It’s important to remember to keep the human touch when you build your business.  Ustream can help you do that.

Building your business with the internet can mean that you gain your lead, build trust with them, complete a purchase with them and never interact personally.

Sometimes this works well for people.  They want to buy what they need and move on.

But when you business involves service (and even if it doesn’t), it is a good thing to remember peraonal, human interactions.

Ustream.tv, a website which allows you to stream live video to the internet in real time is a great solution.

With Ustream, you can interact with your customers, answer their questions and build your rapport with the;m.

I’ve made a short video on  how Ustream.tv can help your business.

When your customers have a question, need to see a demonstration, or just want to see who your are, Ustream is a great solution.

And if you’re feeling tech-challenged or don’t know how to apply Ustream to internet Attraction Marketing, I recommend Renegade Professional for your one stop shop for internet marketing training.

Social media training–what is it and why should you care?

Social media sites are great places to get free traffic that already has a relationship with you.  You interact with your customers, gain your reader’s trust and then you can direct them back to your site.

Social media sites are social.  Blogs, comments, forums, wikis–all of these are ways for people to interact online.  When you use these tools in your business, you interact with your viewer.  Once they blog with you, they already feel like they know you.

Leads that come from social media sites are fantastic leads that want what you offer–in fact, they followed you from the social media site to your site.  They have already made a commitment to you.

And leads like this mean that you can grow your business easily.  Your leads will request your help.

The best training for social media, bar none, is found at Renegade Professional.

Qualities of Good Social Media Training?

• Social media is a broad array of sites–any site where people interact and add their own content.  YouTube, Squidoo, HubPages are just a few examples.  All of these sites allow people to post comments and respond to each other.  Other types of social media include blogs and forums.  The best social media training addresses all of these sites.
• Good training in social media teaches how to use all these sites.  How do you set up a YouTube channel?  What settings are best for a Squidoo lens?  When you teach yourself, each site poses a huge learning curve.
• The very best social media training teaches not only how to use the social media sites, but also how these sites fit in with your entire sales funnel.  Once you make a YouTube video, what do you do with it?  What are Facebook pages and how can you use them for your business?  How do you turn an online discussion into buying customers?

Renegade Professional is unique in that it gives not only the basic click by click details of using social media marketing, but also it gives a broad perspective of building a business plan.  This training gives you the tools and the understanding of when and how to use them.

Social Media is the hot new thing on the internet.  New social media sites are emerging all the time.  But what is the social media definition?

What is the Social Media Definition?

Social media are sites where individuals can interact online.  They publish content in little chunks and make it available for everyone to see.  This means that the definition of social media includes a broad array of sites–from YouTube, EzineArticles.com, and flickr to HubPages, and Squidoo.  Comments, blogs, and forums are all social media sites.  Even wiki sites fall under this heading.  Anything where individuals are interacting.  Their interactions become content for the host site.

What is the Significance of Social Media?

Social media sites allow everyone to put their two cents into the pot of collective knowledge.  Want to write about “Top 5 Reasons to Enjoy a Long Drive to Work“?  elisabethkcmo at HubPages already did.  Maybe you have a new angle on that topic that you want to add–make a comment on her HubPage and join in the discussion.

With social media, every person has a voice.  Every person can make their own YouTube video and show the world their own unique vision.  Every person can write an expert article about their own unique hobby.  And then the online community reacts when they make comments and link to the content.

And with all that self expression, little tiny microscopic niche interests emerge.  Every person who likes videos of ant hills will find each other on YouTube.  You may have been the only person in town who collect clown noses before, but now you find there’s a world wide community of clown nose collectors.

Social media sites are changing the way we view knowledge, democratizing it and changing the idea of what an “expert” is.  On the internet, everyone is an expert and every one can weigh in on the issues.

The definition of social media sites would seem to be just what it says–social.  But what’s interesting is that social media is changing the way we do business as well.

How do Social Media Sites Benefit Businesses?

There are a number of ways social media sites can benefit businesses.

• They are a free, and easy way to publish content online which builds your credibility as an expert.
• The social media sites have a lot of traffic and this gives your media exposure.
• Publishing on social media sites can build links back to your website, increasing its worthiness to the search engine spiders.
• Social media sites are great ways to build relationships with your customers because they are so social.  Get your customers commenting on how to use your latest product and when you answer their questions online, you’ve built their trust that the product is for them.
• And best of all, social media sites give you one more way to attract customers and build your list.

In the new business world, a business must have a strong relationship with its customers.  Anonymous ads on a billboard do not build customer loyalty.  To counteract the anonymity of the internet, businesses must interact and communicate with their customers.  Social media sites provide the means for that communication.

Your email is full of emails from marketing gurus.  All of them teach many techniques, from PPC to building a blog, from emailing to properly constructing a website.  How do you know where to put your money?

You need to learn complete marketing strategies, not just marketing techniques.

To learn how to build your business, you need to think like a marketer.

A marketer understands that a business and its message are not separate.  The way you do business, the platform you use, the business model all reflect your marketing strategies.

REI has well informed sales people and printed sheets comparing the features of all their products.  When you buy a kayak from them, you feel like you made an informed decision.  REI is its marketing strategy.

A local kayak store, Rutabaga has a beautiful handmade wooden kayak hanging from its ceiling.  They talk to you about the beauty of kayaking as well as the features of their products.  Their motto is “We don’t sell boats, we sell time on the water.”  They have a lot of advertising about being locally owned for more than 25 years.  They sell the experience of kayaking.

Both stores are very similar, but both appeal to different crowds.  If I want a techie, informational experience, I go to REI.  If I want to feel good about buying locally, if I want to chat about the best places to kayak locally, I would go to Rutabaga.

Each store embodies their marketing.

So how can you learn marketing strategies?

Step One:  Download Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto

The free Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto gives the fundamental concepts of attraction marketing–giving valuable information to attract customers to you.  This type of marketing means that customers come to you, they request your help.  You don’t chase people down; you don’t badger them to buy.  Just like REI and Rutabaga, you provide your customers with the information they seek and the experience they desire.

The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto is a course book on marketing strategies that make you proud.  You can sleep at night knowing that you are valuable to your customers.  And the most of the strategies are free or nearly free, and very doable even for beginners.

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.

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”?

If you want to change the world, get a tribe of 1000 people.

Seth Godin, my marketing hero, recently did an interview with Loic Le Meur.  One of the points that Seth makes, is that if you want to change the world, find your tribe who agree.

He points out that you need a tribe of people who all think like you.  When these people go to their tribes, your message will spread.

Seth Godin is a powerful marketer, but more than that, he is a profound philosopher.

His message is all about how we spread the things we love to one another. Our job as business people is to provide the things people love.

The best marketing is not convincing someone to love what you have, but to have what they love.  After that, they will do the marketing for you.

Be the Best in Your Tribe

Another point Seth makes is that whatever you do–be the best.  Not the second best, not the third best–you must be the best.

He pointed out that in the world of $2000 video cameras, people will buy the best one.  If you are second best, your game is over–no one will buy yours.

This can be applied to everything we do in life, but in particular, to how we do business.

If you are market health products for diabetes, then offer the best help for diabetes.  If you teach people how to blog, give them the best training.

No one will look at your services and say “Gee, she’s not as good as Nancy, but I’ll buy from her anyway.”

You must be the best in your tribe.

…And that also means that you must know your tribe.