The Bay Area Internet Marketer’s Meetup is one year old this month so we’re celebrating with a birthday party! Come join us from 6 until 8 PM! NOTE the earlier start time.

Winemaker Paul Kreider of The Ross Valley Winery will be hosting a wine tasting event at our celebration. The Ross Valley Winery is located in downtown San Anselmo and Paul has been making award winning wines for over 20 years. Stop in and have a glass of wine with Paul at the winery on San Anselmo Avenue. Paul’s website is www.rossvalleywinery.com.

Dominique Lahaix, the Founder and CEO of eCairn, will be our special guest. Dominique will be showing us how to leverage the power of social conversations and turn those conversations into paying clients for your business. He’ll show us how he finds the right conversations to tap into using his powerful eCairn application.

Dominique is the Founder and Ceo of eCairn, a software company based in Silicon Valley, delivering an innovative social media marketing platform to agencies and marketing groups. He has previously founded and managed a software startup specializing in emailing optimization with clients like eBay, HP, Apple. Before, He has lead several organizations in Hewlett Packard Services (R&D, Consulting and Business Dev) and has 20 years of expertise in managing Technology organizations. He has published, lectured on IT strategy and KM.

Register Here

It’s true. Social Media is just an excuse for us to justify our aimlessly surfing the internet for hours and hours. I’m convinced its a conspiracy by those who want us to waste as much time as we can so we can go days without accomplishing anything.

I keep hearing from Social Media experts that you build your credibility and find new clients by commenting on other people’s blogs and forums. You start out by doing a Google Blog Search forkeywords related to your niche. Next you dig through the search results to find related blogs. Before you know it you’ve spent an hour sampling other blogs looking for something to comment on.

Finally you find a good blog and make your comment. Then back to the Google search results to find more related sites. You find a good article on one site and make a comment. That article leads you to another great site with relevant content. You spend an hour or so reading articles on that wesite which leads you to more articles on another blog. You make some comments on that blog which leads you to another blog from someone’s comment.

And then you realize you just spent 2 hours reading and commenting on blogs and news sites. Next you log into your Facebook account to see what your friends are up to. Your inbox is filled with messages from your "friends" who posted self promotions on your wall. Facebook is getting worse than the spam in your inbox. You get distracted playing on Facebook for a couple of hours and you realize you forgot to eat lunch.

After lunch you check your email and find more messages from friends. You spend 20 minutes deleting those messages and you’re Google Alert notifies you of a new blog post. You jump on that blog to make the first comment and spend another hour reading other blogs.

Does this sound familiar? It has to be a conspiracy but I haven’t figured out their motive other than to make us waste our time.

John Reese is about to raise the bar for internet marketing. A few years ago John was the first person to earn over a million dollars in one day when he released Traffic Secrets, the revolutionary program that taught you how to instantly generate tons of web traffic. Many of the techniques John taught us in Traffic Secrets still work today.

Now John has updated Traffic Secrets to include Web 2.0 traffic techniques. Take a look at this video that gives you a sneak peak of John’s soon to be released Traffic Secrets 2.0

I saw a post on the blog, www.boingboing.net about the Smithsonian releasing royalty free images from it’s vast collection of pictures.

Think about it. The Smithsonian is doing Web 2.0. As Tim Russert’s Dad, Big Russ, says “Ya gotta love this country”

Check out the Smithsonian images on Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian

Are you doing Web 2.0 to promote your business? What the heck are you waiting for? If the Smithsonian is embracing Web 2.0 then you need to get on the train before it leaves the station.

You’re missing out on a tremendous source of free web traffic and an easy way to build lasting relationships with your clients and prospects.

Click here to see how I’m using Web 2.0 to grow my business.

Blogging to one of the hottest trends on the internet. In case you don’t know what blogging is click here for the definition from wikipedia. Writing a blog for your business is a tremendous way to build a lasting relationship with your customers and prospects. A blog lets you demonstrate your expertise in your niche in addition to letting you express your opinions about current trends in your industry. By commenting on other people’s blog you can expand your potential client base exponentially as well as driving tons of free traffic to your blog.

I’ve been teaching a lot of classes on blogging and the biggest complaint I hear is “I don’t have time to write a blog and to find other blogs to comment on” Here’s a typical conversation in one of my classes:

Ted: You should write at least 3 blog posts a week and comment on other blogs at least 3 times a week
Student: I’m already working 60 hours a week and I don’t have time to write a blog
Ted: Is your practice currently full or do you have more clients than you can handle?
Student: No
Ted: Is your business making a profit or are you just getting by?
Student: Just getting by, barely
Ted: How many hours a week do you spend marketing your business?
Student: I don’t have time to market. I’m too busy running my business.
Ted: So you’re working 60 hours a week, just getting by and you don’t have time to market. Are you working with the right clients and are your charging enough for your services?
Student: I guess not.
Ted: You need to be spending at least 10% of your time marketing your business to your ideal clients. Your ideal clients will understand your value and pay you what your worth. By working with the right clients you will be able to work with fewer clients that will pay you more so you’ll be able to work less than 40 hours a week and make a lot more money. Blogging ss a free way to market your business and reach an unlimited audience. By reading and commenting on blogs that are read by your ideal clients you can build a deep relationship with them and demonstrate your expertise. New clients will find you instead of you chasing the wrong clients. By spending as little as 4 hours a week, you can reach thousands of potential clients via the internet. As your popularity on the internet increases and more people start commenting on your blog posts, you’ll forget that you’re actually marketing your business just by interacting with others.

