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.

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