It’s quite simple really.

It’s the easiest promotional secret ever and it’s staring you right in the face. There’s one tiny thing you could be doing differently that would bring you tenfold the results in sales, subscribers, clients or customers for exactly the same effort or amount of money that you’re expending now.

I call it Magnifying Your Audience.

Before I tell you what process goes with that moniker, let’s look at how many of us, even those of us who are experienced, promote our blogs, articles, videos and documents in social media.

We create content.

We proliferate it among the people we already know – current customers, even peers.

We send copies through our current social media outlets – groups we’re members of in LinkedIn, groups we love on Facebook, our profiles, and on Twitter. If we have staff members, we make sure they duplicate our efforts.

We may prod our friends to help distribute our work or call in favors. We could call out to them using great tools like Livefyre, or organize their efforts using Triberr.

We usually get a response that’s similar to the last response we got — or if we created something incredible, we see a temporary boost. Maybe we’ll do a little advertising.

Then we create the next piece of content, hoping that as our community slowly grows, and as we connect to new people on social media, in person, and via referrals, we’ll have a slow, upward climb to an audience that will one day be huge.

It’s essential to understand that there’s actually nothing wrong with this method on its face.

The problem comes in under two particular circumstances:

1. When you repeat the process the same way each time, or,
2. When you vary it but among a mis-targeted audience.

Why?

In the first scenario, when you simply go through the same steps of promoting each time, you may be talking to the same group each time. That’s great if that’s an active group that’s made up of focused people who are constantly growing, changing and constantly promoting you.

But that’s rarely the case. Usually it goes to the same group of peers as yesterday, who may share your content if they remember or see it in time, but most likely will only do so about 10% of the time. And that’s fine.

Everyone is busy and has their priorities. You can’t expect people to spend all their time talking about you.

But if you’re always talking to the same, unchanging group that isn’t bringing new people to your content, it may be time to shake things up a bit. Don’t forget what you were doing when you first got excited about networking with people on and offline – you met new people, helped them, met their friends, got introduced to new groups of people.

You publicized yourself among groups of people who didn’t know you yet, and were likely to be interested in your products and services.

As you continue to promote to people already in your audience who haven’t bought, shared or subscribed, think of new audiences. Maybe even better audiences.

You get the picture.

The second item is much more in line with my point though. I’ve been guilty of it myself. We humans have a tendency to stick to things that are familiar and safe. And if I publish blog posts and share them with my current peers, many of them will think I’m as brilliant as I think they are and in turn, share them with their audiences.

And I adore them for it. It means so much to me when my peers approve of what I’m doing.

But if my peer group stagnates and I’m not meeting new people, so will the reach of my audience, if I’m only promoting to my peers. It’s great when people are willing to put you in front of their audience. But you also have to using methods that put you directly in touch with the people you want in your audience as well.

You can’t just count on the so-called influencers either – they’re not always the ones who spark viral growth.

The easiest way to get out of such a rut is to ask yourself this question: “What kind of person thinks the work I’m doing is like some kind of magic trick?”

Your parents, yeah, probably, but you want to cast a wider net – you want to think groups of people, who will buy what you’re selling in droves.

Keep asking that until the answer you get is a group that’s in your target audience. Then go find THEM online.

What do you do once you know where they are? Well. I guess that’s the next blog post, right there.

I’m currently in love with a tool called Triberr.

Triberr Basics

Triberr helps you organize promotion of your blog posts as tweets with a community of other bloggers. You can currently join Triberr by being invited to a Tribe, or by applying to join an existing tribe.

Things That Initially Confused Me About Triberr

When you first sign up with Triberr, you get 3 additional tribes to run, in addition, to the one you have been invited to – so when you first sign in and see four communities instead of one, don’t be alarmed.

Start with the one you were attempting to join and fiddle with the others later. Do come back to those other three groups though – with them you can add other people, and build your own Tribe.

I like to use one to manage my own bookmarks from other sites, and decide which ones will also go to Twitter, or only go to Twitter.

There are two modes for publishing the group’s blog posts to your stream, automatic and manual.

If your Tribe allows manual tweeting, the settings area is at the top to your left, on the same line as “Members.” Automatic means that when a person’s blog post enters the stream of posts to go out, they go out right away. Manual means you have control over whether they go out, and some control over when.

You can set up multiple feeds and Twitter profiles by clicking the upper right link marked “Accounts”.

Bones are the community currency. If you need to do basic things like having more people in your tribe than the standard amount allowed, you’ll have to spend bones, but enough are given to you for free that when you join that if you aren’t in a mega-group, you needn’t worry about it.

