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.

Thank you so much for reading this. It isn’t the normal blog post that comes out of this site, not by far.

Here’s the gist.

I put together a new package featuring new way to find your most targeted audience on Facebook worth $200, on sale for $7.77 at this writing.

I priced it at less than $9 until I go to Africa this coming week for two reasons.

1- I want you to buy it now not later, because
2- I want to stay longer and not have to work during my first real vacation in 12 years, therefore,
3- Rather than beg for money, as always I’d like to trade value for value. And I like to overdo it on my end.

You probably already have a Facebook Profile, and if you’re a part of my audience, you’ve probably already picked up my guide Fast Facebook Traffic.

(A guide to getting more traffic and leads with your Facebook Profile without violating Facebook’s rules. Or acting in a way that lead people to think you’re a jerk.

Also less than $10 if you don’t have it!)

There are many effective ways to grow your audience through Facebook without doing that used salesman kind of pitch – which we all know doesn’t work anymore.

But you know all that, so why wouldn’t you have a Facebook Profile? Of course you do.

Facebook is an incredible resource for connecting to people who become customers. They drive more traffic than Google now, and with 600 million people using it, not being on Facebook isn’t the best idea a person has ever had.

It’s a shame that, with a personal profile, there are so many extra steps to get people to engage with you. I believe in engagement before lead capture, but Facebook is really making it harder than it has to be.

And yes, my new guide overcomes that, so you can get access to more new people in a way that has them to connect to your page And your newsletter within minutes of first encountering you. But let’s talk about how involved the Facebook profile engagement process is.

First you have to set up your profile so that people know where to go to learn more about you, and hopefully, one day, visit your site and sign up for your products and services.

The solution to that used to be easy – just use a Facebook plug in to put a sign up box in your sidebar. Of course, Facebook put an end to that.

But you can still push news and updates from your profile that will encourage people to get into your sales funnel. If you know how to set up an engaging blog that converts visitors to newsletter sign ups, the cycle will be longer, but there’s still a chance that you’ll get it done.

If only the work were over then. And granted, the process isn’t dull. It’s fun even. But parts of it are inefficient.

For example, let’s say you’ve set up your profile to talk about business to fellow business people, and have a filter for stuff that is directed to family and friends.

Now, you have to go and find out where people are and draw them to you. One common place is a Facebook group. If you know which ones to go to and where to post to get the best results, and how to figure out which ones are active, again,  super.

Of course, Facebook went and changed Groups too. Except they didn’t change the old groups over to the new format. Not that you always want it to, but now you don’t have a choice. (The hell?)

So, okay, you’ve set up your profile properly, you’ve gone and found people to interact with, they click on your profile and join… great, some of the new people are coming. But what happened to the old people?

Aw, nuts! Facebook made yet Another change, and if you haven’t directly interacted with people lately, you aren’t showing up in their stream. Unless they do a series of funky adjustments that most people can’t and won’t be bothered with. So the people you worked so hard to recruit aren’t getting your updates any more, unless you knew the secret to getting in that group in the first page.

So what now?

Well, what if you could set up a page on Facebook with an irresistible feature that made people want to connect to you?

What if having them sign up with you let you contact them through their news feed, through their Facebook messages, and through your newsletter?

How would you like it if you were exempt from the rule that if you haven’t directly interacted with someone in the past few weeks, they couldn’t see you? What if your special status made you visible to them?

What if that didn’t even matter because they were on your email list?

Suppose that through this special page, you could contact people several times a day, or outsource the job to someone who could send out messages on your behalf several times a day?

And wouldn’t it be fantastic if you also got a whole new place to browse and connect to new people in order to find your audience?

I have great news for you.

Facebook just made an update that allows you to do all of the above.

The catch is, it only works this way under specific conditions, with a technique I’ve just put together. At this writing, I’ve only been using it a week.

In that week, on the days I do it, I get 10 new fans in 12 hours, or up to 20 in a day.

In the first five day period I had a spike of 100 new fans.

They aren’t the kind of passive fans that you can buy from various services (some of them spammy, none of them worth $200!) . They are people who are leaving more wall posts, sharing more links, and just overall interacting more than ever.

Even people who had already joined my group are coming back to talk!

