Quick” Scheme!

Remember the old adage “if something is too good to be true…”? It’s alive and well on the Internet.

Countless people buy into the idea of making millions online overnight. Sadly, they buy into programs hyped up with empty promises only to find themselves “out of cash and out of luck” a short while later.

Be aware of spammers, illegal money-winníng scams, and buying “ready to go businesses” that are “hot but will sell for cheap”!

Before you fork over your money investigate if those hot businesses have ever made a dime for their current owner.

Doing your homework will save you valuable time, money and many sleepless nights!

Mistake #6 - Going Into It, Instead of Growing Into It.

While the Internet makes it easier to reach your potential clients, you’re still building a business - and that takes time. Don’t tell your boss you’re quitting today because you started this hot new online business last night and you’ll be “rolling in dough in no time flat!”

First make sure your business idea works and is profitable.

That’s one of the advantages of Internet Business - you can start small and step-it-up as your business starts getting sales and generating profíts.

Just be sure you can consistently replace your current income before jumping ship and telling your boss to “beat it”!

Mistake #7 - Being a Copy-Cat!

Quickly - what is the most popular business on the Internet? You guessed it - it’s how to make money on the online!

It seems that everyone who has bought a course on making monëy online is credible enough to teach this subject a week or two later!

Don’t fall for the allure of easy money - because it’s only a perception. In reality your chances of having a successful online business are much greater when you are different from the pack.

Mistake #8 - Wasting Time and Money on Developing Pretty but Useless Websites.

A bad idea is a bad idea - no matter how pretty you dress it up. Many people waste precious startup dollars on expensive but needless graphic design work, pretty logos, and complex web design.

In reality, many businesses can be simple and inexpensive to get off the ground. In fact, a simple site with little or no graphics will often make more money than one with all the latest bells and whistles flashing all over the page.

Think - what is the core concept of your business. Outline it on a single sheet of paper, then implement it fast in it’s simplest form. You can always give it a makeover and make it prettier if it’s successful and profitable.

Mistake #9 - Not Building Relationship with Clients.

“Even though you don’t know me from Adam, I want you to take out your wallet and give me $20 - in exchange I’ll make you the King of the Universe!” What!? You don’t want to give me your $20? What a surprise!

Most people think about starting a business onlíne in terms of getting a quick sale - with no prior relationship with their potential clients at all.

In reality, you’ll be more successful when you make your first goal to collect contact information from potential clients and follow up with them on regular basis.

It’s much easier to “sell something for Free” than trying to convince people to give you money at first.

Make it your goal to prove your credibility online and make your business all about relationships with prospects and clients, and you’ll build a thriving online empire.

Mistake #10 - Calling It “QUITS” Too Soon!

If your new online venture isn’t makíng money at first, don’t walk away from it too soon. Many entrepreneurs have multiple “failures” in their background - which in reality are lessons in what didn’t work.

Evaluate your ideas and get help with gaining a new perspective on what you’re doing. With some new ideas you might find a new way to position your business differently and make it profitable.

Or maybe you simply need to give it more time to gain the traction and momentum you want.

Mistake #11 - Being too cheap!

While it’s a good habit to be thrifty with your dollars, don’t confuse saving money with being cheap. Remember the price you’re paying for things isn’t always expressed in money. It’s also the time, effort, and lost opportunities you can’t take advantage of because you lack the know-how or are busy doing low-level tasks.

Smart online entrepreneurs continually invest in their Education. They buy marketing training programs, time-saving software tools, and systems that allow them to grow businesses faster with less effort.

The best news is that getting good basic training in how to start your information marketing business doesn’t have to be expensive.
About The Author
The author, Adam Urbanski, Founder and President of Marketing Mentors, teaches professionals and business owners proven strategies to leverage their know-how into low-cost, high-profit information products and programs. For a four-hour fast track training program, go to his website at InfoProfitFastTrack.com.

I just came across the following slideshow and I thought it would fit well with our conversation about where we are going with Internet Marketing and Conversational Marketing.

It is a post in a blog I read every day. This is a corporate blog for LinkedIn. It is a true slideshow, you click to go to the next slide and there is no audio. It talks about the impact of each of our micro-interactions.

emersondirect.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/micro-interactions/

Enjoy and comment there and come back here to comment as well.

Rodger

Many of you who have commented in this blog before, are those who have experience with Internet Marketing. But, I know that many others of you are novices in the use of Internet technologies. Now it is time for the novices and newbies to participate.

