There are several basic low-budget and no-budget ways that websites and web publications can get reasonably expect to more exposure in 2010.

While the objective remains the same – get in your prospects email, search, news or related favorite online hangouts – the methods by which you’ll be achieving those objectives shift from year to year.

1. Leverage Business Relationships
2. Create Affiliate-Powered or Referral-Powered Promotions with Incentives
3. Get Ranked Well in Google and Yahoo/Bing
4. Leverage Other minor Google/Yahoo properties for better search and direct traffic
5. Get Regular Exposure in Google News
6. Build Great Blogger Relationships (whether or not you’re presently a blogger)
7. Get Click Traffic from Twitter, Ping.Fm, and other more topical status update tools, or more audience-focused  micro-blogging applications
8. Get Click Traffic, Article Views and Build Relationships Both Within and Around Facebook and other Social Networking Applications
9. Get Publicity in Other Major Publications and Mid-Level Industry Publications
10. Create a Video Following
11. Create a Podcast Following
12. Shift Towards Bizstreaming (without dropping Blogging)
13. Integrate document sharing, slidecasting, and other multi-media social sharing tools
14. Find or Found Appropriate Community Networks that integrate online tools with offline life
15. Tighten-up In-house interest lists, follow-up, intro offers and backend sale
16. Value-exchanges for attention, based in social currency on the social media sites that are built for content exposure, such as StumbleUpon
17. Economically-sound Advertising

Throughout January we’ll be dedicating anywhere from a couple of days to an  entire week on all of these topics, then we’ll come back and re-cap with a round-up and links to more resources.

Until then, the one thing you need to remember about traffic is the same thing as before: the game hasn’t changed – the tools are just getting better.

So a week ago, I started out with intention of doing a series on Social Currencies. Then I realized that depending on your perspective, the way I wanted to talk about Social Currency didn’t really work.

This concept of currency within the economy of social interaction is really a much smaller concept within a book I’m writing about how small businesses gain the upper hand online through the leverage of resources.

But I digress. Here’s the point.

Before we can start talking about social currency we have to discuss what exactly is.

A currency is the prevalent item or unit that can be taken universally by anybody in a given economy for goods or services, in that same economy.

That is  an acceptable definition but first to apply it here we must agree that we have a social economy, meaning that we have a structure where, things of value are being exchanged, whether for personal use or for business.

So. for example, I could give you my trust. Until I give that trust to you, even in a limited capacity, I won’t give your business my email address unless I’m a fool, or I fully trust the laws that protect me if you abuse it.

In return for my trust, I have to get something back that is worth not just the risk of getting burned by you or a third party that hacks your server, but the act of opening a line of communication itself.

Another definition of currency is any form of value exchange that can be circulated within an agreed economy. In order for one to get another unit of value back, I offer a unit of value.

Of course, in a value exchange it’s all about the perception of value. Money itself isn’t static.

Even though were not on the gold standard anymore we do have comparisons between different countries and economies as far as what a certain currency’s value is here. The value of the dollar against other world currencies is different than it was ten days ago, ten years ago even, and not the same as it will be in ten years.

So this is also an accepted definition for our purposes, given that what we’re trying to do is to get relative value.

I may give you a technique for increasing your visitors that brings you $1350 worth of traffic, for $100 because I know the relative value of you learning it yourself versus paying me to do it.

Or maybe having you as a future lead is worth a loss of $1250 in potential revenue to me, perhaps I value you as a client over a lifetime at least that much.

Relative value.

Next, we’re going to talk about the criteria I measured each component of social currency against in order to determine their usefulness to you as a business person. Then we’ll jump right into the series with an overview of the first social currency.

There will be times where, no matter how you try, you simply can’t share your ideas with text alone.

At the same time, you may not be willing to whip out your video recording software and go through the steps of editing a video, adding or editing sound, uploading it to a server and possibly converting it to a format that would be most easily shared.

