Well, things are moving along with our NY publisher for the release of our new book on business blogging, podcasting, and all forms of New Media. Secrets of Online Persuasion has been in their hands for several weeks now and we’re at their mercy for timing. But we’re thrilled to now have the final version of the forward by Dave Lakhani.

If you’re not familiar with Dave, he’s the best selling author of ‘Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want’ and ‘Making Marketing Work.’ Here’s Dave’s forward in it’s entirety. (At the end of this post we’ll share how you can download a free excerpt to Secrets of Online Persuasion and get a free subscription to the New Media Marketing Journal.)

Friends; families; relationships; cults; tribes …

They all have one thing in common.

Persuasion.

In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, we all hope to deepen our relationships with people and create a swarm of hungry customers. Or, as the Miceks so aptly demonstrate, we should be creating tribes.

Tribes are unified groups bound together by tradition, common thought, shared beliefs, and a common interpretation of the symbols around them including marketing and advertising messages. They come together for a common purpose – to support and to receive support from one another. They are highly influenced by the other members of the tribe and they exert great influence in the tribe.

But how do you create such a tribe – a connected community that pulls together to support each other and you?

The best answer today is by using social media to build your tribe online. Borders, time, and distance have been erased allowing your customers to communicate nearly as instantly as they experience something – and they do. Secrets of Online Persuasion leads you step-by-step through the process of connecting with others like you and attracting them to you to build a thriving tribe. It teaches you very specific processes of education – two-way interactive communication through multiple channels that allows you to influence members of the tribe.

In today’s instantly connected economy, tribes communicate faster and better than ever before. They sit in the theater and tell their friends via text messaging during the movie not to waste their money, not on the movie or the new restaurant they tried before the show.

The tribe speaks, the movie dies, and so does the restaurant because the word spreads in minutes – not days, weeks, months, or years – minutes.

The same thing happens in every business in the world every day. Consumers speak, trends start, businesses grow – or they are damned – with the click of a mouse or the push of a send button.

In order to succeed today, you must not only understand what your consumers want, but how they find that information, validate it, and make decisions.

This book makes that process predictable, profitable, and easy.

When I wrote my #1 best-selling book, Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want, I included one chapter on influencing online. This book doesn’t just blow that chapter out of the water, it expands on the major premise of the chapter in ways I should have, but never would have. And, the reason I wouldn’t have is quite simple. Deborah and John-Paul live and breathe online influence every day. They are in the trenches developing, testing, and implementing for their clients, and this book is filled with the result of that labor. It is a playbook for any businessperson who is serious about attracting, building a relationship, and influencing the most valuable customers in the market today – all the while gently leading them, no, compelling them to join, to take part, to participate.

Loyalty is dead. It harks back to a construct where people are forced through limitation, availability, and lack of information to stay connected with a brand. That kind of experience no longer exists precisely because of the Internet. Tribethink and Tribespeak now rules the day.

Tribal relationships are the customer loyalty of our age and you are about to embark on the best education you can get on exactly how to turn your customers, your fans, your following, into a connected, supportive community with you at the center. And, you are going to profit from it for decades to come.

Don’t just read this book; take action; study the book; implement the ideas and you’ll profit immediately.

By reading this book and taking action, you’re joining a tribe of enlightened marketers, marketers who’ll share with you, educate you, and learn from you. You are now part of a living, breathing, marketing organism that is growing and changing. You hold in your hands the tools to succeed.

Welcome to the tribe of online persuaders.

Read on to find out what to do next.

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. All full copyright rights are reserved by RPM Success Group inc. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

In part three of this New Media Marketing series we looked at three more ‘not quite’ Commandments of marketing with business blogs, podcasts, social networks, and any other type of participatory media.

They were:

#6: Thou shalt participate, comment, and converse in context
#7: Thou shalt only call it content if it’s linkable
#8: Thou shalt assume that readers will enter your site from any and every page

In this article we’ll wrap up the series with the final two guiding principles for successfully marketing with “new media.” Where most of the commandments are focused on people, participation, and persuasion (the Genesis to the Secrets of Online Persuasion,) these final two Commandments are more “practical” in nature similar to Commandment #8.

You can even add (more…)

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In part two of this business blogging and New Media Marketing series we looked at three more ‘not quite’ Commandments of marketing with business blogs, podcasts, social networks, and any other type of participatory media.