My technique exploits a new Facebook feature, in combination with some existing tweaks that allow you to

- turn your Facebook Page into a landing page
- set it up so that people in your target audience have a reason to like/join your Page
- gives them an immediate reward for doing so
- can be set up so they follow up that action with joining your newsletter (Facebook can’t ever affect Those leads)
- bypasses the “you haven’t contacted me lately” filter
- allows you to publish frequent updates to their news feed, including notices of sales, blog posts, helpful tips, or questions
- lets you build a community, complete with discussion board, video, link and photo sharing, for free, and,
- gives you a whole new way to find new prospects and draw them to you.

That’s what my new resource “Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages” tells you about. In it I teach the technique that in 15 minutes of work brought me 20 new subscribers to my Facebook Page and newseltter over the next day.

It works best under certain circumstances, but a fellow entrepreneur just showed me how to make it work for Any type of page, though arguably not as well as my current preferred page.

It’s less than ten dollars, and you can pick it up here:

Here’s what Jim Zaccharia had to say about it:

“WT_? Ok, I Shouldn’t Tell Anyone, BUT, Tinu Abayomi-Paul has come up with a Facebook Traffic plan ‘offer’ for < $10 That’s Too Good To Pass up – IF you Want LOTS of Facebook Traffic, that is. You’ll be Blown Away by the Bonuses. Really.”

When I thanked him for the comment in Facebook, he said:

“I could hardly Believe my Eyes_when I Saw How Much You Provided ! Glad I took you up on your offer Before you came to your senses and raised the price! It’s Easily Worth 10X what you’re asking.”

The price has gone up a buck, but is still under $9 because I’m looking to raise cash for a trip to Africa in a few days. I just learned that I may not be able to work steadily while I’m there, and that I might be able to extend my trip.

(I was prepared for frequent power outages, with backup generators, but not for the potential shortage of the fuel that powers the generators.)

It won’t stay under $9 forever – I’m leaving in a few days. Get your copy now.

Just in case Facebook Pages, or Facebook marketing is new to you, I’ve set up the following bonuses, available until I leave for my trip:

1. FanPage Dollars
2. Fanpage Dollars 2
3. Facebook Profits
4. Facebook Fanpage Warchest
5. 27 Facebook Fan Page Templates
6. Viral Fan Page Script
7. Facebook Ad Explosion
8. Facebook Fanpage Blueprint
9. Facebook Ad Miracle
10. Facebook Social Ads Exposed
11. FB Profit Secrets
12. FB Viral Script Pro 2.0
13. Facebook Marketing Uncovered
14. Facebook Rockstar System

This is over $200 in additional help with Facebook, yours free for investing less than $10 in Fast Traffic from Facebook Traffic.

Get your copy of Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages today. And thanks as always for your support.

Networking! by amydpp, on Flickr

So you missed What’s Next DC? Or you were there but missed something?

You sad sack, you.

I only say that because we’re in the same boat, and that’s what I said to myself. I was there as a floating expert (more on the irony of someone who sometimes can barely walk being called a “floating” expert later- LOL!). And I almost stabbed myself when I missed Rand Fishkin’s presentation.

But I’m also here to rescue you from possible shame and embarassment in front of your friends, because after going over the following resources, you’ll be able to front like you did. There’s no future in frontin’, but that’s another blog post isn’t it?

I started out the day intending to blog my reactions to the presentations, but so many people already did such a good job doing that. So instead, I’m going to link to those, and give you the inside scoop later on:

• being a floating expert,
• talking to Debbie Weil,
• the fantastic networking at What’s Next DC,
• the IRL connections,
• How Twitter Changed One Speaker’s Life,
• and more….

We’ll come back to all that in the days that follow, on my various social media, corporate web visibility, and online company owner blogs, as well as here.

For now, here’s a quick round up of What’s Next DC blog posts I found. And below are my brief reactions to my favorite presentations.

More Resources

You can also see my Quick Resources Overview of What’s Next DC at my corporate web promotion services blog, Leveraged Promotion.

Someone once told me you can’t ever get something that is

• cheap
• and good
• and fast.

You simply cannot have all three things in one product or service.

If it’s a good product, either you bear the cost in real currency, or you lose speed by investing your own time to make it work – hence allowing it to be cheap.

If you can get it or its results fast, the quality of the product suffers or you bear the expense in real currency- cash.

If you can find it cheap, either it’s sub-par quality, or you bear the cost of speed.

Ten years on the web has taught me that this is true, and those are the consequences of getting something cheap and fast, good and cheap or fast and good.

