“People don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do what you do,” Simon Sinek.

Anyone who leads people in any capacity or markets to them in any way can benefit from this powerful talk by Simon Sinek at a TED Conference.

This is why in every great network marketing training…we begin with defining your “why.”  This is also why we tell stories, share testimonials, partner with great causes and work to really connect with people…regardless of our product, pay plan, features or benefits.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s YOUR why?  Please share.

Video marketing is one of the most powerful marketing strategies in internet marketing and if you aren’t capitalizing on it in some way, you are leaving money on the table…period.

Why has video marketing become so popular over the last few years?   You can chalk it up to a couple of main reasons.

Reason #1 – It’s simple to do & can be really effective (especially when done right).

Anyone can shoot and edit a basic video.  High quality cameras are really inexpensive these days and incredibly easy to operate.  Not everyone makes a great video…but everyone can at least bang out something they can put online.

YouTube is the 3^rd (some say 2^nd) largest search engine on the planet.  If you think about that for a second, that means more people go on YouTube to find something than on Yahoo.

Google (who owns YouTube) loves videos when it comes to search engine ranking.  A video ranks quickly and can hold a top position for a long time.  This means a video don’t right can yield you traffic month after month after month with only minimal work.  It’s a great example of pull marketing.

I have some videos that took me literally 15 minutes to shoot and edit that have had thousands of views and produced a ton of leads and sales.   This is why video marketing can be so powerful.

Think about that for a minute.  Let’s say you have a video that gets 400 views a month and it produces 10-15 leads from those views.  That may not seem significant but what if you put out ten videos like that or 20 or 30 videos like that?  It’s unlimited.

You can see that over a short amount of time, your little video soldiers will be out there all over the internet consistently creating opt-in leads for your business.

Reason #2 – It’s personal and people would much rather watch a video than read.

Think about it.  We are the TV and Internet generation.  We want our information fast and without having to work to get it.  Video provides all of this for people.

Video let’s people see the real person and their personality…or lack thereof.  It’s real.  It’s immediate.  It’s drive-thru information.

Additionally, videos add a level of entertainment value that is not found in print.  Whether it’s music, lighting, special effects or just the person in the video being creative…it’s easy to add attention-grabbing content to videos.

Here are a couple core fundamental principles for video marketing that you really must follow to create solid results.

1. Create a clear, simple and powerful message – think out what you will say and how you want to say it.  If it’s a live video, it shouldn’t be scripted, but it should be planned.  If someone can’t follow your message, you’ll lose them in 60 seconds.

If you are camera shy, pick up a program called Camtasia or Screenflow (for Mac) and create a screenshot video that you can simply narrate.  These videos can be incredibly powerful and are really simple to do.  This way, you can really just read a script if you choose.

2. Be attractive – no, I am not saying you have to be physically good looking…attraction is far deeper than that.  Attraction is about energy, confidence, poise, posture and clarity.  Be YOU all the time…be authentic and real.

And for the love of God…please smile.  Seriously, you are asking people to listen to you and follow you.  People want to make more money for the lifestyle it provides.  You should at least look like you are enjoying yours.

3. Just Get It Done & Get It Out – People who are new to video marketing often sit and agonize over what to say, how to say it, what shirt they should wear and where they should shoot the video.  They get stuck in all of the little details and never get the actual product out.

Plan it well, but then just get after it and crank the video out.  A decent video is better than no video.  Some of the videos I have done that I didn’t think were very good at all have produced great results.  Here is one of them.  I mean, it’s not bad, but it’s no Avatar!

4. Research Your Keywords – if your video isn’t seen by anyone, it doesn’t matter how great it was or how clever your message is.  You have to get it in front of people.  Since videos rank so well in organic search results, you want to specifically target the keyword phrases you want to compete for.

There are a ton of different keyword search tools available online.  Google offers a free a Free Keyword Tool as does NicheBot Classic.

If you want to take things up a notch, Market Samurai is an amazing tool for a really nominal one-time cost.  You can hone in on some golden nugget keywords and dominate search results.

When you are just starting out, here is a really, really basic way to look at what keywords you might be able to rank for on the first page.  Do a search.  If page one of Google doesn’t have any videos, blogs or article sites, you can probably get a video to rank on page one.  That is a very simplistic approach…but it will work.

