My study has concluded that it kills brain cells–and that’s a bad thing. I thought I heard a few years ago that brain cells grow back but I wasn’t able to find any search results that helped:

Social media acts as a stimulant. Only it stimulates the wrong thing. It stimulates a waste of time. Sure it connects you to your friends and family and yes it can help you land business… but for most professionals it isn’t the highest best use of your time.

Yes we are adding to the madness as we talk quite a bit about social media, both here at You Brand, Inc. and also on my podcast at DefiningNewMedia.com. Why do we do this? Simply because it’s what the market wants… it’s a shiny object and that shiny object is what brings us traffic and leads. I follow the marketing rule that says sell what the market wants but deliver what the market needs. But here’s the truth…

Social media is typically the 4^th or 5^th strategy/tactic we help our clients with. Typically there are things within the realm of branding, marketing, lead gen, sales, and business development that take precedence. I’m willing to guess that most likely this is the case for you and your business as well.

What About Your Business?

I’m willing to bet that in your business there are greater marketing opportunities than social media. This is mainly because social media lacks one main thing that makes it a killer marketing opportunity. Intent to purchase or more specifically the immediate need or want to purchase your product or service.

Immediate intent isn’t the only problem. We are entering a time of mass social distraction.

For instance, I logged into Facebook yesterday and a few of my friends shared pictures of their dinner. It made me think… before social media did people take pictures of their dinner and then when you came over they said… “you got to see this, here’s what I ate last night… do you like it?”

It’s not just pictures of dinner or mundane updates, this isn’t a new complaint for the social space. The larger noise problem is the massive increase in spam and business participation. The social media space is becoming more saturated each and every day.

For instance, Direct Marketing News reported that Wal-Mart has launched 3,500 Facebook pages so they can distribute local offers. I’m sure other big box stores can’t be far behind with this strategy.

Social Has Lost the Novelty

Not just the novelty for standing out but also as a novelty in connecting with your target market. It’s not unique or even a competitive advantage to connecting in social. Sure, if you stack up a company that excels in social against one that doesn’t they might have a slight edge (although this depends on industry), in the end it has very little measurable effect on the bottom line.

Increase in noise in social media (image by mariosundar)

But I’m still beating around a larger point. There are greater marketing opportunities in your business than social. Even more important are foundational issues like the definition and dedication to your brand promise and your big idea. A dedication to focus and put effort into these will give you a better measurable result.

Direct Response Marketing

I also believe that this focus on social media clouds what should be the focus of most marketing efforts—direct response. This type of marketing is orientated on creating a sale today. Not spending time, effort, and resources on building a relationship for a sale down the road, and this is the promise of social interaction.

I’m not knocking permission marketing (which is what social ultimately is), I’m saying that if you haven’t locked in your direct response marketing channels before you enter social then you’ve have your the priorities reversed.

Direct response done properly creates predictable results—I’ve never seen a social campaign that has predictable results. Also, direct response can typically be scaled—social can scale but the scalability is exposure and has no bearing on actions you take.

That’s why it’s important to get your direct channel machine effective then add the layer of social media engagement.

The Allure of Social Media

But you say social media is free and you can connect directly with your target market… Yes those are valid arguments to participate. But here are a few problems…

First, social media isn’t free—it’s taking a valuable resource, usually your time (or someone’s time) and there is an opportunity cost inherint in that. Second, sure you can connect with your target market and maybe find “brand evangelists”, ultimately it’s still not something you can scale effectively with predictable results.

That’s what you need your marketing to deliver for you. Your marketing should be your best salesperson. It should be something that you can rely upon to deliver sales, leads, or prospects—that’s its sole goal.

Predictable Results in Your Marketing

I’ve never participated in, heard of or seen a social marketing campaign that produced predictable results. I’ve participated in and seen plenty of direct marketing campaigns that have—for this alone I believe direct marketing efforts should be the primary focus of your marketing efforts. If these have not been dialed in then I believe you have zero business participating in social more than a customer support channel.

That’s step 1, focus on building a strong direct response marketing channels then add social. What are your thoughts… is social such a change in tradiational marketing that I’m off base here?