Something seems to be getting in the way of embracing these Internet technologies for putting your message out to a growing number of customers. I suspect it might be several things. Let me tell you what I have seen with my own eyes.

I started working with computers in 1966. I continued working with computers as an IBM Programmer Analyst. Part of my work there was to support engineers, writers, and others in the use of computer technology to perform their work tasks. For many years in that job, I supported those who were preparing manuals about the hardware and the software. At that time, IBM was the second largest publisher in the USA (of course, the government was the biggest publisher, by far). And even after I left that job in 1980, I have continued to use computers in my work and support others who were learning to use computers as one of their primary tools for their profession.

For me, my experience in high-tech cultures was experience-building and skill-building based on my education in Anthropology (BS, 1972), Educational Counseling (MS, 1977), and NLP (1977-1980). When I left IBM in 1980, I started a consulting career, which was founded on a linguistic tool I created. This tool (the LAB Profile) was a functional application of Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar (MIT, 1952). I continue consulting and coaching with this tool and I continue working with those who are struggling as they adopt new technologies.

Common Ways We Hold Ourselves Back

1) One of the common things I have seen is that many people are late adopters of computer and Internet technology because they don’t have enough information about it. They have some fear that they will break something and so they have reluctance about doing it. For some this reluctance is severe enough to look like a phobia.

2) For others, it is more philosophical. They don’t yet understand the meaning which computers represent in the lives of people. Because they don’t yet have the experience of computer use, they cannot connect yet with the impact computers and Internet are having in people’s lives.

3) And for some others, they have a strong focus on people and relationships and they don’t have much use for technological things. They only feel ’successful’ when they are working directly with individuals or small groups in a face-to-face manner. They don’t see how this computer and Internet technology can replace (or augment) the direct, human connection they need to be working with, so they feel fulfilled in their profession.

4) And even others have a reluctance about marketing and sales in general. Their difficulty is not about the technology, directly. It is much more about selling.

Please comment on these:

• Are you in one (or more) of these groups holding yourself back? If so, which ones?
• Do you have some other frame-of-reference about why you have not fully embraced Internet technology for getting your message out?
• Is your desire to get your message out strong enough that you might want to let go of your reluctance?
• If there was a free opportunity for you to let go of what holds you back, would you be interested in doing that?

Your comments, now, can go a long way in helping me prepare that free opportunity. So if you would like to participate in this, make your comments, here, so I know what you need.

Rodger Bailey

PS: Depending on how you got to this blog post, you have a couple of ways to leave your Comment. On is to make your comment where you see: “Leave A Reply” at the bottom of this page. If you don’t see that, then click on the highlighted “Comment” to get to the “Leave A Reply” form.

PPS: If you want ongoing participation in this conversation, Join the Conversation, and I will notify you of all new posts in this blog. There are some free ebooks and other materials which you get when you join.

This YouTube video summarizes much of our most recent discussion.

The real question is about how to grow the knowledge, skill, and experience base of those who have not started using Internet Marketing or who are experienced at Internet Marketing but not yet successful.

Rodger

From my latest round of email, online, and offline discussions I have found that in the personal growth, self-help field (in this case, SelfGrowth “Experts”), there are a large number of people who make their living helping others and who are essentially Internet-illiterate. They know they ’should’ be using the Internet, but they are reluctant or are otherwise slow about adopting it.

I don’t know how many or what percentage of Self-Growth “Experts” are late in embracing Internet technology, but I notice that there are hundreds of SelfGrowth “Expert” pages which have been claimed and named, but which have not had any entries made. And, in our Mastermind group of SelfGrowth “Experts,” our members are often asking each other for how-to advice for their Internet Marketing activities.

I’m just wondering how we can help those in this personal growth & self-help field find ways to improve their business and leverage their expertise for wider distribution of their messages by using technology. Are there ways of using the Internet to get our messages out to more people and would this benefit them?

In conversations they say that they have tried one or two things on the Internet and they have yet to figure out how to make this new-fangled technology work for themselves. So, they continue to orient themselves into their one-to-one and small seminar arena.

Internet Marketing Problems and Concerns

Here is a list of problems and concerns I have recently noticed in this community with respect to adopting Internet technology into their businesses:

• Internet Marketing is confusing for them.
• They do not understand what to do or how to do it.
• The things they have tried did not work.
• They object (emotionally and/or ethically) to many of the popular Internet Marketing techniques.
• They feel overwhelmed by the complexity that seems inherent in the Internet in general and in Internet Marketing in particular.
• They are afraid they will lose the one-to-one personal connection with their clients.
• They do not see the benefit in using Internet Marketing, because their calendar is already full.