5. Promote Your Video Everywhere – YouTube is the largest video sharing site on the internet…but there are hundreds more.  Sites like AOL Video and Metacafe and nearly a hundred others offer some great additional sources of traffic for your video.

There are two main ways to get your video out to these video sites.

The first is to do it manually.  You would go and set up accounts with each of these video sharing sites, then manually upload your video to your account and manually put in the title, description, keywords and such.

The second way is to do it automatically.  If you are like me, I am all for automating whatever I can, especially when it comes to routine, mundane tasks.

Probably the best F*REE software is by TubeMogul (www.tubemogul.com).  They offer a solid platform that is easy to use, but they are limited to only about 20 sites submissions.

By far the best software on the market is Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser lets you pump your video out to all of the video sharing sites with the touch of a few buttons.  I am a non-tech guy and I find it very easy to use.  There are a ton of other features you can add, but you can explore those when you go check out the Traffic Geyser product.

Now you have the Why’s and the How’s of video marketing. Now all you have to do is figure out what you want to say, get the tools to support your efforts and get to work.

Let’s get after it.

You have seen the ads and the websites promising overnight riches with internet marketing.  We’ve all seen them.  I bet you have probably subscribed to some of them and bought their products.

I have too.

Education is powerful, but all the information online about how to make money can be overwhelming.  If you tried to pay attention to everything, you could easily go insane.  You buy a course and start to study it, then before you can even really apply anything, the same “guru” is upselling you to a bigger, better course.  You buy that one too and before you can really apply those strategies, you get distracted with anyone program.

Then you finally get to work.  You run into something you don’t understand and you have nowhere to turn.  You are stuck in a techno black hole with no understanding of how to get out.

This is by far the biggest challenge with making money online.  Over stimulation creating massive distractions.

If you don’t focus, you lose.  Period.

I don’t care how great your business is, your system is or your talent is…if you don’t really dig in and focus your efforts, time and energy…you will fail.  And you will fail every single time.

You want the magic bullet?  FOCUS.  Let nothing interrupt your commitment, persistence and work ethic.

If you are committed to really getting after it, let’s talk about getting your business going online.  Building an online MLM business can be one of the most rewarding projects you can ever work on and reward you with an incredible lifestyle.  There are some absolute basics that you need to understand to get your online business going.

First, and this one is almost so silly I feel badly saying it, you need a website…a good one and a really good funnel system. If you are not familiar with what a funnel system is, it’s simply an online process that interested prospects flow through before they come to you.  With each step of the process, the system provides value and gauges interest, so the ones that come out the other side are highly targeted and highly qualified.  Please don’t think you are going to find a quality website and funnel system for free.

Second, you need to get traffic to your site.  No traffic equals no leads.  No leads equals no sales.  There are tons of ways to drive traffic – Pay Per Click, Article Marketing, Social Networking, Blogging, Classifieds, Video Marketing…and so many more.  Choose one or two strategies that you really enjoy and become masterful at it.  Again, we are back to focus.  In order to get any real traction online, you need to get at least 100 visitors a day to your site and that is just a starting point.

Next, you need to learn how to convert those visitors to leads. Traffic without conversions is just entertainment.  You want to make money.  You will need to learn to tweak your web copy so that a higher percentage of your visitors turn into leads.  Even 3% over the course of a year can add up to a lot more money in your pocket.

Finally, you need to build a relationship with your new subscribers, adding value to their lives and businesses and over time, so you will generate profit from them time and time again.  This is where masters win where unfocused amateurs fail.

Every single one of these steps is a group of skills that you can focus on building.  How do you become wildly successful online?  Look at these four steps, determine where you need to focus your efforts and commit to becoming masterful at it.  If you really focus, you will win…every single time.

If you want to take advantage of a complete Online MLM Success system that has all four of these components in place already and all the free training you will need to become masterful at each, fill in the form below for my complete system.

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You may know of this young cat named David Wood.  You probably didn’t bump into him on the corner since he lives in Alaska, but you have probably bumped into his sites online over the last few months.

David is an up and coming internet network marketer who has done some fabulous work in the area of Article Marketing.  Article Marketing really isn’t anything new.  Internet marketers have been using articles to create valuable content, brand themselves as an expert and drive traffic to their sites for years and years.

So what’s so different about what David is doing?

He’s created some really interesting niche techniques that are very, very subtle…but incredible powerful.  Although he’s been in the network marketing industry for a while, he is brand new online and in the last few months, David has driven over 100,000 visitors to his sites…all for free.

