It’s not leading because it’s easy…

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.

Once again, Seth Godin crystallizes the truth in his book “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us“.

Up until a few years ago, I believed that leaders were born.  There was some innate talent or drive or karmic force that caused one person to be a leader and the other not.

I observed children growing up and watched some of them emerge as leaders.

In groups, I observed how people would automatically gravitate to my friend for direction, often looking right through me to get to her.

But as I have been growing, I have come to a new understanding, one that reflects what Seth Godin describes.

Leaders Choose to Let Themselves Lead

While some people are more inclined to be leaders because of facets of their personality, no one is excluded.  The only requirements for leadership are vision and a willingness to be uncomfortable.

This summer has been a crash course in leadership.  I began a masters level class called Renegade Breakthrough Mentoring Program with Ann Sieg.  And I set my goal to stop running my business like a shy, wallflower, hugging the wall at a party while everyone else gets up to dance.

I began blogging and reaching out to people.

I stepped up my commitment to Dane Buy Local, a business group I’m a part of.

And from taking the risk to stand out, I have been welcomed as a leader.

I won’t discount how uncomfortable it can be.  To be a leader I have had to face everything that Seth lists:

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

My summer has been filled with anxiety and niggling self-doubts.  I leaned into all the places that caused me pain.

But in the end, I have found key positions in projects and am finding my place in Ann Sieg’s  organization.  I’m finding my voice and my vision with internet marketing.  And I’m refusing to compromise.

Leadership is not easy.  Decide to ignore the pit in your stomach, and start taking risks.

Sometimes someone comes along who captures the essence of a moment–someone who distills the moment to its essential core.  This is the talent that is the unique voice of Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova.  Kseniya uses a big light box and draws in sand to tell the story of Germany’s invasion and occupation of the Ukraine during WWII.  She does it beautifully and dramatically.  She is artist, dancer, historian and storyteller.  This video is her winning performance in Ukraine’s version of “America’s Got Talent.”

Kseniya shares her unique voice when she draws in the sand. She takes an experience shared by many, the memories of WWII, and wraps them in her own artistry.  Because she is so raw, so authentic, and yes, so skilled in her presentation, she gives us all a deeper understanding of our shared memories.

As business owners, we must share our unique voice as well.  We must take a common experience, and wrap it in our own understanding to bring people deeper to what can help them.  Bringing ourselves into our business makes us unique.

I’m reminded of my friend, Jodi Barnhart.  Jodi has unique story to tell about how her heart was beating so fast because of stress that you could see her clothes move on her chest.  Imagine–her blouse was fluttering to her heartbeat.  She would carry a folder in front of her chest to cover it up.  Her doctors couldn’t believe that her heart could continue day after day at such staggering rates.  Later, she learned to regulate her heartbeat through nutrition, and now she is determined to help others with the same condition.

And I can’t help but flash on the image of her blouse moving to her racing heart.

That image is Jodi’s unique voice.  Her story captures the essential core of what it is to live with a racing heart.

And her story is what will move others to seek the help they need from her.

Find your unique voice, your sand drawing, and you will be free to help the people you want to serve.

Coaching lessons are found in all parts of your life.  I have been a Thai Massage practitioner for years and here are some of the lessons that I have learned which help me to coach people better.

For more instructions on becoming a good coach for others, join the free Coaching Webinar.

So How Do you Get all That Free Traffic Anyway?

Free Web Traffic?  Ya, sure.

If you have been writing for internet for any amount of time, you hear how by properly writing your content, the search engines magnanimously send you lots of free traffic.  And often you write and you write and you write, but you still have not seen any of that miraculous traffic.

Writing for the internet is different than 8th grade English class writing.  As a writer, I’ve had to unlearn many habits, learn new ones, and accustom myself to writing in a style which feels, well…  not writerly.

You can get free traffic through properly written internet content but you must learn how to write properly for the internet.

I have just written a hub page with some step by step instructions for the basics of internet writing:  A Step by Step Guide to Free, Targeted Web Traffic.

Writing internet content to get free web traffic is not hard but until you unlock the secrets, it can seem impossible.  That’s why I highly recommend a membership at Renegade Professional.

At Renegade Professional, you will get in-depth, click by click training on all aspects of internet writing–and many other ways to get free internet traffic as well.

Some of the videos you’ll find:

• Writing with Pull–how to write so that your readers think you’re talking to them.
• Keyword Research
• How to write a title
• How to construct an article
• Content sharing
• Article marketing
• Bookmarking (what to do once you’ve written that content)
• And much, much more…

Renegade Professional covers not only content creation, but many other techniques used to build your online videos.  It has dozens and dozens of videos (I think you could spend weeks full time just trying to listen to them all).

If every time someone asks you, “So how’s your website going?” you’re embarrassed to reply, now is the time to improve your business skills.  Get your membership to Renegade Professional today.

PS. Here’s a tip I’ll share with you:  if you’re not quite ready to jump into Renegade Professional, there is a free “sister” site which has lots (and I mean lots) of information about Attraction Marketing and building your online business.  Renegade University is free, and uses more articles than videos.  It has the same, beefy content, but doesn’t quite have the same breadth.  If you need more free traffic and can’t figure out how to get it, give Renegade University a try.