I’m developing another video to talk about this aspect of the SelfGrowth Expert community. Maybe by working together, we can all help each other improve our impact on the world. I think that by using the Internet we can grow our individual impact.

Comment About Internet and Internet Marketing

Will you use the Comment link at the bottom of this post to expand all of our understanding of this issue? Whether you are successful with Internet Marketing or not, will you tell us about it?

1. With respect to using the Internet, what have you tried that worked and that didn’t work?
2. Do you think that you ’should’ be using the Internet for getting your message out?
3. Do you think that Internet Marketing is helping your personal growth / self-help business?
4. In addition to the list of problems and concerns I showed before, what are your problems and concerns with Internet Marketing?
5. On an Expertise scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 is “Internet guru,” and 1 is “have trouble turning on my computer”), what is your current level of Expertise with computers and using the Internet for your business?
6. If you decided to improve your level of computer expertise, what form of learning traditionally works best for you: classroom, video, mentor, individual projects, group projects, one teacher or multiple teachers, demos, trial-&-error? Please explain situations with computers and Internet where your learning was successful.
7. Is there anything else you think is important about this topic of adopting Internet Marketing for your business, or Internet Marketing in general?

Rodger Bailey

PS: Comment now while you are still here. I’m listening.

PS: If this topic interests you, please Join The Conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6e9siK228g

This 8+ minute video gives you an overview of the ebook, “What’s Wrong With Internet Marketing?”.

Internet-based Conversational Marketing offers us a process for obtaining sales results we have been missing using traditional Internet Marketing tactics and techniques. If you haven’t done so, Join the Conversation (by filling in the form at the top of the right sidebar) for the free download of the ebooks (“Who is Your Customer?” and “What’s Wrong With Internet Marketing?” ) and the report (“Conversational Marketing”).

What do you think about this? Please click on the “Comment” link at the bottom of this post and tell us what you think.

Rodger

BTW: If you like the video, please “Rank” it for me on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6e9siK228g

PS: Comment now while you are still here. I’m listening.

PS: If this topic interests you, please Join The Conversation.

Read this report and then leave me a comment about it.

I see that Conversational Marketing is the only solution to the Internet Marketing doldrums. The trend we are all experiencing is that the harder we work at our Internet Marketing strategies, the less satisfied we feel about the process and the results.

The reason we have salespages (which no one reads) is because we have not been able to communicate effectively with out customers and we hope to perform the whole sales process in one web page.

The reason we have been trying to ‘drive’ traffic to our site and our salespage is because we have not nurtured a relationship with our prospects.

Conversational Marketing permits us to build trust and authority as part of the relationship. It permits us to spread the sales process across this growing relationship.

Read and Comment. Let’s talk about what can really work in selling your information products.

Rodger

PS: Still working on the video slideshow about “What’s Wrong With Internet Marketing?” It should be posted in a day or so.

PPS: Comment now while you are still here. I’m listening.

PPPS: If this topic interests you, please Join The Conversation.

So, What’s Wrong With IM?

There are several issues:

1. We create our information products, we create a virtual store on the internet, we drive traffic to that virtual store, and not enough people buy our products to make a living at it. We do what we have been told to do, but it is not enough.
2. The only ones who are really making money at it are those who already have massive lists (with tens of thousands of email addresses). And they don’t have virtual stores. So, the ones who are succeeding at IM are not doing what the products they sell are telling us to do.
3. Salespages don’t. The overwhelming majority of visitors to salespages leave in a few seconds. The very small percentage who take the time to look at the salespage, only scan the big & bright headline to see if this is a product in which they might have an interest. If not, they are gone. If they stay, they immediately go to the bottom of the page to check the price. If they are okay with the price, they might read a few benefits or other bulleted items. And, they might buy. The percentage that buy is very small.
4. Virtual stores and salespages are not natural. Even stores are a relatively recent human development. We humans have spent many more millenia buying because of conversation than we have decades going to stores.
5. We are oriented to buy from each other in conversation. And a new paradigm for Internet Marketing needs to understand this and provide a process for selling in a conversational mode.

So, this is one of the important messages in my new ebook:

“What’s Wrong With Internet Marketing?”

Let me know what you think of this paradigm and this process.

Rodger Bailey, MS

PS: Comment now while you are still here. I’m listening.

PPS: If this topic interests you, please Join The Conversation.