The underlying theme shows that tablets and smartphones change the media consumption habits of the average user.  Expect this trend to continue as more people look to acquire smart phones and more households purchase tablet devices. Last week on the podcast I mentioned a study that found that tablet users consumed 48% more internet and this latest study from comScore adds credence to this earlier insight. All initial indications from the release of the iPhone 4S and the Amazon Fire show that even in this economy there is a healthy want for these devices.

Rise of the Tablet Device

Here’s a few key findings from the report itself:

Communication activities were central to tablet usage. 3 in 4 tablet owners accessed email on their tablet device in September with 1 in 3 doing so on a near-daily basis.

Nearly half of tablet owners made or completed a purchase on their tablet. Tablet owners exhibited significant use of their devices during the entire online shopping process – from initial planning, conducting product and store research, making price comparisons, to transacting. In the past month, more than half of tablet owners looked up product or price information for a specific store (56 percent) and read customer ratings and reviews while on a tablet (54 percent).

As with the rise of mobile phones it’s important to understand how you content is being consumed on a tablet device. I don’t believe this is just a US phenomenon it’s something that is going to happen worldwide (see there will be a worldwide tablet revolution and what that means for your business).

As the tablet becomes more of the chosen device to browse the internet I anticipate that the second point about completed purchases will rise as well.

What’s Your 9pm Content Schedule?

Look at this graph…

Yes, that’s tablet usage that spikes between 9pm – midnight.

The report says “…tablets had the highest relative usage during the nighttime hours, peaking between the hours of 9:00 PM and midnight, which suggests that people probably favor tablet usage as they retire to the couch or bed at the end of the day.”

Expect this to be a huge boom for consumption of all media well into the future as tablets penetrate more homes.

On Mobile Phones

The mobile phone is quickly becoming the go to device for quick answers and intent based searches.

Mobile phones drive digital traffic around the world, while tablets are gaining steam. The share of non-computer traffic for the U.S. stood at 6.8 percent in August 2011, with two-thirds of that traffic coming from mobile phones and tablets accounting for much of the remainder.

Increased WiFi availability and mobile broadband adoption in the U.S. are helping drive connectivity. In August 2011, more than one third (37.2 percent) of U.S. digital traffic coming from mobile phones occurred via a WiFi connection. This percentage grew nearly 3 points in just the past three months. On the other hand, tablets, which traditionally required a WiFi connection to access the Internet, are increasingly driving traffic using mobile broadband access. In August, nearly 10 percent of traffic from tablets occurred via a mobile network connection.

In a way these numbers of meaningless because I believe in a few years we will be in a all connected world. Either thru WIFI or major leaps in cell technology.

The Bottom Line

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that mobile phones and tablets change media usage habits. There is an opportunity here– take insight from this report and see how you can immediately apply to your content strategy.  Our first step and foray into this is to see if we can increase engagement during the 9pm spike.

What do you think… any insight I missed in this latest report or what does this data tell you?

Most business owners have an email address at their website’s domain. My main email is adam@youbrandinc.com and this is the same email address that is on the You Brand, Inc. website, my business cards, almost every social account I use, but most importantly, the email that I give to my clients.

If you are like me and you need to keep on top of things in your business, Gmail POP3 Checker is a must have.

Gmail POP3 Checker:

• Checks your email every 8 min (sooner if you donate to the developer)
• Know exactly how long it has been since your emails were fetched
• Works with Google Chrome and Firefox
• Most importantly, helps you keep on top of you emails which is necessary in today’s fast paced digital world

Ps:

If you have a website domain and you are still using an email address ending with @gmail or @hotmail or anything that is not your website’s domain, you should consider setting up an email account with your domain and then using the POP3 to import your messages into a service like Gmail.

Not only does it look more professional, but most importantly, you don’t own your other email address. I own adam@youbrandinc.com and if for some reason Google decided to shut down my account, my email would continue to be sent to a server and email address that I have control of.

Here’s a few things we cover:

• Why should you think like a media company?
• What happens when you think like a media company?
• Why thinking like a media company makes sense.
• What is the role of your content?
• Flipping the switch so you start thinking like a media company…

When marketing for someone to buy your product or service you are always looking for ways to find or move a buyer’s intent. Intent to learn more about your product or more important the intent to purchase.