When you want to start a business, it is really important to find niche markets which are profitable.

Twitter is a great way to find profitable niche markets.

There are many guidelines for finding niches, and of course, many times people make considered choices to disregard those guidelines.  But in general, to find niche markets you will look for:

• High demand.  You want to find a niche which has many searches for the service or product you are supplying.  Find out what people want. What are they looking for?  What do they need? Low demand can make building your business slow.
• Low supply.  The fastest way to profit is to find niches which are under-supplied.  If there is a lot of supply, this may indicate that a niche is particularly profitable and worthy of your business–or it may mean its over saturated.  Research a lot and make a considered decision.  You want a niche where people are desperate for a solution.
• Good monetization potential. You’re in business to make money and you want to be sure your niche is profitable.  Find a niche were people are willing to pay for their solutions.

How do you find these elusive perfect niches?

Twitter.

Twitter is a great way to find out what people are talking about.  It’s like listening in to hundreds of conversations at once.  You learn what people need, what they hate and what they love.

Twitter is a perfect tool to find niche markets.

To learn how to use twitter to find niche markets, read my hubpage “How to Find Niche Markets with Twitter“.  You will discover how to find the people talking about what you want to hear, and what to listen to.

Social Networking is the new thing.  Everyone has a is Facebooking, Twittering, and Linking-In.

What is social networking?

Here is quick video which explains it:

Social networking hold particular power for building your business when it is used to build a pool of people who share an interest in your product or service.  It’s a bit like a giant, e-expo with everyone who loves what you have.

The best explanation I have heard in using social networking, specifically Twitter, to build your business is Mike Klingler’s “How I Built my First Email List“.

Mike’s course is a 3 part course.  It explains why you want to build an email list, and what potential this holds for your business.

In the third video, Mike hits his stride and gives some amazing insights about how social networking holds huge potential for your business.  He explains tips and tricks to create a personable yet business-like presence on the net.  And most revealing, he shows how social networking can move beyond “what you had for dinner” to building a group of people interested in getting updates about your business.

If you have wondered about social networking and how it can help your business, this is the best explanation I have found.  With this video, you will be twittering and facebooking and watching your list of followers and friends grow.

Twitter is big.

The numbers are growing quickly and it seems like everyone has followers in the hundreds or thousands.

How did they get there?  How do you build your following when you may not even know anyone who twitters?

If you’re lucky enough to already have a client list that follows you on your website, then you’re golden.  Make a few posts about your new twitter account, and they’ll follow you.  Often the rich or famous can build a following quickly just by announcing it.  And often, they can be quite choosy about who they follow–only picking their dearest friends.

But if you’re like many people starting out and you are using twitter to build that following, you’ll need a different strategy.  You’ll need the “if I follow you, then you’ll follow me” plan.

I’ll Follow You and Hopefully You’ll Follow Me

To build your Twitter following, you’ll have to make the first move and join in some conversations with people you don’t know.  It’s a bit like being at a party, and standing in a circle of close friends listening in.  You smile at the right places and try to find an opening where you can contribute to the conversation.

Start by searching for the topic of your business at search.twitter.com For my site www.stress-free-mama.com I might start with “stress”, or “mothering” or the topic of a particular page.   This will find conversations people are having about that topic.

When you find results, click on the profile of the people tweeting, and see if they seem like someone you would like to know.

When I choose who to follow, I try to pick people that I may want to start a conversation with at a party.  For my stress site, I’d pick women, mothers, working mothers, or people juggling lots of activities.

When you find someone you want to follow, follow them. After following them, click on their followers in their profile.  You will have a group of people who are interested in the same person who interest you.  This will build your following in a more directed way.

For example, to build for www.compostheaven.com, I pick people interested in gardening conversations.  When I find a person with a big following who specializes in gardening, I usually check out their followers.

Make it your goal to follow 25 new people every night for 2 weeks.  At the end, you will be following 350 people.

Now the magic of twitter begins.

Many of those 350 people will follow you back.  And when they do, their followers will start to check you out.

Start tweeting right away.  If you are making good, friendly, business-like tweets during that time, both promoting yourself and providing helpful content, you will also get attention.  It feels funny to tweet to no one, but it’s good practice and when people click on your profile later, they will see what you have to offer.

Once people start following you, once a week check on your new followers.

Use the same criteria to choose if you want to follow back–are these people who are related to your business niche and who you would want to meet at a party?  If they are, follow them back.  If not, don’t.  There is no rule that says you must follow back, and you want to build a focused pool of followers for your business.

Local Businesses

If your business is a local one, try using Twitteraholic.com to find people in your city.

Twitteraholic.com gives your ranking on twitter.  Look up your twitter ranking, and when you find it, there is a link that compares you to others in your city.  Follow the people in your city and they may follow you back.

Who’s Really Moving and Shaking?

If your niche is looking for people who already have businesses, you may want to see if your followers are active with their business.  Sometimes a person’s website can show how developed their marketing plan is.

All twitter profiles have a website link.  I always click on that link to see who is doing what.