They were:

#3. Thou shalt keep thy marketing an ongoing conversation
#4. Thou shalt understand your target audience and honor their wants, needs, and desires
#5. Thou shalt listen, learn, observe, and adapt

You can check out the full details on these two ‘not quite’ Commandments, why we say ‘not quite’, and also discover how you’re in danger of being hacked to pieces by a hoard of midget Ninjas if you ignore them — all here in Part One and Part Two.

Here are the next three ‘not quite’ Commandments when blogging for business and marketing with New Media.

Observe your target audience. Remember the group’s wants, needs and desires. What are they looking for? How can you solve a problem, meet their needs, or remove pain? If you can answer these questions, you will be successful in the online networking world.

Contribute in context. Make sure your comment adds to the conversation in some meaningful way. Don’t just say, “Oh yeah, I wrote an article about that on my blog, go check it out.” This is the fastest way to break rapport and ruin relationships in the online community. It’s seen as self-serving.

Your comment is your opportunity to prove that what you have to share is valuable – the more valuable, the more likely people are to check you out further.

Blogging software takes care of this automatically. However, as you create new content, it needs to be searchable, and able to be indexed and referenced. There should be no “rotting links.” This happens when a site posts an article then moves it to an archive. The original link changes with no auto-forwarding feature, or worse, you get a “404 error: page cannot be found.” These annoying things stop the new-media marketplace from working properly, and stop your credibility almost immediately.

Today, your search-engine rankings come from the keyword-rich content anywhere on your business blog. When people visit your domain coming from a regular search engine, they’re going to be coming in through any page on your blog.

E-mails can reference you. Other blogs can reference you. If that happens on a post that went up three weeks ago, there may have been a dozen posts since then, so they’re now entering your site through the archives section.

Think about what your blog site looks like – how it is structured for name capture, taking the conversation to the next level, and making the relationship with your readers even more personal.

Marketing with business blogs and winning in the New Media Marketplace requires a different mindset. Begin practicing these ‘not quite’ Commandments in combination with successful “non-interruption” marketing strategies, and you’ll watch your online marketing results soar.

In the fourth and final part of this series we’ll cover participation on individual pages; and testing and tracking.

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In part one of this business blogging and New Media Marketing series we looked at the first two ‘not quite’ Commandments of marketing with business blogs, podcasts, social networks, and any other type of participatory media.

They were:

1. Thou shalt be a market thinker, not a product pusher
2. Thou shalt participate and profit without becoming an evangelist

You can check out the full details on these two ‘not quite’ Commandments, why we say ‘not quite’, and also discover how you’re in danger of being hacked to pieces by a hoard of midget Ninjas if you ignore them — all here in Part One.

Speaking of midget Ninjas, a few of our coaching clients emailed me asking me to explain where midget Ninjas come from. (Come on guys and ladies, it’s OK to post your wise-@$$ comments here instead of emailing us. ) Anyway, as far as midget Ninjas, I know most come from a remote island chain in the Western Pacific. But if I were to reveal the exact location of that island, I’d be sealing both your and my fate at the same time.

Within minutes, a midget Ninja that’s been hibernating at the back of your refrigerator behind that 3 gallon jar of olives from Costco would awaken to snuff out your life. I don’t want that to happen to you or me, so unfortunately we’ll have to keep the midget Ninjas home location a mystery.

But what I can share with you today are three more ‘not quite’ commandments of marketing with blogs and New Media.

A conversation can occur one-on-one. Or as we’re talking about here, one-on-one x 1,000, one-on-one x 10,000, or even more.

Seth Godin predicted this trend of leveraged marketing back in 1999, and most companies STILL haven’t gotten it.

Marketing is permission; it’s not interruption.

Interruption marketing (the way old-school advertisers and mass marketers are still trying to do it) doesn’t work anymore. Marketing is permission and permission is only gained after engaging and listening. If you haven’t read it already, Permission Marketing is a great little book where Seth explains this all in more detail.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a another great book for exploring the concept of the marketplace being a conversation. It primarily focuses on large corporations and the corporate world. And it was written in an attempt to get corporate leadership to understand in their own type of language how they need to change and adapt to this new marketplace.