If that isn’t enough, listen to this.  He has been able to use his techniques to get his landing pages (from a marketing system that over 15,000 people use) ranked on the first page of Google.   That’s right.  He’s gotten a replicated web site ranked on the first page for some seriously competitive search terms like “Online MLM Training,” all through article and videos.

If you never have been in internet marketing before this may not mean much to you, but the internet marketers reading this are either thinking it’s BS or falling off the back of their chair.

That is incredibly hard to do.

If you are new to business online, let’s look at it this way.  Among other things, Google ranks sites by Relevancy, Popularity and Originality.  (A lot like people used to rank each other in high school!)  So here you are with your new company and you are really proud of the amazing looking replicated site the company gave you.  When you search for your company…your personal site is nowhere to be found.

And it never will be.

Your site isn’t unique in the least bit…it’s just like all the other affiliates with the company.  No offense, but Google could care less about your replicated site.

But learning some basic (and some very clever) strategies with blogs and article marketing, you could be raking in dozens of leads a day for your business.

To give you an example, here’s one fantastic strategy that is just incredibly juicy and can get you ranked fast and stay there.

• Write your article (after doing a little keyword research) and publish it, preferably to your blog since the search engines love blogs so much.
• Spin your article out to the top social bookmarking sites.
• Promote your article with some video.
• Publish your article to as many sites as possible all linking back to your blog. (There are tools to help you do this that you can find on my site)

Anyone can do that.  All you need is some guidance from a mentor/coach, some tools to make your life a bit easier and the will to make it happen.

If you follow some basic strategy and are consistent in your efforts, you will get rewarded.  Marketing online in many ways is no different from marketing offline.  You use some tools, you lead with value, you engage people in conversation, you follow up and you stay consistent.

Just like David Wood Article Marketing Strategies, there is a ton of great content online to support your marketing efforts.  You just have to find someone you connect with and trust and is someone who you would want to work with.

It’s all available for you to take advantage of.

The only reason that you wouldn’t have tons of leads everyday waiting for you to follow up with…is because you don’t take action.

And that choice, my friend, is all yours.

To learn how to capitalize on artitcle marketing and generate an endless amount of leads just like David Wood, subscribe below for instant access.

Is Richard Branson teaching a class on network marketing?

No, he isn’t.

Honestly, since I have never even seen anything published by him on the subject, I couldn’t honestly say what he thinks about the industry.

But I have built a large part of my life around the study of successful people and success itself and key fundamentals hold true regardless of the industry.  If you take a look at Sir Richard’s life and look at how he’s lived it and how he runs   his businesses, you will find many nuggets to pull out for your daily use.  Assuming you are a network marketer, these lessons can support you in growing a massive, long term business…and enjoy every step of the ride.

Take Risks
If Branson’s life has been about anything it’s been about taking the leap first, then figuring out what to do.  Sure, he has planned and executed extremely well, but throughout his career he was constantly faced with challenges.  Those challenges always brought choice.

Branson has consistently chosen the biggest possible direction, regardless of whether he knew exactly how he was going to do it at the time.  He’s followed the motto – commit first, then figure it out.

We often think we need to study this, learn that, be this or be that before we can really get after growing a huge business.  Just go for it.  Life rewards the courageous.

Push Through Your Perceived Limits
Branson can almost be viewed as an adventure extremist. Whether it’s the hot air balloon journey’s attempting to circumnavigate the globe or the transatlantic crossing in an open hull Hobie cat, he has constantly push his own personal limits.  He’s not only done the above feats once, but numerous times.  He’s a man that, even still at 60 years old, is constantly pushing himself to learn more, do more, become more and achieve more.

In MLM, this stops people in their tracks.  People get to a point of uncomfortable and shrink.  It’s only on the other side of the turbulent atmosphere that we get to enjoy the peacefulness of outer space.  Push through your self-imposed limitation and you will surprise the hell out of yourself as to what you are capable of.

Delegate & Empower People
As of this article in January 2010, it’s reported that the Virgin Brand now owns more than 200 companies.  I have also heard from reliable sources (although I couldn’t confirm) that Sir Richard himself owns 432 companies.  Let’s just take the 200 number.  That’s 200 companies; all with infrastructure, products, employees, salaries, benefits, customers, marketing…you get the picture.  And it’s not like they are all in related industries…the Virgin brand owns pursuits in music, aviation, beverage, finance, literature, mobile technology, radio, wines…and don’t forget…SPACE TRAVEL!