Here lies the problem with social engagement– lack of intent.

Social media provides the best opportunity for ongoing touch points. Reinforcement of trust and consistency. Also it’s ability to create greater awareness and emotional interaction points. These are some of the most powerful benefits of properly engaging the social space.

Also understanding that social media is all about the soft sell is important but let’s get beyond that for this post.

Why Marketers Love the Web

One of the reasons why the web hit critical mass was that for the first time you could measure the intent of a purchaser. You could then direct ad spend dollars towards what can be deemed transactional searches. To go deeper on this I suggest you check out the post that from AimClear on Query Intent.

So the web gave the ability for intent to be determined based on transactional and clarification keywords. This is a good thing. Now enter social media.

Why Are People On Social Media?

At its core people are on social media to connect with friends and family. They are there to have fun, to escape. It’s key to keep in mind that people haven’t joined Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or YouTube to connect with a brand or company. This point can’t be stressed enough.

When someone goes to Facebook or is on Twitter seldom if at ever are they there to purchase something. Usually this is the last thing on their to mind.

Social media works great for an additional touch point. Another opportunity to create trust and to reinforce consistency from your company or your brand. It’s also great for awareness.

Friends and Family and Your Business

Another powerful element of social engagement for business or an entrepreneur are your interactions happen with someone in a stream amongst their friends and families. So done correctly your messages will be tolerated with the interactions, the pictures, videos, and sharing they are having with people they truly care about.

This is a huge element of social interactions that I believe are important. While this is important it still does not drive to intent to purchase. So when engaging in the social space your interactions have in alignment with what we have spoke about thus far.

Why all this talk with intent? If you keep what I’ve discussed here in mind when you do interactions within the social space you will be ultimately more effective. Your messages and interactions will fit into the expectations of the core users of each social platform you are engaging.

What to do with This?

Before you do an update in social media ask yourself if this message plays towards intent. For instance, if you send out an update about a coupon you are running ask yourself a quick questions. Are doing this because it is easy for you or are you doing it because you believe you can move your audience (followers) towards intent to purchase?

Does this fall into their expectations from you or your company? How does this update play within the other updates they will see at that time? Ask yourself so what? Get into the mind of your audience and ask why should I care?

I know I bounced around a bit in this post I discussed this a little more in my podcast Social Media Intent and Emotional Selling.

To begin with the top tier celebrity does not have a personal brand.

Celebrities have well crafted personal images. The top tier celebrities like Oprah, Donald Trump, Tiger Woods (before the Viagra) didn’t focus on building a personal brand.

Read Further or watch video below…

What Are They Doing?

They are building a personal based image that can be leveraged to sell, endorse, and profit. I guess you could argue this is somewhat a brand but not really.

I remember watching Oprah when I was younger. 5 days a week Oprah was on TV. She was good, could bring the audience and the guest to tears. But beyond that she knew how to run, manage, and create a very effective media empire.

Did she leverage her name? Yes. Did she do this first? Did she only focus on this? I’ll let you answer that.

Donald Trump, he didn’t build a personal brand. He bought low sold high. Bought raw land or dilapidated buildings added value and sold. Shrewd real estate and business deals built Donald Trump. Not some focus on building a personal brand. Heck have you seen his hair?

Tiger Woods before his straying ways was and will be by far the greatest golfer of modern times. His driving, putting, and dedication to improvement can’t be touched by anybody else on the course. Did Tiger say years ago… I’m not going to range today instead I’m going to start working on my personal brand. Uh… no!

What Did They Really Do?

These celebrities are known for what they are good at. Not because they focused on some personal marketing or corporate rejected term like personal branding.

I know personal brand fan boys and girls[sarcasm] use those as examples as to what’s possible. Okay I get that but maybe you should talk more about how they refined their craft or their talent. They molded that talent day after day. How they took their skill and leveraged that into a very profitable personal image.

So what should you do?

Don’t focus on building a personal brand. Focus on being great. Focus on being the best at what you do. Focus on being YOU.

I have a feeling that if you do that the whole personal brand thing will take care of itself.