If you create a group big enough to need bones, you can buy some.

Yes, Triberr Rocks

In a nutshell, that’s Triberr, tying other people’s blog posts to your Twitter, not just yours. I’ve found it helps boost my traffic, but that since I’m in manual mode, I have to make sure I have a tab open to publish posts. Actually I like that, because it forces me to read my peers work every morning, a step I tend to skip when I get busy. Building community with other people is an essential part of blogging, though.

Another tip regarding timing the tweets – if you’re interested in having posts go out during prime times on Twitter, the only way to change the timing for the moment is not to approve the tweet until you’re ready to publish it.

What About Spam?

Here’s how I look at it. I love the people I’m in Tribes with at Triberr. I love their content, I think they’re brilliant, I read their stuff, I was gonna retweet them anyway.

All Triberr is doing is making sure I don’t miss any. Lots of the most popular blogs on the planet do the same thing, they just organize it themselves.

What I do is set my tweets to manual. This way, I have to approve each one on a case by case basis. More work but then I get to read them first – I’m using it almost like an RSS Reader in that way.

If you work with good people, who are targeted to your audience, and you don’t abuse the system yourself, you won’t send spam out. And you can drop people from your Tribe if you’re an admin, and you can also leave a Tribe and join another if you like.

Not to mention that Triberr has guidelines in place that are likely to prevent spam abuse.

“I Need More Triberr Help”

When you get started, if you need more help, also take a look at the Triberr help section and some of the videos they have up on YouTube. Shout out to Dino Dugan, one of the geniuses I know over there, who you can tweet with questions.

Reply if you’d like to start a community tribe. You’ll have to participate in at least one of our free traffic challenges to join but after the video challenge is over there’s an easier one coming up.

Greetings fellow Twitter addicts and Facebook fanatics. I hereby call this meeting of Twitface Blog Neglecters Anonymous to order.

What am I blabbering about?

My dear soul, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s this New Year that just came out. We’re calling it 2011, last I heard.

With this celebration of night turning into…. midnight… I’ve heard blog resolutions aplenty. I made one just a few months ago, and failed miserably at blogging daily.

And, sure, I can blame my health and/or the holidays, but that doesn’t explain why I didn’t keep posting with AudioBoo, or in other multimedia formats.

But I’ve thought about it a great deal, and I have received what is often the best gift of massive failure, and that’s the reason why.

So if your New Year’s Resolution is to blog more, listen up. Because I’m going to share my reasons for failure, and how we can both avoid them for a big win in 2011.

The Top 5 Reasons for My Blog Daily Failure
1. Premature E-publication

I write every day. Every single day. A few tweets, a Facebook group post, sharing thoughts on Amplify, blog comments – up to 25 a day, you get the idea.

Why is this a problem? It isn’t. It’s the WAY that I write, that’s getting in the way of writing blog posts, or creating audio blog posts.

It used to be, I’d stay up until 3 am Pacific, or get back up if need be, read the news, create a post, hit the sheets, be up again at 9, check the news, make another post, do/delegate any outstanding client work, and spend the rest of the day in activities that performed the dual tasks of marketing myself and helping people.

Now, in this twin-centric age, my mornings are about the older twins, and I work nights on the nights that I work, because for whatever reason, my body likes the night life. (It likes to boo-ghay.)

And any energy I had left to write a blog post that could help someone was spent on other types of social media.

That’s right, I tweeted, facebooked, and especially amplified myself right out of a blog post. Sharing is so easy, why make a whole blog post, audio, video about a tool, product or resource anymore? And who has the energy, after all that networking via content, to blog about your own company?

Not me.

So, first big piece of advice – stop shooting your wad on the other social media sites. That doesn’t mean stop using Facebook, Twitter, Amplify, Delicious, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, BizSugar, or anywhere else. It just means, prioritize your blog, and any other online publications you write for, ahead of properties you don’t own, control, or have a stake in.

2. The Wrong Goal

For someone as busy as I am, with the health challenges I am facing, and the type of blogging I do, blogging daily is a ridiculously unnecessary goal.

I’m not a frivolous blogger, and I’m never going to be. If I speak, I want to say something.. Unlike some other folks, if I blog every day without some serious planning, my blog will quickly devolve into an echo-chamber me-too parroting site.

I originally started this goal to increase profits, because of a case study I did among my clients. Those who haven’t stopped blogging daily, despite my 6 week guideline, are all more prosperous than those that chose to slow down after 6 weeks.