There is simply no way to build an empire like that if you hold on too tight.  Branson often says he hires incredible people and believes in their ability to carry out their jobs.  You have to let people surprise you.  They often will if you empower them to do so.

Build your team up. Give them the tools to be successful and let them step up and lead.  Get new people involved early and see what they can do.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Surround Yourself With People You Trust
The Virgin Group of companies is run in a very unique way.  Individual companies are entrusted to carry out their daily functions and run their business.  These companies are all part of the Virgin brand and at some level, that brand has an identity all its own.  The Virgin brand is managed by an advisory and special sector teams around the world.  They support all the companies on finance, marketing, branding and customer experience.

In every aspect though, Branson has put amazing teams together and even though they have 50,000+ employees in 29 countries, they work as an excited, tight family birthing new companies all the time.

There is nothing that will crash a team faster than people in leadership roles who don’t have integrity.  Keep your core group in close contact and build together with the same core values, purpose and mission.

Take Really Good Care Of Your Customers
Anyone who has ever done business with a Virgin company knows there is something a little different going on at these businesses.  There is a feeling of fun, energy and passion.  Take a look at the limo-like cabin of a Virgin America plane.

On Virgin Atlantic flights, you can even get foot massages!  With the Virgin brand, it goes deeper than that.  They started a program on international flight that people can donate their loose international currency.

Virgin team members would collect in and donate out into the countries it came from.  A simple, yet brilliant idea to make a difference with a massive amount of people.

Make sure you are communicating actively with your team.  Send them gifts if you can.  At the very least, send them cards and notes with things you know are of interest to them.  Treat them with unprecedented respect and courtesy.

Build Your Brand
Branson, very early on in his career, went on a quest to make Virgin the most recognizable brand in the world.  I don’t know if he has done that yet, but he is certainly well on his way.  Everything they do is about furthering their brand.

They have clearly identified what Virgin stands for and that message is alive in every single thing they do.  It’s incredibly obvious.  From customer service to manufacturing to packaging…who they are comes shining through.

Have you figured out what you are all about?  How do you want people to experience you?  What do you want them to say about you when you aren’t there to listen? Get clear on your core values…choose your niche and start building your brand.

Always Find A Way
If you read Losing My Virginity, Richard Branson’s first book, he tells the story of the beginnings of the Virgin brand.  At age 15, he started a magazine called Student and in it, they started selling records through direct mail.  Well, one day the mail carriers were poised to go on strike.  Branson knew he had to do something to keep distribution going on the records so he found a 2^nd story space and opened the  first Virgin record store.  Over the years, he opened just a couple more of those things!

This resiliency is inherent to who Branson is.  He just finds a way to get it done.  When you are that committed, the Universe conspires on your behalf and you often get rewarded many times over for your efforts.

What do you allow you to stop you in your business?  Do a few “no’s” send you into a self-destructive tizzy?  Or, do you just figure out how to win and get it done?

Have Fun While Building Your Business
If you learn anything from Branson it should be this.  Enjoy the fricken journey.  He works his tail off and plays just as hard.  In fact, fun is such an inherent part of the Virgin brand it’s virtually impossible not to have some play mixed with their work.

Early in growing his empire, he bought Necker Island, an island in the British Virgin Islands (of course) as a remote getaway and escape.  He has spent a ton of time there and now, actually, you can too if you want.

Building a business is a lot of work.  Things that are worth having in life are worth working for.  I honestly believe that the more we can wrap fun and joy into our work lives the more successful we are and the faster we’ll grow a business that we love.

Millionaire maker T. Harv Ekar believes in putting 10% of your net income after taxes into a “Play Account” to do just that…PLAY.  This account MUST be emptied every month or every quarter.

Branson on MLM
An early mentor of mine used to say, “Success leaves clues.”  Meaning if you look at successful people, there are clues everywhere as to what makes them that way.  Figuring out the clues is the easy part.  The question is…will you do the things you need to do to grow your business and transform your life?

The education and training to build an incredibly lucrative and joy-filled business is readily available.  Whether you apply what you learn is another story altogether.  The world needs people like you to step into their power and be great.  Mediocrity won’t change the world.  Choose greatness.

If you haven’t opted-in yet, do so now to stay up to date with all of my latest posts.