(Okay, you caught me trying to look young. The real number is 12 years on the internet – I built my first business site in 1998.

Goodness. It’s actually 17 years if you count newsgroups and such.

I am so old. Anyway.)

In my newsletter, from time to time I’ll suggest an inexpensive resource. I will only do this if

1. I own the product

(which means I went through the entire delivery process- including customer service if something went wrong)

2. I found the strategy sound

having used a similar enough tactic myself, or actually implemented the exact one I was reading, and,

3. It can benefit a variety of businesses, not just internet marketing.

There are lots of things that work only in the bubble of the internet marketing niche, because that’s a special type of consumer, as is the business opportunity niche or the business to business niche. Not saying it’s better or worse. Just different.

Having said that, I have to apply that logic to cheap traffic guides, including my own, so that you can understand why some of my prices are quite low, and others are so expensive, only the truly well-insulated or managed firm can afford both me, and the time it takes to see the first signs of my high end advice sticking.

There are people out there whose entire careers are based on information I share in this blog, to put that into perspective for you.

(I’d say “not to brag” but then you’d have to say “yeah, right.” And then I’d have to say “you can only successfully brag about things that are true.” and… well it would turn into a whole “thing.”.)

Some of those people make free or cheap guides to get their businesses started. Some with my permission, some without. All of us, myself included, sometimes forget the problem with cheap traffic guides before we go further.

Or we at least forget to explain them in our salesletters or within the guide itself. That’s what brings me to look at the cheap traffic guide issue from many angles, to see their potential problems.

The first problem is that whole cheap, fast and good thing. Myself? I try to err on the side of cheap and good.

I believe in hard work. The fact is that most really good traffic techniques are often inexpensive, but take a lot of hard work to build.

But not everyone makes cheap traffic guides with that in mind. Some people write them about traffic tactics they used a year ago, not knowing that they are worthless now.

I don’t think they do this maliciously, I think they just don’t often see that the reason any loophole they may have found still works for them because they got in really early. They don’t realize the promise they are making to a newcomer won’t be kept. It’s a classic problem for people new to selling traffic products or services.

So you get a product that is cheap, that you can put to work fast, but is ultimately worthless…

And as such is no good.

You also occasionally happen upon someone who shares a loophole early. So you get a fast and cheap technique, but since they made it available to so many people, it draws too much attention and the loophole is closed.

To me? Good just for a short term is still bad if I’m trying to run a reputable business. (If you’re running a triple X site, or gambling or any other venture that you can afford to have banned or can quickly rebuild, feel free to put your black hat on. I won’t judge.) A true traffic technique is good for the long run….

And as such is no good.

Everything else will fall under the heading of fast and good. You’ll pay for someone to do it for you, or you’ll pay to learn about it. Yes, you have to make an investment, but boy, it’s worth it.

They are few in number but when they come along, it’s great.

Which brings us to the second problem with cheap traffic guides.

They are general knowledge, even when the implementation steps are given in great detail. Allow me to explain.

Let’s say I go bananas about an expertise marketing course. I get it, it’s fantastic, it even works.

But I own a video game site. Expertise marketing may not be the best choice for an entertainment product. I probably would have been better off business blogging, advertising within other games, being on sites gamers go to, doing a social media campaign supported by light ads on social media sites.

The seller of a cheap traffic guide doesn’t know that.

Either they don’t have the expertise, or they do and can’t share it because you aren’t playing at that level – you’re doing the entry level cheap guides when you should be getting traffic makeover from a someone with a Traffic PHD.

(Yep, I’m linking to a bunch of my products. I appreciate it if you do purchase something, but feel free to just soak up this knowledge for future reference instead. I’m linking to other stuff too, but just in case you’re looking for something of mine, hit the bold links.)

You may not even need a bunch of cheap guides, or even an expensive consultant. What you may need is to pay more attention to your site and apply some good common sense.

Things like – if your site sold better before the redesign, redesign again based on the old design with stylistic updates only.

Or things like, if a high percentage of people are leaving your site, and it’s not to go purchase through a third-party processor, maybe you need to figure out what’s driving them off – and if it’s a good thing.

Or things like, if you make more money when your newsletter comes out, ask your audience if they’d like more newsletters. Then increase your mailings to however many they say per week.