What I failed to see was that those who chose to publish less weren’t perishing, they just weren’t growing as fast. Then I had to ask myself a serious question – in my current situation, isn’t the one thing my company does NOT need is rapid growth? How would I fill demand when I barely have a grip now?

So my goal shouldn’t be to blog every day. It should be more like, blog passionately every other day. Take a look at your goals – do they make sense? Why do you have them? Is blogging daily Really going to take you where you want to go? Is blogging more a goal that comes from nostalgia for a yesteryear or the yearning to better fulfill customer/client/prospect needs?

3. Loosey-Goosey Planning

My big plan was – use AudioBoo to be more consistent.

That’s it.

You probably need an editorial calendar. Yes, part of blogging, especially if it’s to inform your audience, is driven by current events. But on the days when nothing exciting happens, what are you blogging about and why?

How does it tie into helping your audience through your company?

4. Caught Stupidity from Failing to Keep It Simple

That’s not to say the AudioBoo goal wouldn’t have worked.

If only I could make it about that.

But once I started using AudioBoo, I thought about the median age of my audience and how they supposedly like to read more than listen or watch ( I know I do, and I’m right at that mean age. Mean like, mathematically. I’m a fairly nice person.)

And then I had to make sure I manually popped the link into the podcast file.

And if it’s a podcast, shouldn’t I have some of that fancy intro/outro music?

Then I had to find out if I could get them transcribed.

Then I wondered if I could use Dragon Naturally Speaking to transcribe them, or some other program. Then I found an iPod Touch app, but I’d have to train it.

Between those last three items, it became too much work, which was the opposite of the point of using AudioBoo in the first place and I stopped.

What I should have done was focus on the audio posts, and delegated the details to someone else.

5. Didn’t Explore Other Mediums/Formats Enough

I could have used web video, slidecasts, infographics, or yes, audio.

I could have varied my regular long pieces with short ones, top ten lists, resources, best of pieces, etc.

Could/woulda/shoulda. Didn’t. Will now. Join me.

I could write more but you get the idea, right? Blogging more is a great resolution for increasing your bottom line, if you find, like me, that the more you publish, the more you make. Just, set an attainable goal with a realistic plan.

… delivering great content to a hungry audience in the way they want to receive it, consistently will bring you success in the long term. All the other rules of web marketing are there to accelerate the long term, or to provide for you in the short term.

If you see someone become successful online, they followed this simple formula. Listen in to find out what got me thinking about this.

It truly is the Ultimate Traffic Method, better than JVs, having affiliates, great organic search results.

But the catch is? It often takes ten years to become an “overnight success”. So if you need food on your table now… well that’s what all the other advice is for.

Resources:

Tia Peterson’s lovely post on Amplify that got me talking about this.
The blog post in question on BizBlogChicks, also by Tia Peterson.
The successful blog it discusses.

You know what’s as important as blogging consistently?

Responding to the people who take the time to help spread your word. Now, there will, of course, come a time when you can’t manage respond to every single person one on one. But just letting people know that 1- you hear them and 2- you appreciate that they’re mentioning you can go a long way.

And even worse, not doing so can have absolutely detrimental results.

I can’t tell you how many opportunities I have missed when I haven’t responded. Sometimes I physically couldn’t do it in time. It’s something I just live with. But it happened enough times that I put a little routine into place.

If someone comments on my blog and I can’t answer them in time, I put them on a list of people whose content I’ll share at some point. When people retweet me, I put them on a Twitter list called “IOU Retweet Love” to let them know that first, it was noted and appreciated and second, will be returned at some point.

Then when they send out a quality message that has the potential to get a good response, I help them pass it along via a retweet to my group.

You can’t live on blog island – without the sustenance of the Blogosphere, your blog will die. So find a way not only to respond to people who help magnify your voice or comment on your blog, but get involved with other blogs. Comment and share other people’s words too.

As previously discussed, I’ve gone on a personal mission to start blogging on a daily basis. I’ve started already, but it’s probably most fair for the GROUP to start after the holiday.

So here’s a bit more information, ideas, and a couple of intentions I have for this that aren’t quite firm.

• Intend to start a blog carnival around this
• Intend to publish a list of weekly posts. Blog carnival will allow you to choose which ones I put on the list.
• Hashtag in Twitter is #blogdaily
• Everything is optional after you respond to the original post about this with “I’m in.”
• We need a way to contact each other that’s not intrusive and less trouble some than email. I’m thinking a yammer group.
• Right now we have 10 people who said they were in, here or on the FB group.
• Hoping we can all support each other with commens and responses and such.
• Will be sending updates to the Open For Web Business Facebook group.

