I’m a gamer and I’m proud of it.

No, I’m not hard core, but I’m not apologetic either.

Whether it’s little time wasters like Tap Resort Party, life quasi-simulation like The Sims 3, or the wickedly guilty pleasure of  the  Grand Theft Auto franchise, I play video games, online or off, and I take my hobby seriously (habit? that’s what I originally typed) .

(Though, since I take my business more seriously, I sold my Playstation 3 as soon as became a full-time entrepreneur in Las Vegas.)

Part of the reason I started playing games as an adult was in observing the way games are marketed (as well as marketing within games, but that’s another story).

The way I see it, after targeting, you have a direct correlation between the way games are marketed and the way small businesses are marketed, be they local, micro, or web. And thinking of marketing from the perspective of marketing a hobby can help you get the process right.

For example, when video games are marketing to their audience, they don’t bother trying to reach people who don’t play games. If they get a crossover audience from people who become players from watching other players that’s fine – sometimes they make a product so spectacular, like The Sims 3, that they get people who don’t normally game interested.

So first lesson, they’re very target-market minded. They go after their core audience and with good reason – since they are building product lines, they can have customers for life once they’ve hooked them.

(Could you double your business this month by simply adding another product, or promoting someone else’s?)

Grand Theft Auto isn’t going after soccer moms, but they are smart enough to know that a healthy enough portion of their audience is using a Mac. I’m not the first one to point out that Rock Star Game’s marketing strategy is very clear, and with that name, it’s hard to think it’s an accidental one.

Second lesson: they build either engagement, community, or both with their product, whether purposely or inadvertently.

Last Day of Work has official forums for its Virtual Villagers franchise. Members talk to each other, share tips, even cheats. And other games just grow fan bases on their own, or bond over them as a common interest.

But whether the game company starts the community or it grows naturally, the company or developers as individuals also enable that community or observation of game engagement to market for them.

That’s the third lesson: referral marketing works. Ask John Jantsch- he wrote The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself to teach you how grasping that one concept could change your whole business.

For proof it works, just look at the marketing strategy of a company that has more than one Facebook game with over a million daily active users.

The company is called Wooga. This is what their CEO Jens Begemann had to say about how the game grew to achieve something only two other companies on Facebook have been able to do.

He points to four channels that fuel Wooga’s growth, three of which are fairly obvious to most developers: cross-promotion, discovery stories and invites between players. The fourth, and less well known, channel driving Wooga’s growth is direct searches on Facebook. Begemann’s theory is that players are learning about Wooga games through word of mouth, and actually taking the time to come search for them on Facebook.

And yes, that’s for a game, which is arguably an easier sale than say, residential real estate.

Or is it?

Is it ever really hard to sell to fanatics who love your company, or its products, and want to work with you, or send people to you – over and over if possible?

I’ll tell you something personal before I go.

In my daily life, I’m like every one else – just trying to get through the day and do my work. Some people have struggles with money or love, and my primary struggle is with my health. I don’t feel like a rock star most of the time – who does, really?

And then someone I haven’t spoken to in a year writes me an email about how much their business has grown since we worked together.

Or I’ll go to a local event and actually hear someone whisper behind me “Oh my God, I think that’s Tinu.” (I still can’t help but giggle – who the hell am I?)

And it makes me feel like my life makes a difference to other people, like I’m a useful member of society. And suddenly the pain isn’t so bad. And the day seems like a simple, manageable set of tasks again.

Why am I telling you this?

You’re probably someone’s rock star. There are few topics less sexy than website promotion. So if I have fans, you do too. Just don’t think of them in the sense of screaming, fainting teenage girls at a boy band concert.

Think of them as your happiest customers. Who are they? Why do they talk about you?

They’re right in front of you. Try and see them now.

The shy lady you’re extra nice to when she comes into your store.

A fellow business owner who depends on you for the latest news because you’re the only one who can make technobabble make sense to them.

A family that must have your bakery’s blueberry muffin’s for Christmas breakfast.

That commenter on your blog who has been with you since you first started posting, years ago.

Find out who those people are. Give them the tools they need to spread the word about you.

ASK THEM TO TELL PEOPLE ABOUT YOU.

If there’s anywhere I have failed in my marketing, that’s it. I’m far shyer than I look on screen.

Why should we be shy about asking people to help us, though?

Don’t you love telling people about great discoveries? Your customers do, too. There’s a certain pride that goes with having a great resource and being the first to tell someone about it, a kinship that goes with sharing an experience.