An easy in-between would be to share your ideas as a slideshow presentation, the same way you would if you were going to do a lecture. All it requires is the software to make the show, and a way to distribute it once it’s created.

And of course, content that makes sense without a presenter to walk you through the steps.

The Equipment You Need

Now, if you’re a PC User, chances are, you have Microsoft Office, and have access to Powerpoint, or can get access to it at a local internet cafe. If you’re a Mac User, even money says you’re going for the slick effects a Keynote presentation is capable of (this is the program that most recently converted me to Mac – and of course I still have Powerpoint, so best of both worlds!)

What if you’re not Ms. or Mr. Moneybags, and you need a decent tool, that won’t empty your wallet? Or if you want to use something platform independent that will save in a format compatible with either system for editing?

You can always download the Open Office suite for free. It’s got word processing, spreadsheet software and can create presentations, and has a version for both Windows or Mac.

Then there’s always Google Docs. Not only can you create presentations from your browser, you can open presentations in other formats, or simply use Google Docs to share your documents with the world.

It’s also a good idea to have a way to get graphics for your presentation that are royalty-free, so you won’t have to pay a fee each time they appear. There are tons of places where you can find royalty-free clip art, though not as many where you can find them for free.

Don’t forget to include your URL! Make it clickable if you can, if you can’t, make it visible from every slide.

Okay, you found a place for photos or clip art, and you’ve picked your software. Now what?

Finding An Idea to Share

You need to make your slideshow not just worth viewing, but worthwhile for someone to tell a friend about. Start thinking about a question people keep asking you, the kind where they sigh with relief when they get the answer. Something that’s a question people wouldn’t expect to get a free answer to, that’s related to your business or site.

What do you keep getting emails about?

What is in your FAQ?

What questions do folks leave in your blog comments?

What are people asking about in forums?

Take your time and find something juicy.

Spreading the Word

Now, you’ve got your slideshow. It’s beautiful. It’s concise. People get epiphanies while viewing it. Angels sing.

Okay, maybe it’s just useful. Yeah, actually I was throwing a curve ball at you to see if you were paying attention. What you want is to do a basic, clear slideshow that’s not so fancy that the effects get in the way of the presentation. If you’re using effects, a good rule of thumb comes from fashion – complete the presentation and then take one effect out. Don’t try to be too perfect or fancy or you’ll never be done. Just make it good, get it out.

Now, it’s perfect for your purposes. How will anyone hear about it?

This is where our good old friend social media comes in, combined with a few more traditional ways of sharing.

Sharing step one, publish it in a shareable format. As mentioned, Google Docs will help you share it with the world as a public link you can send anyone to, but did you know that you can also embed them into your site?

Another popular option for embedding presentations is SlideShare, which can also help you go viral because, like Google Docs, it provides code which allows other to share.

You might also try BubbleShare,  KoffeePhoto, and SlideBoom. i have two other favorite tools for sharing slides, but I want to save them for our next SlideShow traffic tip.

In the meantime, Sharing step two is; Tell Everyone.

• Let your list know and ask for help sharing it.
• Call your networking contacts and get even more help.
• Ask your favorite expert or an admired peer what they think, and if they can think of people who will find it useful.
• Put it on your site.
• Link to it.
• Tell your friends to put it on their sites and link to it.
• Tweet it with a link
• Update your status on Facebook.

Tell.
Everyone.

That’s it. If you’re lucky it’ll go viral, but even if you just do okay, you’ll have spread the word about your ideas much farther than your solitary grasp.

Reward yourself accordingly with a nap, beer, or good cheer. Rinse and repeat.

photo credit: laurenatclemson

Here’s a short story for those of you who are procrastinating on putting together some kind of free teaser content to get someone to subscribe to your site.

Me, just now?

I subscribed to a good-looking but outdated site about free traffic, just to get possibly the world’s stupidest and most out-dated traffic tip, bar none that I’ve seen in the last 4 years. The site it came from actually has the occasional really good tip, so I’m not going to out them.