Lot’s of people pump out great content and if you do that long enough in our wonderfully connected small online world, you will build up a tribe of followers.  In the fast response world of social media, if you are doing something good…someone is going to tell other people about you.

Well, what if you want to speed up that process?

What if you want to aggressive build followers so you can grow your business?

Here are some fantastic tools that can support your efforts, save you time, give you a much broader audience to speak to and ultimately…build your subscriber list faster than Joey Chestnut scarf’s done hotdogs.

1. Social Oomph – Social Oomph (originally TweetLater) is a web-based program that offers a ton of great syndication and timesaving features.  The feature I enjoy the most is being able to schedule Tweets in advance.  Although I love everything about social media, I find that if I am not strategic, it can be a huge time suck, pulling me in for endless hours.

I look at what new posts I am going to write over the course of a week and anything else I may be talking about and I schedule a series of tweets to keep the conversation going.  This doesn’t replace all my tweets as I need to get engaged with people and actually have dialogue, but it provides a nice consistency without having to be tied to Twitter all day long.

The paid version of Social Oomph will also allow you to post across multiple platforms, such as Facebook, your blgo, statusnet and ping if you use those.)  Pre-scheduling FB updates is easily worth the $29/mo they charge.  It’s a lot cheaper than an assistant…even if your assistant lives in India.

There are a ton of other cool features like auto-follows/unfollows, vetting members to see who has more Twitter power, auto welcome messages, etc.

Social Oomph simplifies my life and allows me to be much more strategic and have a plan for content syndication.

2. Onlywire – This is a great little tool to help put your blog on steroids, but you won’t get banned from any awards by using it.  In fact, virtually all bloggers, especially those in the home business niche use it religiously.

One of the biggest keys to getting content syndicated by other people is that you need to make it easy for them to do so.  Wordpress plugins like Tweetmeme (another great one) have made it so simple for people to Re-Tweet your message.

Onlywire has taken that concept 26 steps forward.

Onlywire is an automatic submission tool that currently works with 26 social networking and bookmarking platforms.  Once you set your accounts up, you can syndicate your blog to all 26 platforms with a single click.

For your readers that have Onlywire accounts, they can do the same thing for you.

In one click, your new blog post goes up on Twitter & Facebook and is bookmarked on Digg, Mixx, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Tumblr and a ton more.

That’s a lot of back links, baby!

3. Automatic Article Submitter – This is a genius little program.  There are many article submitters available and unfortunately, most of them are crap.  Google ranks based primarily on three things…

Relevancy, Popularity & Originality!

In other words, is your content relevant to people who are searching, are people talking about it (social media and back links) and is it unique?

This tool let’s you create variations of the same article (to create unique content) and then automatically submit it to 200+ article directories online.  This article submitter is good…very good.  If you write 3 articles a week that gets submitted to over 200 directories…just think about how much content that is online after a year!

4. Your Tribe – okay, so this isn’t exactly a tool, it’s more of a strategy, but it’s likely the most powerful one, so I absolutely must include it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of a Tribe, it’s a term that developed from Seth Godin’s book, Tribes, and simply means a group of loyalists who like your work and have a desire to talk about it.

Strategically online, it may be a small group of like-minded entrepreneurs who create an alliance to promote each other’s posts, make comments, rate videos, Re-Tweet and syndicate for each other.

These people do not have to be in your business, you just have to build a relationship that is based on trust, mutual respect and everyone involved has to come from a place of abundance…there is enough for everyone.

What if you had 5 core people in your Tribe and each person had 2,000 Facebook friends, 5,000 Twitter followers, a blog with great content and a YouTube channel with entertaining and educational videos.

First of all, since these people are putting out great content…you WANT to share it with your followers because it is of value to them.  Secondly, when you put out a new blog post, it’s going to be syndicated to over 12,000 Facebookers, 30,000 Tweeters and bookmarked in over 150 places!

That’s some serious awesomeness!

There are many, many more great tools available to you to start building your business online.  There are far too many to count actually.

My suggestion is to find a handful that you really like that you can incorporate into a daily or weekly strategy that works for you and STAY FOCUSED.  Unless something else amazing pops up…just keep driving forward and work your plan.

One of my new personal strategies is that I get up, get a workout in and write content everyday.  I do this before I get caught up in all of the activity that the day will bring.  This way, at the end of the day, I know I put out a new piece of content to add value to people’s life and support my business growth.