(Which is why Google HotPot could change so much about local search. But I digress.)

Maybe your actual product can’t possibly be better. I bet your customer experience could be, though.

So take a few tips from game marketers, and make your customer experience better- make it good enough to BE your central marketing strategy.

In the previous post about Money Funnels, I connected lists and traffic.

In the preceding audio post, I showed one way that they work together – you can leverage targeted traffic to continue to bring you new people that will sign up to your list.

Now I want to go one level deeper and show you the connection between lists and traffic in your business.

Whether you own a bakery, an affiliate marketing business, or a high traffic blog that depends solely on advertising for revenue, your contact list is the lifeblood of your ongoing success. The reason? It is through your opt-in contact list that you are freed from the shackles of constantly generating new business to survive.

The reason that so many marketers and successful business owners will tell you that your money is in your list is that once you have a list of contacts, especially past buyers, you can market to them again and again, as long as you have their permission. Since previous buyers are much more likely to buy again, and they are 90% cheaper to market to, you have a low cost audience that you can make sales from again and again.

This doesn’t mean you can get your list to a certain size and stop looking for new visitors. Indeed, the key to having a flourishing business is to have a balance between new business and old business.

You see, as your present contact list ages, the people on it will change. They will have different experiences, be at different places in their lives, financially or otherwise, and their needs change as well. For example, let’s say you make and sell boxes to businesses.

Over the next year, some of the new businesses will fail and close, which will affect your business. Other older businesses will expand or be acquired, leading to more business. Still others may change their packaging from boxes to bags. Then there are the new businesses being formed every day which need your services.

For all those reasons and more, your list has to continue to grow and evolve.

How does that happen? New traffic.

The job of your new traffic is to generate new leads that will hopefully sign up to be contacted repeatedly, make an initial purchase, then become repeat clients. New business should be where your growth comes from, not your foundation.

Why not?

Well, let’s say you had the same small business. But instead of creating a list of people who need to place new orders for boxes each month, every time you needed a new lead, you used 9 times the resources to create new business. Of course, that money has to come from somewhere. No matter what kind of profit you are turning, if you have to spend nine times as much on generating new leads, you’re spending a lot more money, more than you have to, indeed.

Not only that, you have less money for staff, to take home, for other expenses like computer equipment and office space. The fewer resources and higher the expenses, the slower your growth.

And since you don’t have the revenue stream of repeat business here, you’re also attempting to run your business with no idea of how much you’ll make the following month.

That’s not a business. That’s a really expensive hobby.

You need both lists and traffic to run a successful business, online or off.

Okay, so when we last left our discussion, I was talking about what’s considered spammy at Facebook, and why spam at Facebook will ultimately fail. That leaves us with the question – how do you get people in Facebook to visit your site without spamming them?

How can you increase your exposure at Facebook without seeming like a spammer?

As I’ve said before, if you want to blatantly market on Facebook, you have a several options you can exercise without looking like a spammer.

1. Get a Facebook Business Page,
2. Buy a Facebook Ad,
3. Participate in or Create a Group,
4. or Leverage Your Profile.

Now, I’d never discourage you from doing any of these, in fact, you should do them all.

But I’m not going to write about them all here today. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. You create a business page – if you know how to build and manage a community, you’re all set. (If you don’t, still a discussion for another day.) And who doesn’t know how to buy an ad? Yes, there are more effective ways to use ads on Facebook, but at the end of the day, the basics don’t need to be covered.

Networking through groups and leveraging though? Not as common-sense based as you might think.

For now let’s take groups. It’s an easier topic, and leveraging your profile will probably take an entire day of videos, which I’ll start on tonight or tomorrow.

The reasoning behind joining groups on Facebook is simple: groups are mini-communities that have discussion boards, and often links, photo and video sharing areas, where people have agreed that they have a common interest, and want to exchange information about it.

Let’s say you teach people how to turn a $39 book into a $300 info-product with videos and audio CDs. You search groups and you find a book marketing group for authors.

Awesome, perfect market – if they’re marketing their books, they want to make more money, and if they want to make more money, your program is custom-made for them. There’s 2000 people in this group and you can just count the money flowing in…

Here is where most people go wrong. They go into a social group with an ad mentality, and start posting what are essentially, ads for their products on the wall (the general guestbook type area) or in the discussions. And it will backfire every time.

“But Tinu”, you might be thinking, if it doesn’t work, “why do people keep doing it”?

I’ll answer that, but first let’s look at why it doesn’t work.