At least not here.

But the moral of the story?

Is the curiosity factor. I know just about everything there is to know about generating traffic.

I got that way by researching even the remotest possibility of someone having a website promotion strategy that I didn’t know about. 99% of the time I’m told about the dumbest possible trick that won’t work for 100s of reasons.

You know how I decide whether or not to sign up though? It’s not the tip – how do I know what that is until I subscribe and get the freebie?

It’s the site’s other content. Even if I get a hint that the freebie might be useless, I’m not actually signing up FOR the freebie. I’m signing up to be reminded periodically that the site exists and may help me.

POSSIBLY getting a good tip in the process is gravy.

The point is: a LOT of people think the same way I do. Most people who are any type of online-savvy are already hip to the “free gift with sign-up” tactic. It’s something those of us who are on the fence use to talk ourselves into giving that site our time of day.

Bottom line?

Do it. Find a freebie, and dangle the “ooo shiny” to get me to sign up.

But.

Find a GREAT freebie. In fact, find a COLLECTION of great freebies related to your topic and dangle THAT, not some useless drivel that insults my intelligence. Even the most web-shy newbie appreciates being treated like they have half a brain.

And if this site had presented me with something that actually lived up to the hype? I was a sale waiting to happen. I’m sitting here with my fiance’s credit card spending up all his money, $97 more wouldn’t have hurt either of us.

So, go do it. NOW before you forget. It can be 1- 5 pages long – who has time for a 100 page ebook anymore anyway – unless they paid for it?

It can be a video, an audio, a transcript of an older teleseminar product you’ve decommissioned.

Because?

If your site is halfway decent and your prospect is interested anyway, a good freebie upon sign-up can get them down off the fence, and turn them into a subscriber, then a sale.

Extra piece for affiliates: Are you marketing your own squeeze page, or turning over that traffic directly to another site. There’s no surer way to make sure your affiliate link is the one that’s clicked than to send them there from your OWN site, where you give away your OWN freebie, to sign up to, yes, your OWN newsletter, so you can help business people find different ways to meet their needs.

Oh, and on the what’s happening next front, I’m going to reveal the new tip-a-day newsletter sometime this week, the new membership sometime in the next 14 days and some articles on How to Create Unstoppable Traffic, as well as another free guide.

There are two types of traffic campaigns. One brings you a huge burst of short term traffic. The down side to it is that it’s hard to maintain that pace of traffic, marketing and publicity, even if you have a whole department dedicated to just that. You run out of resources of some type eventually.

The other may or may not bring you short term gains, but it builds on its own momentum, and thus, will last forever once it’s started. You would have to abandon it entirely for a year or more to shut it down. The downside to it is that it takes 60 to 90 days for it to fully kick in, and if you don’t know how to attack it a little at a time each day, you won’t have the patience to see it through.

Tactic One: A Single Avalanche 

Avalanches are isolated incidents, relatively rare when compared with blizzards. They happen only once in a while, and can be fairly unpredictable. But what you know for sure – there’s gonna be a LOT of snow, and it’s gonna fall right on top of you, in a short amount of time.

Now, let’s pretend snow represents traffic. Now you can understand the name “Avalanche”. You can build one huge ramp-up campaign that’s a huge blast of traffic that dumps hoards of people in one direction in a short amount of time with a traffic avalanche.

The trouble is, while that’s great for a quick injection of traffic, it is NOT sustainable.

Eventually you run out of resources. That could mean sources of JV partners that are willing to mail for you.

Or in the case of advertising, you run out of inventory.

Or in the case of time, you’re so busy filling orders that you don’t have time to keep up with your traffic method, yet haven’t made enough to constantly pay someone else to do it.

Avalanches are finite. You get a big dump of snow on top of you, and you are under it until the snow melts or you decide to dig your way out. It accumulates on top of existing snow, but it’s not going to constantly build on top of new snow because by nature, it’s a once in a while event.