What are your favorite tools?  What timesaving and traffic building tools do you use regularly with great success?

Please post a comment and help share the love anyway you can.

Remember high school? For some people it was at absolute blast and for others it was four years of torturous hell. For most people it was some of both.

What I remember most about high school was the feeling of not quite fitting in. I was popular and all and had many external successes, but as you know, our mind often creates an entirely different reality.

I spent a lot of energy trying to be like other people that I thought were cooler, better looking, smarter, funnier, had a better body…you fill in the blank.

It wasn’t until years later as I dove into personal development work that I found out many, many people experienced very similar things. Like me, tons of people lived (and are still living) through comparing themselves to others.

What’s the deal with that?

It’s fricken exhausting, isn’t it?

Why do we run from our own self-expression?

Many people have been doing it their entire lives.

At some level, many people would rather imitate others than just be who they are, as if somehow, the knock-off version of someone else is better than the original version of themselves.

From a business and marketing perspective, this is a slow death. It would be easy to say that this happens because we teach people to model successful people. We say to find someone that has what you want and model them.

Doing what successful people do is certainly a way to success, but unless you model successful habits while developing your authentic self-expression, it’s easy to lose yourself in the process.

Is success worth it if you are just a carbon copy of a bunch of other people?

I think this is one of the big reasons people fail in this world. They don’t trust themselves.

I can speak from personal experience that I have had many incredible ideas that I stuffed away for fear of whether they were good enough, only to act on them years later when I got the balls.

Waiting doesn’t work.

Filtering your ideas against what the rest of the world is doing only dilutes your value.

Vanilla is a pretty boring flavor.

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
- Howard Thurman

Yes, come alive.  That is it.

When it comes to marketing, blogging, copyrighting and presenting your business…sure there are some fundamentals that you want to learn and put in place, but nothing and I mean nothing, can replace your spirit.

If all of your articles, posts and blogs read just like a hundred other people in your niche…why would anyone follow you?

Be fricken original.

We see this all the time online. People model others but forget to make their work their own. The result is bland, boring copy.

Don’t be that guy.

Find your sweet spot. Identify what really lights you up.

Then, focus on letting your own light shine instead of trying to borrow a tiny bit of someone else’s.

“There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”
- Martha Graham

So, my dear friends, it’s time to get jiggy with it. Go get your freak on! Your authentic, true to yourself, completely original, flava boiling over…self-expression.

Choose today, right now, to do ONE THING that celebrates your self-expression. Let the tiger (or tigress) out of the cage. We want to hear you roar.

It’s time the world sees what you (the one and only you) are really made of.

Please comment if you connected with this post and tweet/re-post to your heart’s desires.

Did you know that it is estimated that we are now exposed to more information in a single day than our parents were in an entire month at the same age?

Take that same comparison back a generation to your grandparents and the reference point is an entire year.

That’s insane, right.

Consider the following: Facebook with all the newsfeeds, Twitter, YouTube, Good old fashioned TV, magazines, RSS feeds, Google alerts, emails, the internet in general, Iphones, smart phones, Ipods…it’s daunting.

But it’s true.  So much, so very fast.

There is no place that this is more evident than in the world of online marketing and social media.  I just came on the scene over the last year or so and I have been studying feverishly.   I tell my clients and subscribers… “I know more than most and less than many.”

When you are trying to build a business online…it’s tough to know where to start.

Who do you listen to?  There are so many ‘experts.’  Who is right?  Which direction do you go?

So many people come online and try to find a quick fix.  That’s not the right mindset.  Business online, in many ways, is the same as offline.  You need to commit to learning a core set of skills and you need to provide lasting value for your customers.   Most importantly, you need to continuously learn how to become better at doing both.

Some people think they can hide behind an online veil.  That may be true for a while, but if you want to build a long term, successful business, you need to be authentic in all of your communications and business dealings.

It’s easy to see who is putting out content that they really believe is valuable and who is putting out content that is simply to generate traffic.   The people I am going to share with you do both consistently by focusing on the first.  Their content rocks and people love them for it.

HERE ARE MY 5 TOP INTERNET MARKETERS OF 2009.

(These are in no particular order)

1. Pete Cashmore

Most people are going…who?  You are more likely to know Pete’s blog…Mashable.  (http://mashable.com) If you had to pick just one site to visit to learn about everything web 2.0, Mashable is it.  In less than 5 years, Pete and his team have grown Mashable into the goto site of millions of online readers.  Their content is fun, intelligent, creative and always packed full of relevant material.

