There was a really important post at DoshDosh today called “An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get“. It went over a very basic marketing principle that has somehow gotten turned into a gimmick – the idea that in order to get someone, anyone, to do something for you, that you must first do something for them. 

It struck me, reading that article that everyone knows you’re supposed to do that. 

Everyone thinks they understand why to do that. 

And yet few people know HOW to do it. Or everyone would, and everyone would buy everything and all our problems getting the word out and  would be solved. 

I wonder why that is. Thinking back to when I was a newbie, thinking about how current newbies to traffic generation behave when they meet me, I think this quote from the article best alludes to the mystery:

You’re not selling to robots or animals. You’re selling to people whocare about the seller. Get what you want by first giving unconditionally. Manage what people think or feel about you and you’ll get what want easily.

When I was a newbie, I didn’t get that. I got into business to be able to help people and have some extra spare change – I was looking for a part time supplemental income.

One day put out some valuable information for free, and for a while got a lot of great attention for it. Then when flipping through Clickbank, I noticed that someone had turned my idea into a product. Out of curiosity I bought it, thinking they had the same idea I had at the same time – maybe we could work together and make something bigger.

And I saw that, word for word, some of the content in the product was stuff I was giving away free on my blog.

At the time I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

Sue? I didn’t have a lawyer and couldn’t afford one.

Contact the person and bluff that I was going to sue? I couldn’t make good on the threat, and besides, it was a lie. And people knew that person well – they were just getting to know me in the marketplace.

Ultimately I figured out that due to the ranking of the product, they couldn’t have been making a lot of sales. So I made a better product, and put it on the market. Six months later the market for that particular item was flooded with competition, and I was still on top.

I always believed it was because I provided better value, and people knew it. I gave away most of the information others make you pay for, and then heaped a lot of actionable content to pay for on top of that. Eventually my tactic paid off.

Because I wanted to build a business. The other guy just wanted to make a quick buck.

And that’s the difference between some of the new blood in any business and the veterans, between some of those living the “guru” lifestyle and the true experts.

One wants to build a business, the other is hoping to run away with some of your cash. One has to shoot straight with you or they risk losing your future business. The other doesn’t care because they just want to get you to buy this one thing and then run away.

If you want to earn trust with your audience, before everything you do, think, “will this build me a long-term relationship with subscribers, customers and clients?”

Ask yourself why they would come back for more.

Ask yourself why YOU would come back for more.

This month in Traffic Reality we’re going to be talking about how to use social media properties to build your business. I’m not going to just talk about Twitter, or Facebook or StumbleUpon or forum marketing.

I’m going to talk about all of them as a whole, from the technical points of how to use them, to the tips and tricks on each separate site in my Web 2.0 strategy and how I use them together to generate traffic, leads and sales.

I’ll be focusing on Actionable Steps, and how to reduce your daily social media workload to half an hour a day. We’ll discuss the intimate nature of how and why some things get popular in social media and other items fail miserably.

We’ll be looking into why these occurrences have nothing to do with quality of the resource, and everything to do with leverage. Actually we’ll be talking about that fact that I feel leverage is so important that, years ago, I named my company Leveraged Promotion.

This topic is so important that I’m going to start giving away bonsues in Traffic Reality at the beginning of the month of lessons instead of the end, so I can get them all in.

In the next post in this series, I’ll give you a few take away points for right now, as well as an announcement of our last content winner.

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.