If someone is talking about how they got 20K new membership subscribers in a month, chances are, they had an avalanche. It’s a good place to start for traffic, but what happens next month? What if you want membership to increase to 200K, then what?

You can’t just do avalanches over and over again. You can’t just start a new blog every time you want traffic to your main product. Once it is built, what sustains that momentum.

A Blizzard. That’s what. Which we’ll talk about next.

Twice upon a time, a very recent time ago, I was making a big mistake with my consulting business. It was such a big mistake that when I discovered it, I decided to never take on new clients, and when the time was right, to drop the two I had.

I’ll tell you what the mistake was in a minute, and why it was so huge that I totally changed my business and as far as how most people know me, retired. First you need to know a little background about me.

You see, I have a reputation as a bit of a rainmaker. I put the proverbial butts in the proverbial seats, and I can do so in droves.

I’m not saying that to brag – I love to brag, but if I was going to I’d be way more specific with graphs and charts and links to proof and stuff. But you can Google that on your own if you like, or look on the site or on my various sales page.

The reason I’m bringing it up is because when you get a reputation for being the go-to person, you get a lot of business related to your expertise or because someone heard about you. And when they hear about you, they want you to do what you did for the other person.

The problem is, what you may be able to do for one type of site, is not necessarily duplicatable for another. Or, in what has been happening to me, I have been hired on to build traffic systems, when most people actually want me to do a marketing blitz or traffic blast.

Once I realized that most folks want a traffic blast I decided to hang up my spurs permanently. Not only do I not have the staff or the time to do hectic traffic blasts each month for the same set of businesses, I hate doing them! The hectic intensity is too much for my lazy nature — and most importantly is 100% wrong for most businesses to do more than once a year.

It was a HUGE mistake to believe that people know the difference between building a traffic system and doing a quick, short blast of traffic.

So I came to an epiphany. Why don’t I show people how to do both? Which came with the issue that first you’d have to know what I was talking about. So here goes.

Stay Tuned.

People’s need to protect their own egos knows no bounds. They will lie, cheat, steal, kill, do whatever it takes to maintain what we call ego boundaries.

Dr. Andrew Samuels
Professor of Analytical Psychooogy, University of Essex

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Recently I wrote that there is only one true power of social media.

Before that I said that the simple secret to social media is understanding that it’s about relationships, and that fixing, founding or forgetting a relationship with solve the majority of problems you have with social media.

Actually that applies to just about any type of traffic generation you’re going to do, whether it’s foot traffic to a local restaruant, or online traffic to a website.

Now what does any of this have to do with egos?

We’ll come back to that in a minute. First, riddle me this.

Who is the most powerful person in a game where gaining approval is the ultimate goal?

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Is it the person seeking approval?

Certainly not.

If you’re this person, you’re asking other people to give you their power (of approval), which puts you in the position of need. So you’re actually the weakest person in the game.

Is it the person giving approval?

Not if they can only give their own approval. This person is just one vote of approval in a sea of many.

Think about it – if I wasn’t an all-around traffic expert, published in reputable expert publications, or didn’t have traffic advice that consistently works, you wouldn’t care if I blogged about some new resource.

You’d be thinking so what, what does she know, why am I even here? As you’re probably thinking with anyone who touts themselves as an expert without establishing that it’s actually true first.

We’re skeptical, and we should be. Not everyone is honest in business, sadly. Not that I’m some paragon of virtue, I just like to save time, and honesty? HUGE time saver.

Which leads us to the two exceptions to this rule.

If that one person’s vote has more weight than others, they are more powerful than another person whose vote only has regular weight.

And if their vote influences others, they are more powerful by the factor at which their approval moves other people to action. We see the former in the case of super delegates. An example of the latter would be a celebrity endorsement of a product that increases sales.

So. What person is most powerful in a game based on approval?

It’s a person who can influence people to give their approval but does not need this approval themselves.

Here’s where all of the traffic and social media talk has to do with egos.