What’s great about learning about social media and web 2.0 marketing from a source like mashable is that you can pick and choose what calls you and dive deeper into any subject without the personality of a guru breathing down your neck with pressure to buy this or that.  You can certainly buy lots of things on the site, but every post isn’t riddled with them.

There is so much fricken value on their site it’s amazing.  With Alexa.com ranking Mashable with a top 500 most trafficked site in the world, lots of people agree.  It’s one of the top 10 most profitable blogs on the planet.  How would you like to have 42,000 back links?  Wow!

2. Chris Brogan

www.chrisbrogan.com

Brogan is a social media and business development specialist who flat out just delivers.  His content is clean, focused and immediately applicable.  I actually only found Chris a few months back but was immediately drawn to his message and way of being.

For example, lot’s of people (including myself) provide content in the form of lists.  Top 10 ways to drive more traffic to your site, 5 ways to become a Twitter rockstar, etc, etc.  Well, Brogan frequently does too…but his lists are a touch bigger.  For example, here are a few:

50 Ways To Take Your Blog To The Next Level

40 Ways To Deliver Killer Blog Content

50 Ways On Using Twitter For Business

Like I said…Chris delivers.  Someone could be brand new online, join Chris’s site and with focus and determination, learn how to build a massive following and make money.  Brogan rocks.  His photo in the about me section is a little scary, but he still rocks!

3. Brian Clark

Again, just like Pete Cashmore, most people are going, “who?” That’s because like Pete, Brian Clark is branded by his website Copyblogger.  www.copyblogger.com As you can imagine from the name, it’s all about copywriting.  But that’s not the whole truth.  Copyblogger is about so much more.

At the core, it’s copywriting to create traffic to your site.  For me though, it’s about cultivating your entire online presence in a way that is both reflective of who you are and drives traffic.  Both of those are important.

Their cast of writers is witty, personable and extremely relevant.  I subscribe to both the newsletter and blog feeds and save every article.  They are that good.

4. Gary Vaynerchuk

www.winelibrarytv.com

I’ve included Gary on this list because Gary doesn’t teach internet marketing or social media marketing…he lives it.  Gary took his father’s wine store in Springfield, NJ from $4 million a year to over $50 million a year with more than 50% of that coming from internet sales.

Gary’s the perfect example of how to use video marketing, social networking and your authentic personality to explode a brand…or as Gary would say, “Bring The Thunder!”

If you love wine, Gary is your guy.  But also, savvy marketers will watch everything Gary does and how he does it.  He is a brilliant showman and has turned a traditionally stuffy topic of wine tasting/knowledge into a world where every man is welcomed.  If you want to learn how to build community, go check out Gary’s site…you will be one of over 90,000 people a day to do so.

5. Jeremy Shoemaker

www.shoemoney.com

Shoemaker is a bit unconventional, even by Gary Vaynerchuk’s standards, but you can’t argue with his results or his authenticity.   He’s the real deal, growing his passion over the years into a massive business.  He’s transformed himself from a 400 lb techno-nerd to a lean, mean internet marketing machine.

Jeremy has created some wildly popular programs, tools and sites and his blog is a constant in the Technorati’s 100 most visited blogs.  At the end of the day, Jeremy’s post are fun, creative and full of usable info.

He calls it like it is.  He doesn’t hold back.  He doesn’t care if he gets his hands dirty in order to create a message that is powerful.  Jeremy may not be for everyone, but with an alexa.com rating around 5,500 and 35,000 daily blog readers, he’s for many people.

These are my top 5 but there are many more

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I am the first to say that there are so many talented people online.  I have found these guys to pump out consistent content that I enjoy reading and find incredibly valuable.

Just as importantly, I like their “flavor.”  Their authenticity shines through and I am engaged.  You may or may not feel the same way, but if you want to do well online, you should find some mentors that you connect with.

Go check them out if you haven’t already and let me know what you think.

Who makes your Fab 5 list?  Leave your comments with the 5 people who most influence you online.

Would you like to capitalize on the marketing strategies of the most successful retailers in the world?  They easily and consistently get us to buy their products…and we do it almost instinctively.

The truth is pretty close.  Great brands create buyer loyalty.