Watch Video Presentation:

1. There are things in your business you should be doing, and you know you should be doing but you put them off last. Do these first.
2. More unproductive time is spent doing the things you should outsource. Find opportunities to outsource things you really shouldn’t be doing and if you can’t outsource then find ways to put these into a system where you are more proficient.
3. Marketing hasn’t changed all that much, only the tools and the way you communicate with your target market has. Learn the foundations of marketing, branding, and positioning.
4. Start the day with the most important thing you need to do and end the day with asking what you accomplished. If those 2 things don’t match up make a change immediately.
5. The phone is still one of the best networking tools on the planet and beats social media hands down.
6. Follow up and consistency are the cornerstone of a strong and growing business.
7. Your target market is more educated on your product, service, or idea than they have ever been. This gives you an opportunity to really solve solutions; the challenge is solving the right solutions.
8. People make decisions both emotionally and logically. If these are out of sync in your offering or process people will run for the hills. Your offers have to make emotional and logical sense.
9. People have made up their mind before they talk to you. It’s your job to help them come to the conclusion that you, your product, or idea is what they have been seeking.
10. Rely on experts. It is said that you don’t know what you don’t know. Don’t allow this to happen in your business. Find the things that are critical to know to give you a competitive advantage and work with experts to help you understand how to capitalize on these things.
11. Instill a dedication to being the best for yourself and your team. This will take you farther than any marketing strategy.
12. Test your reasoning and thoughts. Design tests in your business and marketing so that you can prove yourself right or wrong. Then iterate these.
13. All businesses need systems, what are yours and have you developed them.
14. Understand your markets buying signals and buying timeframe. In certain markets there are trigger events that cause your market to be aware of a problem or seek a solution. The birth of a child is a good trigger event that spurs a whole host of purchase decisions. What is your target market buying signals, timeframe, and trigger events?
15. Attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources. If you get someone’s attention respect it and give them what they want or seek.
16. If you’re just getting started or rebooting, start with your big idea, a strong website, and find unique ways to reach people who want what you have. Spend zero amount of time in social media until you have this figured out.
17. You have hidden revenue in your business; the trick is finding where it’s at with as little amount of effort as possible.
18. Act. More people fail by not acting than they do by getting their idea in motion. When you act you get feedback, when you get feedback you improve, and when you improve you ultimately get to something that works in the marketplace.
19. Trust yourself. You know deep down inside that your idea will work now prove the world wrong.
20. Quantity rarely trumps quality. This is even truer when you look at the amount of effort and time you put into your business. Make sure it’s quality and not quantity that you are measuring.
21. No clear metrics. Write down and track the key metrics that drive your sales, prospecting, and efficiency of your business.
22. Focus on what you can control and let go of the things you cannot. Or better yet find ways to flip the things you can’t control in your mind in a way that you can control them within yourself.
23. Learn to look at a situation in 3 ways, your way, their way, and as an observer looking at both.
24. Most sales can be defined by a straight line, and this straight line happens even before you talk to your prospect. The better you get at managing that line the more sales and business you will create.
25. Seek a yes or no, if it’s a maybe you should run. A yes or no is a decision, maybe will always have lingering questions.
26. Your success is your own. No one cares more about your success than you. Don’t rely on someone else to be your driver in success.
27. Find a way to banish need from your negotiations. The other side can sense this. Even if you do need that deal or that project operating from this mindset will make it harder to close.
28. Know your why.

Those are the insights that come off the top of my head. Looking for a business breakthrough? We offer a free working consultation designed to help you have a business or marketing breakthrough. Click here to learn more.

This week we have Facebook changes, a Twitter analytic platform, Windows 8, HTML5, and a study on GroupOn.

First up Nielsen released their Q3 social media report that gives a little insight into the state of social media. No surprise that Facebook is king of the social web. Here’s our insight for the latest Nielsen Report.

Facebook New Features

Facebook announced some interesting new features. The subscribe button and smart lists. I predict the smart lists will be a welcome improvement to the Facebook platform, I’m still unsure on the impact of the next addition, the subscribe button. This allows you to subscribe to the public updates of people even if you aren’t friends. This button is the ability to choose what type of updates you get from friends; I think that is something that might get utilized by users.