Just remember — (more…)

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When marketing with business blogs, podcasts, social networks, or any other type of New Media Marketing tools, there are some commandments that must be followed. If you break them, you’ll die a horrible painful death being ripped apart by a gang of midget Ninjas, then you’ll spend eternity burning in hell!

OK, so they aren’t really commandments in the true sense of the word. They weren’t written in stone by the finger of God and you won’t be struck down by lightning if you break any of them.

And as far as I know… all midget Ninjas have been rounded up in the last few years and shipped off to Club Gitmo in Cuba.

Seriously though — much of what you’ll read about business blogging and New Media Marketing written by well-intentioned early adopters of the technology is laced with perwsonal opinions and common practices positioned as “rules.”

Now don’t get me wrong, some rules are good (and necessary)in many areas of life. But very often in business and marketing rules do nothing but hinder creativity and lock people into sub-par growth curves.

The fact is, my partner and I are big rule breakers. (It’s one of the reasons why we live in Hawaii and work with business owners around the world.) So these commandments are more guidelines than rules. Let’s call them “not quite commandments.”

Marketing success through failure

One piece of advice my Dad gave me when I was 12 has always stood out for me over the years, “Don’t just learn from other people’s success stories. You’ll learn more from other people’s mistakes, so you won’t have to make them yourself.”

When it comes to online persuasion and influence, there are (more…)

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The New Media Marketplace is bringing a host of supercharged buzz, branding, and connection benefits to businesses and politicians. Savvy business owners have been using business blogging and business podcasting for nearly two years now. And it’s not just podcasting for profit and marketing purposes that is making money and winning votes.

Shortly after a mastermind session with Mike Stewart (the Internet Audio Guy), my partner Deborah, myself, and a dozen of our clients back in January of 2005 — one client began podcasting weekly and monthly updates to their nationwide sales team instead of conference calls and CD distribution. That one move dropped nearly $36,000 to their bottom line in savings and showed a 8% sales closure improvement.

Video networks which were not even in existence in the last US election cycle will help give exponential exposure to creative campaign content. With 60,000 video uploads per day, 100 million video views per day (several dozen are mine :)) and a robust social networking community — YouTube.com is expected to be a hot bed for the many of those video podcasts.

But YouTube, Google Video, Revver.com and Metacafe.com are just one component in the New Media Marketplace. The real power of audio and video for both business owners and politicians is in podcasting. Podcasting from a campaign or business blog is the core of any New Media Marketing campaign.

Mass media has deemed the trend “newsworthy,” but don’t expect to learn much from their coverage and analysis. Their interest on the topic is based primarily on (more…)

Alright, it’s a stretch! Blogs, podcasts, social networking and such compared to a v8 chainsaw.

But I couldn’t help sharing this video since I’ve been using chainsaws since I was 12. One of the chainsaws I still own is the Stihl saw shown in the comparison footage towards the end of the video. I use it to get my “weekly release” clearing trees on our North Shore Oahu property. it’s really quite invigorating after a rough week in the office. LOL

In a recent post title Only Generous Bloggers Influence, Steve Rubel makes some excellent points on online influence and persuasion. Most were right on, but one has the potential of becoming a dangerous business blogging “rule.”

First, where Steve got online persuasion and influence right. Steve defines a generous blogger as someone who:

“…pumps out lots of great content that’s worth reading, are giving when it comes to links and their time, … shares deep and profound thoughts that they probably could keep proprietary.”

These are all spot-on points. And to expand beyond the more practical online influence and persuasion characteristics Steve lays out, there is a personal interaction and rapport building component that’s even more important for business owners who are marketing with blogs and other New Media tools.

For example, since our audience here at Advanced Business Blogging is primarily made up of business owners and professionals new to blogging and other New Media tools for marketing, we get contacted more by email and phone than we do online through comments, etc. It’s the same with our other business blogs. And many of our clients who are business owners outside a “techie” type niche/industry with audience members may be more familiar with blogging and social media, are finding the same thing to be true.

This type click-and-mortar contact requires an entirely new set of influence skills…

Most notably the ability to seamlessly (more…)

When our good friend Wayne Kelly (host/producer of the hit Wayne and Jayne Morning Show on KBS Canada) told us about his interview with Kyle MacDonald about his red paper clip nearly a year ago, I was pretty impressed with his trades. At the time using only Craigs List and his blog, Kyle had bartered his way from a single red paper clip to a snowmobile with just six trades. His goal — to barter his way up to a house.

