7 Quick Tips for Building a Power Center Instead of a Popularity Matrix

A Little Taste

As I explained in the last article – I couldn’t possibly teach you everything you need to know about creating a power center here.

But I can give you 7  Quick Tips to building one online here as a proof that it works.

Take one of these steps each day over the next week, then go back to using social media, and you’ll see an almost immediate increase in your access to the best connections you have.

It won’t be enough to solve all your problems.  At the end of the day I sell one thing, business profits.  I’d go broke if I gave you the whole thing free. Think of this like a drink special…

7 Quick Tips for Building Your Power Center Online

1. Purge the deadbeats. It’s not about numbers

   Get anyone who isn’t vaguely interested in your help, opinion or voice, out of your stream. Now or later, if they don’t want your help, why are you talking to them?

2. Get out of any community that you don’t truly feel a part of or want to be a part of, long-term

   If you stay connected, at some point it will suck up your time needlessly.

   Socializing without an immediate end can become profitable as the people you come to care about and who care about you wish to see you successful, but it’s not the REASON to be there. No need to announce your departure, just leave. The idea is not to add to the noise.

3. Start cranking out consistent, high-quality content that the community that would form around you wants – but don’t give away the farm. Mix in other people’s great content in a healthy portion.

   It’s called bait.

   As such, it’s an appetizer, not a meal – although it’s perfectly to okay to make it seem like one. Educate people about why they need your real product. If your product is a service like speaking or consulting sure, it’s fine to give away a book a la Seth Godin.

   The key is, give away ONE juicy percent of your value, so that they’ll be salivating for the other 99%.

4. Get your content found.

   Again, I can’t reproduce my entire book here. But it’s all about distribution, baby. No band wants to get a record deal just to be able to say they have a deal – they want to sign with a label that can distribute their product to the widest interested audience.

   To get great distribution, you have to meet the right people, people you can help who can also help you.

   You may help your customer by solving his problem, she may help you by buying your product. You may help a peer by sharing their link on Facebook, they may help you by writing a blog post about you.

   Who is plugged into the network you want to serve, and how can you serve those people?

   Serve is not a synonym for spam, but you knew that right? Of course. But be aware that your audience’s idea of spam doesn’t follow the technical definition – to them it’s ANYTHING they don’t want.

5. Serve, serve, serve.

   Notice I didn’t say volunteer, volunteer, volunteer.

   Just because you charge doesn’t mean you aren’t in service. You’re worth it. Behave that way. There are other people who aren’t worth it, that do, and look where they are. Knock them off their false pedestals by bringing real value.

6. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

   Find every way that you can do reduce the amount of energy it takes to fuel this engine you’re building. Become more efficient at producing content. Are you writing a new article when you should be turning existing articles into audios?

   Reuse and recycle that content in several formats. One of them is bound to catch on and you never know which.

7. Repeat.

   Repeat your content in different ways to the same audience.  Repeat your process of finding the last customer with the next potential customer.

   Repeat the process you used to find your 1st great Twitter friends to get your next group of Twitter connections.

   Whatever worked the best? Repeat it one more time. Stagnation will kill you. Keep moving.

   Have you ever noticed how self help professionals often write the same book three times?

   They may have a different level of depth each time, or they may tailor it to a difference audience, or use a different approach to explain the same thing. And even their repeat customers love it.

   That’s because we don’t always get it the first time. We often get our a-ha moment about something  after 100 times of hearing something. Then the 101st time we pay attention to some small detail that didn’t seem relevant before – and all of a sudden AHA – we get it.

If you want to know when I’ll have my guide to building power centers ready, join the newsletter at the Free Traffic Tips homepage with your email or via the Facebook Connect button.

Don’t forget to tell a friend – I’ll totally buy you a cupcake if you do.