EdgeRank and Your Facebook Page

A story from SearchEngineLand talks about a study from EdgeRank Checker blog that found if you update your Facebook page from certain API’s it will reduce your engagement. What this means is you should be updating your page manually to get best results and to get maximum engagement.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter is going to release an analytic portion of their service. I haven’t seen it yet but most things I read about it says it was based on the technology from a company they acquired called BackType. If the data from Twitter is more accurate than other analytic solutions this might be one more thing you will want to add to your toolbox.

Windows 8 and HTML5

Windows 8 made some news… it is too soon to make any predictions or to see how this will change the digital landscape. One thing to note though is that IE10 will be completely plugin free and have HTML5 greatness. Great move there. I’ve said on the podcast of a few months that if you market online or even want to be ahead of the curve that you should at least have a working knowledge of HTML5. Here’s a primer, although in parts it gets technical it will give you a good overview of why companies and tech is moving in this direction.

Other items of note from this week…

GroupOn and Reviews

Thinking about running a GroupOn? I still think its bad idea for any business to consider and there is a study that backs up this thought. They found that when a company runs a GroupOn reviews get negatively effected. You can view the study here and if you want a little more commentary I covered this on Tuesday’s show, GroupOn and Reviews.

Text Message a Local Business

The Disrupt conference was this week. That I think has been covered in a quite a few places but there was one start up that was intriquing . TalkTo.com allows people to connect to local businesses via text messages, even if the business isn’t aware of the technology.

Did I miss anything you think was big news this week?

At 18 I joined the Army. It turned my life around and was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. There are a few things I learned during my time served that have stuck with me throughout the years. I believe these things can make any business or person better at what they do.

I was stationed in Italy and my job or MOS (as the Army calls it) was 92R or without the acronyms… a parachute rigger. We were also called red hats because we wore red baseball caps instead of the typical beret or army head gear. As far as I remember this was so we could be spotted and signaled out while on the airfield or tarmac.

A parachute rigger supports an airborne unit (maybe you’ve heard of the 82^nd Airborne or 101^st, ours was the 1/507^th at the time). Our job was to maintain the parachutes, rig equipment for air drops, and most importantly pack the parachutes that paratroopers had on their backs as they jumped out of planes.

That last part is a huge responsibility and something we didn’t take lightly. Every now and then something in the Army makes sense and the way that they ensured we packed good parachutes was just one of those times.

I Sure Hope This One Opens

Here’s how they kept us honest…. Once a month we were required to jump out of a perfectly good airplane with a random parachute that we had personally packed. Isn’t that a great way to ensure quality control?

Imagine yourself sitting in a plane, its dark outside and on your back is a parachute chosen randomly that you packed.  You don’t know when, what day, or even if this chute was packed at the beginning of your long day or at the end.

As a younger guy around other younger guys and stationed over in Italy at the time I do remember having fleeting thoughts of… is this the day after I went out all night drinking and got 2 hours of sleep?

Thankfully my chute always opened, as did every single one I ever packed. But it wasn’t because I was a great parachute packer, I wasn’t all that fast or all that good at it… these parachutes opened because I had followed a system.

Systems for Life and Death

We had a whole system for packing parachutes and we also had a daily quota.  The parachute was laid out on a long table and you had step by step process to follow. At certain times in the process you had to stop and allow someone, usually a senior officer to check your work. At the end of packing each and every parachute they would check your work once again and both you and your checker would sign the parachute log book.

This process gave taught me two things. First it instilled an attention to detail and second it taught me to rely on systems.

Attention to Detail

I’ve learned since then that in business having an attention to detail is critically important. There’s a trap here, there is an attention to detail that stops you from shipping your product or taking action, that can be devastating to your business. I’m talking about having an attention to detail on the things that matter and that make a measurable difference.

In packing parachutes there was one part where you used two hook type tools to wrap the lines across the parachute bag. If you forget and left these hooks in the parachute it would almost guarantee that the person using the chute would have a really bad day. That would have been a big detail to miss, but what about small ones?

Steve Jobs Attention to Detail Example

Recently on Google+ Vic Gundotra shared a story of when he received a phone call from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning. Steve was concerned about how the Google logo looked on the iPhone and wanted to work with Mr Gundotra to get it fixed. If Steve Jobs was concerned with the gradient of yellow in the Google logo are there things in your business need the same attention to detail? Would it make a difference in your business? I’ve asked myself the same questions and found that typically there is.