The social media world is based on the shifting of group approval. If you can predict or control the sway of a group’s approval, yes, you do have some power. But if you’re constantly spending the votes of the people you influence on your self, three things happen.

First, the group you’re interacting with catches on that you’re only interested in their approval so that you can get more approval. The more sophisticated your product or services are, the more sophisticated your audience is, and the faster they’ll catch on to this.

At that point, they stop listening. And you lose.

Second, you aren’t banking or growing your voting back account. It’s always depleted, and it’s always going to the same place.

Your investment isn’t growing. What could have been an asset is now a liability. You lose again.

Third, the influencers in your approval sphere eventually abandon you. Why should they wield their influence to assist you if you’re not wielding yours in reciprocation?

Losing the influence over the influence? All bad. Third time loser.

And why would we spend all that approval on ourselves? Many reasons – almost all of them lead back to the ego. By definition in our purposes: your consciousness of what your own identity is.

The ability to gain approval from others defines us as humans because we identify our egos as ourselves. If you think this isn’t you, consider the last time you tripped in public or said or did something embarrassing.

Think of the last time someone admitted they look up to you publicly. Remember what you did to get the last person you wanted to date to notice you. Consider what you’d do to get a new customer or client.

A huge percentage of our interactions with others has to do with gaining the approval of others. This carries over into our social media activity. We’re so much ego whether we like it or not.

(Which isn’t Actually your identity, but if you want to get into that discussion, go rent Revolver. Excellent thinking man’s action picture. If you don’t get it the first time, watch it again with the director’s commentary on.)

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing to build up an influencer profile and then spend some of that influence on yourself, to spend it on clients now and again, or even to build one just for the sake of self importance. Not to do so would be like going into business with no intention of making a profit.

Sharing just because you care is great, but if you can personally gain from it sometimes, why not?

It’s just — that can’t be your sole point of doing it. It simply doesn’t work.

Now what happens if you are able to master your craving for power, and utilize social media without the constant need for approval.

Three things.

photo credit: Katayun

1- The group is naturally drawn to you. Ponder – do you do more business with the high-pressure salesperson more, or the person who helps you make an educated buying decision?

2- The approval you get becomes collectable. People start to follow you to see what you will suggest next that benefits or entertains them. You can get repeated votes from the same people. You wield influence. You can invest it, spend it or save it for later.

Kind of like currency.

3- You influence the influencers AS an influencer. Your clout increases expontially with each influencer who follows you. And instead of having mediocre results the one time you desire (rather than need) attention for a resource that is based in self-interest, the easier it is to get them to help you.

Now you know WHY you ought to master your social media ego.

Which leaves us with the question – how do you balance your specific selfish interests with your more social ones?

Simply take your ego out of the equation. You can do this by investigating what your own ego boundaries are, and adjusting them as necessary. You can give yourself some artificial ratio for promoting yourself (only once every 25 or 50 shares is a good target.)

Or you can just ask, with each time you use social media, who is going to have more short-term benefit from this? Me or the person reading this?

As often as possible, the answer should be, both.

photo credit: pbyrne

If you understand this, truly understand this, about social media, you’ll never be confused about how to benefit wildy from it.

Notice I didn’t just say “get traffic from it”.

The One and Only True Power of Social Media is that it is completely based on getting approval from others.

So to understand how to use that information, answer this question for yourself: in a situation where popularity is driven by approval, who is the most powerful person?

Hint: It’s not the person who Gets the most approval.

Ask me below and I’ll give you another hint. A big one. For free, but I will only deliver it in private. And if you guess correctly or figure it out, I’ll let you know that too.

Within the next seven days, I’ll write in public about the answer. You’ll have to figure out for yourself which writing is the answer though.

• If You’re a Web 1.0 Advertiser in a 2.0 world, what are you doing wrong?
• What is Lotame?
• How does Web 2.0 Affect You?
• How Hot is Video?
• Facebook, MySpace and Why Email is Out for Kids

… 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!