That’s it for now.

… of the Year, is now online.

You have no idea how close it came to being the last one ever…

Whew!

In this Christmas Issue:

Five Seasons Freebies
Four Traffic Weapons
Three Blogger’s Resources
Two On-Going Contest
and a Funny Chirstmas Video of Me!

Can’t wait to see you there!

Well. If you’re a blogger anyway…. it means yet another way you can increase your blog traffic is by covering the news.

No, it’s not a new concept – I’ve been harping on that for at least two years, as all you regulars know. What’s new is that Technorati is helping blogs get featured on AP News sites.

After having the pleasure of witnessing a friend of mine hit the Associated Press newswire last year, it’s great to see that Technorati is going to be partnering with Associated Press member sites. That means that the next time a friend of mine is covered by AP, I can blog about it and possibly appear in one of the links to the stories.

From Technorati’s Weblog Post:

The new service will bring blogger commentary about AP news stories to communities large and small throughout the USA, giving bloggers a voice in trusted local papers throughout the nation. For many news readers, this will be their first exposure to the blogosphere with national, international, business and sports news presented along side links to blogger commentary and perspective.

So what does that mean to you? If you have any reason to cover stories that pop up on the AP wire, then sugar… dumpling … blog about them. Link naturally, and not just because of the traffic – it’s an extra boost, not the whole point.

What I’m really hoping is that this bold venture will help build bridges between bloggers and reporters. In some trades and local dailies, you can almost feel the animosity towards bloggers coming off the page. I just had a conversation about this with the folks over at Real Estate Blog Sites, who set up MyST Blog sites specifcally for the high end real estate industry. It seems that in some online newspapers, you still see a blog backlash – some play down their effectiveness in generating leads, others warn big companies to fear the blogosphere instead of reach out to it.

Anyway. Before I dive headlong into that tangent, just though you should know.

I haven’t been around for a while, and I’ll probably post an update on that later. I’ll be flying back to Vegas on May 2nd, and by the 7th, I’ll officially be around full time again. While I have a few minutes, I thought I’d talk a little about business blogging, since I have a press release out about it today.

One of the reasons I talk about blogging so much is that I know a lot of webmasters who are absolutely desperate for traffic to their sites. They often have a budget of less than one hundred and fifty dollars, a few hours a week of free time for marketing, and desire search engine traffic above all else.

If this sounds like you, let me ask you this.

What’s wrong with a method to increase your search engine traffic in the time it takes to write a medium-length email every weekday for 30 – 90 days? Especially if, after 90 days, you can maintain those results with one update a week?

This time three years ago, if someone had told me that I could get hundreds of first page rankings in the search engines that I got to keep, month after month, and I didn’t have to spend $100 – $1000 a month on AdWords or Overture, I would have done backflips.

And apparently, I’d be a millionaire today as well. All from learning the right way to blog to rank for 200 search terms instead of two.

It absolutely confounds me why anyone who could write an email wouldn’t find the time to try this method of generating additional traffic to their site – free, high quality, targeted search engine traffic.

Of course, some people believe that all the answers to how to do this are available for free online. And for sure there are some great resources, like Wayne’s excellent Blog Business World.

But if all the information for how to increase your traffic from search engines with a blog was available online – wouldn’t everyone have great traffic right now?

And yet they don’t. Because it’s not just about how to pick a good keyword, or getting links from submitting to blog directories, or knowing where to ping when you blog.

It’s about building relationships – document relationships, the relationship between you and your reader so your traffic will stick.

I talk about some of that in the podcast I did with PRWeb today. It should be out in a few hours. In the meantime, open up the attached PDF file and look at some of the sample resources and ask yourself – are you really happy with how much traffic you have? If there’s an ethical, step-by-step way to learn to do it better, that other people are getting great results with, what’s your reason for not trying it?

How valuable are sales and leads to your business anyway? Are they worth spending a couple of hundred dollars? A couple of thousand? A few hours a week?

You can download the attachment in PDF format. In an upcoming post I’m going to talk about the first case study I have for Adsense and Blogging using my method, which got my personal coaching student 300 visitors a day in three weeks, who are helping him earn over $500 a month in AdSense.

What if he had ten blogs? What if he sees the plan through to the 90 day mark and has ten times the traffic?

What if he were YOU? We’ll talk about that soon, maybe in a few hours, maybe tomorrow.

Which is my birthday, incidentally….