The Creation of Systems

The other important thing I learned was that you live and die by your systems. I’ve found that many people resist systems, especially small business or solo-entrepreneurs. I think there is a switch inside us that tricks us and convinces us that things can be put into a system. Or we feel that a system has to be this big 3 ring book of boring copy and processes that make run for the hills.

Here’s a System to Instantly Make Your Business Better

I was listening to a recent Mixergy.com episode where Andrew Warner interviewed founder Dan Maxwell.  He mentioned a great system (he learned from information marketer Eben Pagan) that he uses for the first 30 days of working with a new developer. Every single day he asks new developers to answer a set of questions that he keeps in a shared Google doc.

These questions are a system, a system to build a working relationship and a system that allows him to find the best of the best of developers. I also think these 4 questions could be used for anything in your business. They are…

• How many hours did you work today?
• What did you accomplish today?
• What problems did you encounter?
• What questions do you have for me?

These 4 simple questions answered at the end of the day are a system. If you break them down you’ll also find that it will help you create a very efficient process for getting things done.

2 Critical Elements to a System

There are 2 critical elements to any success of a system for your business.

1. Is the system written down?
2. Is the system followed?

You and key people might have the system memorized but ultimately having it written down ensures that knowledge can be passed along.

Special Note to Solo-Entrepreneurs

I have to make a special note to solo-entrepreneurs (we work with quite a few). I know sometimes you resist this process and systems. You say you don’t have time and it’s only you in your business—well writing down your processes and systems will help you in two ways.

First, it allows you to really think through what it is you do and improve upon it. It also will focus your mind on how you spend your time and effort. After a short time of doing this you’ll notice that you will improve some systems, you’ll gain more time, and become more efficient. That’s a huge promise but I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

The Parachutes in Your Business

We all have parachutes in our business. These are things we strap on our back that we hope will work once we exit that plane. You’ll jump out of that plane in your business a lot more confidently when you know that you’ve instilled an attention to detail and followed a proven system.

Here’s what I suggest…

Take a few minutes and write down the things in your business you can put into a system.  What are those things you do that could be more efficient?

The attention to detail is a bit harder. Here you have to find the things that if you had a greater attention to detail would have a huge impact on your business. Sometimes you know these things because they are the stuff that trips you up often, other times it’s digging a little bit deeper.

When you define both your systems and your critical attention to detail items a couple things will happen. You will become better and better at what you do and you also will save time and energy on that frees you up to do more of the things you enjoy.

Notes:
3 ring image by Jinx!.

I’ve found there are three main things that successful online marketing has. A clear goal, a real plan, and market feedback.

It’s time to get serious about your online marketing efforts.

In today’s digital landscape its easy to get distracted, jumping from one thing to the next. Yesterday I did a story on the Tech News You Shouldn’t Read. My main point was that the typical tech stories we see have no bearing on the success of you or your business. So why read them?

Information gathering, visiting blogs, learning the latest tips, tools, and strategies to engage social media is not what is going to help you become proficient at marketing online (okay except visiting our site, I have to throw that one in).

I’ve found that most people have enough information or an idea on what might work for themselves but they lack in one of the following things…

1. No Clear Goals

This is one of the most common reasons why people aren’t having results marketing online.

They put up a blog, create some content, bookmark it, share it in social media, and repeat. All this without having a clear WHY they are doing it.

This is the first thing you should do before you create a blog, website, or start to seriously engage social Media.

Sounds simple, but usually the keys to a foundation of success are.

To create goals for your efforts here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• What is the purpose of my current marketing efforts?
• What am I hoping to achieve?
• What are specific goals I am seeking in all my advertising efforts online?

You might say this is simple and you know what your goals are, but — do you have it written down somewhere? Most people who are not having great success at marketing online do not have written goals.

Creating and writing down your marketing goals literally will manifest a few things for you.

First, it allows you to focus on what is important.

Second, it will start to get you thinking about the things you do on a daily basis to achieve these goals.

Third, it gives you a focus and a reason for all your efforts.

What type of goals should you define?