Most network marketers have no idea how to use these strategies themselves.

Check out this video for some of the basic of Push (what virtually all network marketers do) vs. Pull Marketing (what all network marketing leaders do).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Please leave your comments and share this video with your networks.

As an emerging blogger online, like all of us, you want traffic.  You want people to rush to your blog with every new post.  You want people to hang on your every word.  Don’t you?

So here you are…you have identified your niche.  You are clear about your brand.   You are committed to writing a successful blog.  You sit down at your keyboard to crank out a new post and your start to write.

You publish it and wait.

And wait.

You check your dashboard for your stats.

8 visitors in 3 days.  Ouch.

You swear you can hear crickets chirping in the background somewhere.

“What gives?” you say to yourself.  You think, “This is phenomenal content.”

It may very well be, but it’s a bit like the old adage about a tree falling in the woods, does it actually make a sound if no one is there to hear it?

Of course your blog post still exists if no one is there to read it…but does it even matter?

Blogging has emerged as the center of most online marketers world and it’s incredibly valuable to understand how to cultivate traffic.  If your message is good, which I am sure it is, then the world deserves to hear about it.

Here is a simple introduction to 4.7 powerful strategies to get people running to read your blog faster than a bunch of drunken Scotsman run towards sheep.

1. Keyword Target Your Post – Sometimes great posts create themselves, but other times you create the post after identifying a keyword(s) you want to target.  Take some time and use a free keyword tool like WordTracker or Nichebot Classic to research some of the ideas you have.  You are looking for the wonderful combination of two factors…high search traffic and low competition.  This is the Holy Grail for internet marketing and great organic SEO rankings.

For example, if you were researching “Doggy Day Care” and found that it had 250 searches a day and 320 competitors, but      “Doggy Day Care Services” had 110 searches but only 35 competitors, you may want to go after the keyword with lower competition and dominate the page rankings.

2. Keyword Integration – Once you have identified the keyword phrase you want to go after, you need to integrate it into your post.  For best results, put it in the title of the post such as, “How To Find The Best Doggy Day Care Services In Your Neighborhood.”

It’s not enough to just put your keyword in the title, in order to really write a successful blog post, you must integrate it into your post as well.  Don’t be a keyword whore, but use it as much as possible to maximize your keyword density and improve your rankings.

If you look back over this post, I’ve pimped out my keyword phrase three times already and have a number of supportive phrases.  Unlike the unfortunate streetwalkers, these pimped out keyword phrases will keep working for you day in and day out without ever complaining.

3. Send Your Post To Your Inner Circle Network – my back itches, please scratch it.  Just let me know when you need a little help yourself.  This is a great rule to follow for bloggers.  Establish a group of partners that you appreciate their content and they appreciate yours.  Send your post through to them and ask them to comment on it, share it, Tweet it, Digg it and any other social networking or bookmarking site that lights them up.

Google is a bit like high school.  It’s a huge popularity contest.  If your content is relevant and people start talking, Google will love you.

4. Ask People To Take Action In Your Post – in addition to your inner circle, let all readers know that you would appreciate them sharing your post with others.  Ask them to share it with their networks.  If it’s good content, they should want to.  Content sharing is a great way for people to building up their lists…they may as well use yours.

Once you ask, make sure you provide them the means to do it.  Install a Wordpress plug-in like Sociable or Share This to make is simple for people to tell the world about your amazing and successful blog post. <– Pimped out again!

4.7 Write Within Your Brand – Everyone may not agree with this, as there are lots of ways to put content out on the web.  But I think your brand is extremely important and I believe you want it to shine through as much as possible in everything you do.

When you first start writing your blog, it’s easy to get caught up in just writing to write.  You need to give it a bit more consideration than that.  This is a piece of your work…give it your personality.  If you would never ever talk about sheep boffing Scotsman, whores and pimps…then you shouldn’t.

Be you…all the time.  Authenticity is key.  Over time, your tribe will attach themselves to your brand & your style.  That’s what keeps you at the top of their mind and keeps them coming back like Courtney Love to the Betty Ford Clinic.

So, people go get your blog on!  Be creative & have some fun.

Please leave your comments below.  If you feel your network would benefit from this article, please share it with them.  Blow up Twitter.  Plaster it on your wall in Facebook.  Help me get some Google love…I often felt left out in high school…don’t scar me again!

Until next time…

Keith O’Brien

http://authentic-networker.com