I use Firefox, and I have installed a handy extension which tells me the page rank and Alexa ranking of every page I visit.  Download SearchStatus for free, and you will get a tiny bar on the bottom of your browser with the page rank information.  I check this to quickly asses if a website is new or developed.  It’s not a fool-proof assesment, but it gives you an idea of what the person is doing.

Helping Your Business Friends and Associates

Not everyone uses Twitter for business, so when you know someone is building their business niche, help them out.  If you have a downline, let them know that you will always follow them.  This makes your followers available to them.

If you are reading this, send me a Direct Message and I’ll be sure to follow you.  We can all help each other get started.

Tweeting is big and using it for your marketing has huge potential.  Getting started is easy.  Go follow some people and start tweeting.

Twitterers don’t stay.  They tweet and then skedaddle.

According to Nielsen Online, the twitter retention rate is low, often below 30%.  This means that of the people that open a twitter account, 60%–and sometimes 70%–are not twittering the next month.  So far, twitter may be big, but the glow is gone quickly.

Unless twitter finds a way to keep its members, its phenomenal growth won’t be sustained.  Eventually, twitter will run out of new users to replace the old.

What Can Twitter Teach You in Your Business?

There are a couple of lessons that twitter can teach you for your business.

First, if you use twitter in your business for marketing, know that you are communicating with a changing crowd.  Know that the person who reads your tweets today, may not be reading them tomorrow.

And know that tomorrow, you may need to find a different way to communicate with your customers.  Twitter is big now, but the Internet changes quickly.  Watch, listen and stay flexible.  Be prepared to change with whatever the future brings.

The second lesson is even more important.

The only way for twitter, your business, or any business to truly grow is with a devoted, long-term audience.  Even a mega-star like twitter will not create block-busters if it can’t create loyalty.

To build a reliable, long term business, you must find your audience and speak to them in an authentic way.  If you really offer them something useful, and really tell a story they can relate to, you will be rewarded with their loyalty.  They will tell their friends and your business will grow in a sustainable way.   You may have a blockbuster, or you may not.  But either way, you will be around for a long time, and you will have been useful to your customers along the way.

If you have wondered how to join the “Work from Home Moms” club, and thought that you could never do it, Lori Ramsey will inspire you.

Lori Ramsey is a successful work at home mom who raises 6 kids while building her internet business.  She makes a full time income by developing and managing 4 websites, including www.stages-of-pregnancy.com.

On April 17, 2009 I had the opportunity to interview Lori and find out how she does it.  This interview, takes you through Lori’s story–from learning to open an email to eventually creating an income that exceeds her husband’s.  And she tells her story as a chronology of having babies.

Find out how Lori:

• Started with a retail business site and why that was stressful for her.
• How SBI changed Lori’s business and gave her back her dining room table.
• Challenges to being a WAHM.
• How Lori uses “mother time” writes an article in 10 minutes or less.
• How long it took for Lori’s business to take off (less than you think)?
• Lori’s biggest challenge to running her business and what every mom-preneur should know to master it.

Lori’s story is an inspiration to every woman who has dreamed of working from home and caring for her children.

To learn more about Lori Ramsey, please read Work From Home Moms.

Seth Godin, one of my favorite marketing philosophies, gave a talk about breaking your relationship with your audience.  “This is Broken” gives examples of communication which try to achieve one goal, but end up achieving something entirely different.

In Seth’s first example, he shows some debit cards which he received from a cell phone company to reward him for signing up.  But the cards expire in 60 days, and are difficult to use.  And the cards were designed for exactly that purpose–to be so difficult to use that many people won’t use them.  Part of the calculus of the “Sign Up Bonus” is hoping that some people won’t get their bonus.

Many companies operate on this principle.  Instead of taking the opportunity to build customer loyalty, to get me so excited about my new cell phone company that I go out and tell me friends, they withhold and offer false benefits.  They “break” the relationship from the beginning.

This is a great lesson.  We can all name times when we have dealt with companies and walk away disgusted with their policies and lies.

And it’s important to ask ourselves as marketers, are we doing the same thing?

This lesson is hard to see when we are talking about ourselves. I’ll give you an example of how it can work.

Right now, the new way to offer internet training is via videos.

But I hate video training.

First of all, you can’t search a video for the part you want to look up the way you can with an e-book.  You can’t skim.  If the video is 46 minutes long, I have to sit their for the whole time, or constantly move my cursor every couple of minutes, hoping to happen upon the section I want to watch.  Videos are dull.

But many people love them.

If I offer trainings, and ignore the desires of clients, and write an e-book, I have broken the relationship from the beginning.  People who want a video must mold themselves into my preferences.  I have made it hard for them.

I can choose to break this relationship or not.  I can choose to cater specifically to people who prefer e-books, and let the video-loving people go elsewhere.  I can tell the e-book people a story about how great e-books are that they will love to hear.

But I have broken the relationship with the video people.

And if my training is about how to make your business available to many people, I have not used my systems in alliance with my goals.

So it’s a choice.

Look at your business and imagine yourself a new person interacting with your systems.  Does it work easily?  Do your systems reflect your goals?

Or will people come to you and say, “This is broken”?