Anyway, the point is, a traffic guide can build on your knowledge but it can’t advise you whether choosing to use the tactics in it are best used on your site or business.

On the other hand, sometimes you don’t need specialized knowledge, or you want to focus in on one small area, or you want to own everything that person ever created, or or you’re beginning and you want to see what’s in the water before you jump in.

That’s cool, because that’s what is great about cheap traffic guides.

With a minuscule investment, you can skip today’s latte, small pizza, or cheeseburger meal, and find out if you can use Twitter effectively for your business, even though you hate Twitter.

You can find out whether there is any potential for you to get traffic from Facebook.

So I hope this makes things clear – I know there are some issues with using cheap traffic methods. That’s part of why I give you the same information you might find in a cheap guide for free on my site, then put $97 into $8 products, and collections worth $25,000 into $600 reports or $100 video packages.

I want you to be wildly successful so that you can afford me, and come back for some more of that good stuff your business is now addicted to – ain’t I a cad?

For the record, these are the cheap and good ones I currently, openly, and proudly endorse. The
ones I created are in bold. If you own others, share them. Affiliate links are OK. For our purposes, cheap means less than $15, and good means the technique still works.

Remember also that “fast” like cheap and good, are relative. I can generate 10,000 even 100,000 or a million visitors overnight given the right budget, tools and team. So if I say I’m teaching you how to get 1000 visitors overnight, realize, that’s slow to me.

• Fast Facebook Traffic
• The Twitter Lists Secret
• Twitter Traffic
• Google Social Search Secrets
• fast blog traffic
• how to maximize mbl traffic (My Blog Log)
• list explodes
• 1 month – 1000 members
• Video Traffic Guide
• Video Traffic Power
• Video Traffic sales letter
• 2 bucks an ad

You hear so much about how the economy is down…

and sales are down…

and traffic, profits, life, work is down, that it’s almost a culture shock to see local small business not just making it, but kicking butt, in your area.

I mean, everyone is broke, but people I know for a fact aren’t well off have iPads.

There’s supposedly no money in circulation, right? But Starbucks is packed every time I go.

We’ll come back to all that in a minute. One thing I want to make clear – this isn’t an isolated incident. I’m not offering this as mockery to people who have lost their jobs or had to let people go, due to the rocky economic climate.

I’m offering this as hope that perhaps, the way we need to measure what’s successful in our country is changing. I’m offering this out as hope, hope that it’s not just one business that can do something like this to make a hard time a thriving time.

Hope that we can ALL make it.

In fact, I have four examples I’ll be focusing on this week in this and other blogs:

1. The Dominican Hair Salons
2. Cindy’s Karaoke
3. Annie’s Art Gallery, and
4. Fish Market Restaurant

Before you think “this isn’t for me” event marketing works whether your business operates online, offline or both.

In this audio I’ll be discussing:

• What Event Marketing Is
• Why It Works
• Examples of Successful Event Marketing Implementation

Can’t see the player? Download here.
Coming up soon:

• Examples of Event Marketing succeeding online
• Tips on How to Create a Must-Attend Event
• Marketing Your Event Offline
• Marketing Your Event Online

Today I bring you a short rant in which I reveal some things I secretly HATE but still use to increase my traffic, and thus my subscription rate, and thus my sales, and ultimately, my income.

If you can’t see the player, you can download the audio here.

Let me start off by saying that the whiny baby in the picture is not to imply that YOU are a whiny baby if your social media actions, strategy and/or plans don’t appear to be working.

I’m flat out saying it. Because I love you.

I’m not, like, IN LOVE with you or anything like that. I mean more like a human being, who shares in your dreams, and occasionally, your misery. And if you love someone, in situations like this one, you tell them the truth.

(In situations like, “did you finish the potato chips?” you lie. But I totally didn’t finish them. There’s another bag in the pantry. I saw it.)

So back to our topic.

Social media – which really isn’t called social media anymore – works. You can dispute it if you’d like, but I am hereby officially positing the theory that if your social media efforts aren’t working, it’s not because the technology sucks, or your dog ate it, or Facebook is for losers, or Twitter is for techies, or YouTube is for people with no life.

No, homie, the problem is what you’re doing.

It would be the height of jerkiness for me to call you a whiner whose mama dresses you funny if I didn’t pose some solutions to the issue you’re facing.

(I’m still kind of a jerk for doing that. But I haven’t had my coffee yet. It gets better.)