The fastest revelation will come from the dating world. Ladies, please raise your hand if you would respond favorably to the following situation:

A guy walks up to you and says, “Hi, you’re cute, let’s have sex now.”

Anyone?

Yeah. If there’s 100 ladies in the room, maybe, MAYBE one chick has her hand up.

If I say, all desperate women put your hands down, that will drop to zero.

So why do people do it? The same reason why one in one hundred people respond. Desperation and/or just plain ignorance. Not stupidity, mind you. They just honestly don’t know the right way to do it.

And the desperate customer, you just don’t want to have. No matter what you offer them, they’ll claim it doesn’t work and ask for a refund. So, really, it doesn’t work at all.

Then what does work?

Value.

You will hear me saying this on the videos over and over again – add value, bring value, create value, enhance value. Value and being laid back.

Everyone wants the folks at Home Depot to help them buy a light fixture, but no one wants to be sold a lamp.

We’ll get into specifics in the next articles and videos, in just a few hours. Right now I have to stop for….

Family time. See you soon.

Here’s a quick tip that I’ve used to my advantage many times.

In a nutshell, you go out and find companies that give you publicity in the when you write about them. It works best if you’re writing because you sincerely love them, and if that publicity is either in the form of a link or will be presented before a captive audience.

Here’s how to do it.

1 – Find the top companies that have some kind of parallel relationship to your site. A parallel relationship would be one that is in the same topic neighborhood but not competing.

I write about search and Google, but since I no longer do SEO, this is a good example.

2- Find the subset of those sites that link to sites that write about them.

You’re looking for something as simple as trackback, and evidence that trackback links are published. An even better indicator is an “In the News” clips column that includes blogs, or a specific section like the Media Coverage section at kyte.tv.

3- Write passionately about a service or product from that company.

You want to do this in a way that demonstrates how your audience can benefit, not just your own happy experience.

Your aim is to share something that talks about how great the other site is, like a review. Feel free to be critical, but remember that harsh feedback probably isn’t going to be republished by the bigger site. (This is part of why it works best if you’re sincerely enthusiastic or passionate.)

4- Promote the wicked hell out of your write-up.

Remember that the purpose of this promotion is to draw attention to yourself and get publicity from the folks you’re writing about. Best case scenario, you’ll get links from lots of people, and the publicity from the company in question will bring you a second round of links.

So you’ll want to guestimate what the response time is for the site in question – some popular one-man shops need a few days to notice you, sites run by corporations may need a week, active bloggers will likely spot you within 48 hours.

Why?

Because if they don’t notice you, you gotta nudge them. It also helps to find the least-used vehicle. For example, if you wanted to get in touch with me, email is a mistake. I have 7 accounts, and only one of them do I answer on my own.

But if you tweeted me or left a polite comment? You’d probably hear back from me that day. Remember that if you’re the one who wants a favor, it’s up to you to be as little of an inconvenience as possible.

5- Thank Everyone.

Very important missed step: once the big company talks about you talking about them, thank profusely. Thank people who commented, passed along, re-tweeted, help you network your way to the contact, the person who wrote the article, the department that responded to your praise, everyone.

The people who pay attention and take action are THE most valuable contacts in our new interactive web world.

Extra tip:

One smart company to write about if you’re a blogger is FeedBurner, because you can get republished in their Publisher Buzz section. True, Feedburner itself is not related to your site, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of blogger use their free service, and the topics of those blogs are as diverse as they come.

I don’t know if it’s still true because I can’t find the original link, but they use to track blog posts tagged feedburnerhowto at del.icio.us. (Something like this, if you could verify that last part, would count as something you could tag as feedburnerhowto, if you were the first to do it.)

Personally, I sincerely love FeedBurner despite their occasional problems. And the folks I know over there have always been really nice to me – in particular Traci Halipern. Shout out to my peeps at FeedBurner! Can you folks let me know if you’re still doing this?

Okay, that was funny. Still, TV spots in local markets are relatively cheap and you don’t even need to know how to produce them if you use a service like SpotRunner. There’s one critical thing you have to do to make sure that they work. And heck no, I’m not going to tell you about it here. That’s how I got in trouble the last time.

I’ll have more tips for driving traffic that Aren’t free, but quite effective, whenever the hell I get around to re-launching my post-retirement blog. In the meantime, go see the latest post for your chance to get into the free, private members site where I’ve pre-launched my hidden tips blog.

See you the next time I feel like showing up here. I miss you all!.