The goal I hear most often is…

I want more traffic to my website.

That is a good goal, but it’s really not the type of goal you should be defining.

A quick way to focus on the right goal is to answer the following question:

I need more traffic to my website because…

That really is the purpose of your efforts. That should be the focus of your goals.

Traffic and visitor goals are important, I’m just saying bring it to a higher purpose.

2. No Real Plan

Now you have goals your speeding in the right direction. Next start by creating a list of things that you can do to accomplish those goals.

It now makes it easier to figure out and stay focused on how you should spend your time and money.

A common goal for an example is growing your email list. What are some ways you could start creating a plan to do this?

Let’s take a website or blog:

• Write and promote a blog post X number of times a week – Creating blog posts gives reasons for people to visit your site, more visitors usually does translate into more people joining your email list.
• Re-purpose content- Take content you have created for your blog and use it in other places. Such as niche social networks or create a Facebook note.
   
• Engage social media – You properly engage social media, where people want to learn more about you. Usually visiting your profile and visiting your website.
• Comment on industry blog posts- You find the top blogs and influential bloggers in your industry and make comments. Very good strategy for targeted traffic to your website.

3. Not Gaining Experience or Market Feedback

This is the most critical part, there are two main reasons why people fail in this critical spot.

First, they didn’t create goals and a plan.

Goals + Plan = Market Intelligence.

When you operate without those two critical elements the experience you gain never ties back to something concrete.

In effect, you have no way to relate your success or failure to anything meaningful to you or your business.

The second reason why many people fail to have real success in this area is they don’t create a evolving feedback plan.

What I like to do with projects I work on is a Release, Review, Modify schedule. There is one more peice we will talk about shortly.

Internet marketing online - Release, Review, Modify

Release

You release a new type of doing something, new feature or a change. For instance, you change your call to action on your website.

You’ve been running the same one for the last 20 days, you have X amount of visitors, so you have a good idea of what the opt-in rate is.

You decide on the metrics you should be tracking to measure effectiveness and if you are getting traction. You craft this change and release it.

Review

Now in the review phase you look at the results. These are the metrics you have already identified will be the basis of your success. Usually it’s pretty obvious whether or not your concept increased results. Sometimes it stays the same. That’s when you move onto step into the modify section.

Modify

You take what you’ve learned so far.

You might say to yourself… before when my opt-in offered a free report I got a 7% opt-in rate across all visitors. With this change it’s at 9%.

Tip: sometimes it’s smart to look at specific vertical market visitors, example; opt-in rate of Twitter or social media-vs-organic traffic. Organic traffic vs paid traffic.

Questions you might ask:

• Is this rate acceptable and can it be improved?
• Next, If it can, what changes are necessary and what are the metrics?
• Does this fit within my goals and can I implement it?

This is something that is a continuous action in your marketing efforts.

If your success rate based on your goals is acceptable, that’s when you move to the next level.

Scale

Scaling is when you take what has worked and find ways to explode the activity.

Scaling your Internet marketing.

I’ll give you an example from our website.

Blog commenting gets a us pretty good traffic. This post here on Mashable where Brian commented on social media and ROI links right to our Social Media Magic Bullet Report.

The traffic from this comment has a very high opt-in rate for this report. It’s relevant to the topic so people that read Brian’s comment link over and already are interested in the topic of the special report.

So how do we scale this?

Two ways, you could use real time search tools to find other posts on social media and ROI, find blog posts and comment.

Set up a google alert for “social media and roi”, if you want quick results you set it up as it happens.

The key is not what we did but the process, it started with our goal.

Our goal:  Build a large permission email list where can can give tremendous value and people can learn more about what we do.

We created a special report and put it behind a opt-in form to increase this list. We then feature this on our website and drive specific traffic that is is likely interested in the report.

This is one scalability item. From there we test other options we have based on results we gather.

What Should Do Now To Effectively Market Online?

• Step 1 – Create and write down your goals
• Step 2 – Create a realistic plan to achieve your goals given your current capabilities
• Step 3 – Gain, retain, and learn from your results
• Step 4 – Release, Review, Modify, and Scale.

To your success.

Tomorrow we will release a post on some Metrics and Advice on how to track and gauge your results.