So here are some of my thoughts. Not that I’m a doctor or anything like that. But my social media IS working. By that I mean it brings me traffic, publicity or other types of attention that I then turn into money.

The Top 5 Reasons You Think (Correctly or Not) That Your Social Media Efforts Aren’t Working.

1. You don’t understand what it’s supposed to do.

It doesn’t make your hair shinier.

It can’t buy you a new dog.

And it doesn’t make money jump up into your pocket.

Social media, to put it simplistically, makes information easier to move around, share and engage with. Yes, you can make money through your business efforts in social media. No, you can’t do it by applying old world marketing to the new media paradigm.

But you CAN connect the principles of marketing to the back end of social media.

You can have a blog that engages, and blog posts that aren’t sales pages. Then you can have a subscription box on every page, which leads to the first part of your sales funnel. And you can do it without pissing people off, too.

2. You aren’t measuring the right thing.

I have a friend who insists on doing things like putting a bit.ly link in his profile, putting obvious affiliate links on his profile and leaving signature links on his intrusive posts to other people’s walls in Facebook.

He looks like a fool.

I’ve told him as much.

But he insists that he’d rather get .01% of people he can track to click on his links now and buy today, than 30% of people he can’t track to do business with him in the next 90 days.

If that is your approach to social media, you are Insane.

As in, you need medication, not like an insult. Literally have someone examine your head.

It’s this approach that kills most social media efforts. Why not put some Google Analytics code (or some other way to track the origin of clicks) on your OWN site. No, it won’t track people who get an email or hear about your link because of a Facebook friend and save it to their bookmarks.

But it will get more people clicking. Folks like to know where a link is going to take them. And not everyone knows how to use tools that circumvent bit.ly and other URL shorteners.

3. You aren’t doing things that get people’s attention, and keeps it.

Bland content saved to delicious.com is still bland content. I know because I have written ten times the bland content as I have original, engaging pieces that people find useful.

You’ve got to find a different way to say it, or say something different that is closer to what your audience, your future customers, want to hear. Then you’ve got to do it in a way that makes them tell someone, and want to come back for more themselves.

If you can’t figure out how to do it, hire someone.

But try first. Honestly it’s not that hard.

4. You’ve got great content, but you’re not distributing it.

Great content that’s sitting on your site without being noticed is just as useless as bland content. Are you syndicating it via RSS? Are you emailing your subscribers when you have a worthwhile post? Have you turned the popular posts into podcasts?

Get your content out where it can be followed back to your site.

5. You’ve got great content, you’re distributing it, but your audience isn’t engaged enough to care.

Okay, you’re awesome. I know it. But you only tell me once a month. And when you tell me and then I comment back how super you are, you ignore me. So then I figure, why retweet it? So and so is a super-douche who doesn’t care anyway, why should I?

That’s not to say that you have to spend your life answering every single piece of communication in real time. We’re not all the Old Spice Guy.

But you can do your best to get in contact with your former, present and future customers, on multiple channels, in a way they’ll appreciate. You can update on a regular basis. You can say thank you for the retweets you get. You can find content at their sites to retweet too, or comment on.

My overall theory is this.

If I give you a toolbox, and there’s a hammer in it, if you use that tool to do anything but bang a nail into place, its effectiveness is going to go way down.

But you’d be crazy to say the hammer isn’t working if you’re using it to put on eyeliner. And if I’m going to call myself your friend – nay, a decent human being – I have to strongly advise you to stop doing that, any way I can.

I’m specifically talking about branding right now. But this could be any aspect of small business – customer service, marketing, social media, newsletters, meetings…

And I believe the answer is, it only matters what you call it if what you’re doing doesn’t match what you’re saying that you’re doing. For example, you can’t call it customer service if you’re listening but not responding.

Actually let’s tangent onto that. I have an experience to share. One of my affiliates had over 257 sales over the 36 hours.

(That’s what I get for offering 100% commission on a page that converts at 17%. LOL, just kidding. Why I’m deliriously happy about paying out on that is a discussion for another day.)

Anyway, the point is, about 4 emails an hour came in with customer support questions or issues. They were mostly three issues – not getting one of the three confirmation emails with the download, not seeing that the videos were in one of the delivered files, or they had a compliment/question.