Now, within just 15 trades and a little over a year’s worth of blogging and New Media marketing effort — Kyle MacDonald has turned that one red paper clip into a house!

Solely using the power of the internet and New Media Marketplace, Kyle’s unique marketing and bartering got him online and off-line publicity galore. Eventually that publicity got him noticed by Corbin Bernsen (”L.A. Law” and “Major League”) who offered Kyle a speaking role in a movie he’s producing. But instead of jumping at the opportunity, Kyle stayed true to his belief that all trades needed to be fair and provide something of value to the other person. There would be no perceived charity here.

Since he had nothing of relative value to trade Bernsen for at the time, he put the offer on hold and went to work. With research, and by using some online persuasion techniques Kyle discovered that Bernsen collected snow globes. Kyle (through a trade with Alice Cooper) got a very rare snow globe of the band Kiss so he could trade that with Bernsen. Now thanks to the power of online influence and persuasion he was on his way to some serious online and off-line media attention.

With all the buzz, Kyle’s blogging and the New Media marketing frenzy he was creating attracted the attention of the town of Kipling Canada. The city Council is capitalizing on the press, publicity, and online traffic generated by MacDonald’s story for their benefit as we ll as Kyle’s. In a very smart move the town Council voted to buy him a house in Kipling!

A very smart marketing move!

This one investment of about $45,000 US will easily bring half-a-million or more in free advertising and publicity to help boost Kipling notoriety. And that, the town is already planning to use to boost their marketing to get business owners to come back to Kipling. A ten-plus times return for buzz and traffic generation that was all made possible by New Media and online persuasion!

Pretty cool stuff!

The most interesting thing is that the real marketing and promotion power at work in this story is NOT in the technology of the New Media Marketplace. It’s in the in people, participation, and persuasion! Without the ability to build rapport or influence and persuade online, Kyle MacDonald would have never been able to wield the New Media technology to successfully reach his goal.

Technology is only a tool. The power is in people and persuasion.

What are some ideas you got from this story that you could use in marketing your business with blogs, or leveraging other New Media resources for buzz or branding?

What secrets of online persuasion and influence do you see at work in this success story? (Check out the resource links below to the AP news article “Blogger’s quest ends with keys to house” and to Kyle’s Red Paper Clip blog for more details.)

Maybe you’ve already had some wins with a similar story of your own. What was that win?

Share your thoughts with a quick comment. We’d love to hear how you’re using business blogs and New Media to generate free buzz, branding, and advertising for you and your business.

Links related to this article:

Kyle MacDonald’s Red Paper Clip blog
The Wayne and Jayne show on KBS Canada
Wayne Kelly’s blog
Craigs List
Blogger’s quest ends with keys to house

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. All full copyright rights are reserved by RPM Success Group inc. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Discover the only strategic online sales and persuasion system guaranteed to unleash the maximum marketing power of the New Media in your business — BLOG Interactive 360™.

John-Paul is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Business Coach and New Media Marketing Consultant he helps small business owners market, manage, and sell more with self-influence and persuasion. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].

I probably should have posted this notice sooner, but Deb and I have been putting in 16-hour days for the last two weeks getting our revised manuscript to our publisher to meet Ingram’s deadline for September distribution. Obviously updates here at Advanced Business Blogging have been on hold since complete creative focus has had to be given to the book and our NY publisher. For those of you who have been emailing us about what’s going on, I apologize for not letting you guys know at the beginning of this cycle.

We’ll be all wrapped up this week and the final manuscript for Secrets of Online Persuasion, along with the ultimate publication date of the book, will be in the hands of our NY Publisher and Ingram. Advanced Business Blogging should be back up on a regular schedule starting on July 10th.

BTW — we got the final cover from the publisher’s graphic designer last week, so for those of you who emailed us about that, or have been asking on the blog coaching calls — here it is.

Hi ho! Back to work I go! (yeah… I’m a happy little dwarf :D)

See you next week!

Aloha!

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. All full copyright rights are reserved by RPM Success Group inc. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Discover the only strategic online sales and persuasion system guaranteed to unleash the maximum marketing power of the New Media in your business — BLOG Interactive 360™.

John-Paul is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Business Coach and New Media Marketing Consultant he helps small business owners market, manage, and sell more with self-influence and persuasion. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].