I was having lunch with my mother at Applebee’s the other day and I noticed a flyer on the table. It said Wanna be on TV? We can help.

Check out www.applebees.com/realvideos and you’ll see you can upload your own videos to their website. They want you to upload video of you and your family enjoying themselves at Applebees. They’re going to feature the best  videos on television commercials. What a great idea. They’re using Web 2.0 to create interaction between you and their website. Applebees is inviting you into their community. The only thing they’re missing is letting us see the uploaded videos on the website and make comments on each others videos.

I’m seeing more and more of this community building from large companies and I love it. The large, cold, faceless corporations are reaching out to us!!  Now lets get the oil companies to reach out to us as their profits skyrocket and build a community!!

Squidoo is a new social site with a twist.  The benefit of creating a Squidoo lens is monetary in nature as they share the advertising revenue with you based on the traffic that your page and site generates.  This is an added bonus to anyone who knows how to get some real traffic to their Squidoo Lens.

Before you can begin to build your Squidoo lens you will have to have an account with Squidoo.  You can easily sign up for a free membership with a username and password associated with an email account.  You are allowed to have 10 lens/pages per email account.  You will receive a confirmation email and once confirmed your account will be activated and you will be able to create your own lens.

Before you start creating your own lens it would be a good idea to do some research on the topic that you would like to create.  There are many different niches out there that you can target but not all niches are created equal.  Some have much higher values for Pay Per Click and some have better values for affiliate programs or digital products.  You will have to identify the niche that you would like to create your lens prior to its creation.  This will help optimize the process as well as give you the maximum results.

Now that you have signed up for Squidoo you will want to log-in and go to make a lens.  You will want to optimize it to your niche.  You will have to find some of the top keyword search terms that are searched for by using a keyword tool.  Use those terms in your lens title for example if you have chosen dog training as your niche you will want to include the phrase dog-training as the name of your lens. 

Once you have created your URL you will need to select the category that best suits your niche. Next you will have to select the rating for your lens.  Unless you have something that is x-rated or very adult you will most likely have G rated content. Next you will have to add your keywords to the lens.  This will help the search engines identify what your page is about and possibly help you get ranked for that term.  That is not a give in but it is a possibility.  You should pick your best 3 terms and input them at this stage. 

You should now be given the option to edit your Squidoo lens.  Take a look at the content that you want to add.  A good idea would be to take a look at other sites that are related to your niche to get some ideas as to the layout and the content.  Another smart idea would be to add links to other related sites as well as to your sites as well.  Make sure that they are related links though.  Do not add a sports link to a dog training site.  It would not be related and most likely you will not receive any good traffic from it.

Change the lens to reflect your own personality.  After all this should reflect you and give it that personal touch.  Don’t expect to become a millionaire off of one lens but if you create enough lens’s you can expect to receive a decent residual return over time.

I’ve been learning about web 2.0 and playing around with it for about 2 years now. It is a really effective tool for building relationships, attracting clients, and driving traffic to your blogs and websites. My business is booming and i have a steady stream of leads coming in daily. The downside, it can be a full time job being "social". If I spend 40 hours a week building relationships online, when do I have time to do the work for my clients? When do I have time for myself? I’m working at least 6 days a week right now and spending at least 12 hours each day in front of my computer. Although I love playing with technology and new sites on the internet, this isn’t the perfect lifestyle I wanted to create.

I found a great blog post today Chris Garrett’s blog at http://www.chrisg.com/need-digg-power-account/ that discusses the obsession with trying to dominate the social media pages. It’s very difficult and time consuming to get a post on the first page of Digg or del.icio.us. It’s even harder to stay at the top over time. Chris reitterates the fact the you shouldn’t worry about dominating the social media sites. Just focus on creating high quality content that helps your prospects and customers and the social media gurus will find you.

You’ve found a list of blogs in your niche and you’re ready to start commenting to build a relationship with their readers. How do you know if this is a good blog to comment on? There are a number of factors that determine if this is the right blog for you to comment on.

[tag-tec]StomperNet[/tag-tec] just launched [tag-tec]SMARTS[/tag-tec], it’s new [tag-ice]Web 2.0 coaching program[/tag-ice] today for $1397 or 5 payments of $297. Is a 10 week coaching program worth $1397? The [tag-tec]StomperNet[/tag-tec] guys are known for providing high-quality information and they proved it again by launching their highly successful video series [tag-ice]Going Natural 2.0[/tag-ice]. They overdelivered on their buzz buildup and I’m sure they’ll overdeliver in their coaching program. [tag-ice]StomperNet[/tag-ice] will give you everything they promised and more.

The bad news is that I’ve heard that many of the members of StomperNet were overwhelmed by too much information and too many technical details. The StomperNet faculty is fantastic but they often overwhelm everyone with too much tech talk. Most people glaze over when they hear too much tech talk and their brains turn off. StomperNet goes for $800 bucks a month and has made many people rich online. Unfortunately most people that signed up were overwhelmed and got nothing out of the program except a huge debt on their credit card.

I’m so happy that I didn’t have to drop another $1400 on another coaching program. Luckily I found a great mentor a few years ago that teaches you how to build a successful online business without overwhelming you with tech talk. [tag-tec]Jack Humphrey[/tag-tec] is a master teacher and explains the most complicated subjects in a way that everyone understands. And the best part is that he teaches everything you’ll learn in the [tag-ice]SMARTS[/tag-ice] system and more for only $29 a month!

Check Jack’s coaching program out at http://netbizexpert.com/r/socialpowerlinking

Until next time,

Ted