Now, when you’re handling an uptick in emails at that rate, you can certainly fall back on the excuse that you’re swamped, especially if you’re doing it yourself. Put it in an autoresponder and you’re covered for a little bit. Most people will be understanding.

Or you can deliver the best possible service you can, and give such a great customer service experience that will leave a memorable impression.

You can send three delivery confirmations instead of one.

You can offer a second way to get the videos.

You can call people on the phone to make sure they got what they needed.

You can send an extra message wishing them a good day when they confirm that they were helped.

It just takes a little extra to make a big difference.

For another example, let’s look at branding. That’s what made me write this article today.

I was reading Do People Really Want a Relationship with a Brand?

Here’s a quote:

In human-land, we don’t have relationships with brands; we have expectations of them.

My Mazda is in the shop right now. And while I don’t think of having a “relationship” with Mazda – my car’s brand – I definitely have expectations of what Mazda as a whole brand should be doing for me.

And in a sense, the article is right.

I don’t want my roofer to spoon me. I expect my friggin roof fixed. Now. Properly the first time. Not cheaply but certainly at a good price.

But that’s still a relationship.

People want relationships with people, of course — and yet, the whole idea of relationships with brands is that these are subconscious connections. No one could care less about a company selling some stuff. But people have died for their passions and hobbies.

Who sells the equipment to enhance their passions? Who creates the material for their hobbies? Companies.

For evidence of brand relationships, watch the documentary “The Corporation” [ official site trailer | full movie on Hulu].

Now, I don’t believe corporations are evil, but skip forward to the part about branding. People describe companies like Coca-Cola with *personalities*. It’s scary that branding is that deeply entrenched, but it’s also interesting that it’s at that level.

I *do* believe smaller companies need to focus on  connecting human to human though – that’s our strength.

You can call it relationship marketing, branding, or hickory-dickory-dock but we need to do it if we want to distinguish ourselves from the next guy. Expectations come from relationships. So do being receptive, responsive and respectful.

Intriguing topic for an article and warrants a lot of discussion. Be sure to read the entire article. The larger topic of the site is talking about branding in human terms, which Is very important to businesses of all sizes.

I hope you had the greatest 4th of July ever, whether you celebrate Independence Day stateside, or if it was just another Sunday.

Yes, here in the USA, we celebrate Independence Day. People talk a lot about freedom and independence. It would take me a lot of detail and back story to tell you why the last time I truly felt free was so long ago. But why I feel independent?

That’s easy. I own my own company.

I don’t just “work for myself” – no dis to the self-employed, as I once counted myself among your ranks. But in many ways, my business is growing beyond that, slowly and steady as she goes. And while I’m personally far, far from being a millionaire, I do know that given full possession of my faculties, a way to communicate and basic survival needs taken care of, I could build another company tomorrow from scratch.

And whether you just enjoy my blog or have all my products, I have you to thank for that. So thank you.

That feeling of knowing I can shape my own destiny, win or fail, is what Independence means to me as an entrepreneur. I’d love to hear what it means to you.

Facebook may not have been built with marketing in mind, although the four choices under “looking for” on your Info tab are Friendship, Dating, A Relationship and Networking.

However, if you choose to take that invitation to network, you still have to be careful about the way you market yourself.

I could do a whole article on staying within Facebook’s terms and conditions alone. For now though, I’m going to focus on the subtleties of networking online, particularly Marketing in Facebook.

If you think about when you go to an event to network, you behave a certain way- even if the point of the gathering is networking, you don’t open with your business card.

People would think you were a lunatic if you came to the event dressed inappropriately, and ran in circles around the room, throwing a handful of your business cards at each person’s face.

Yet, somehow the perception is that this kind of behavoir is not just accepted, but welcomed online.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m no purist.

Far be it from me to say “don’t network” or “never try and make some money”, even on Facebook. I say take business where ever it comes.

It has just been my experience that in a networking environment, online or off, you get more of your products sold and services ordered, if you forego the hard sell.

The Age of the Hard Sell is over now, anyway. It’s the Age of the Educated Consumer, who has dozens, sometimes even hundreds of choices about where to shop, not to mention sources of information about you or your company.

We sell more by serving better.

To take the discussion back to networking, this is why we tend to be buy from the well-dressed person who cares and offered their help. We should be asking ourselves – what’s the equivalent online?

I’ll answer that question another time. In the next post, we’ll go over some common marketing mistakes here on Facebook.