How To Win Friends To Influence People

Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the bestselling self-help books ever published, the reason is it works. Relationships are the single most powerful element to success in business and life…online and offline.

As the web gets more social, winning friends online can make you immensely influential. It all goes back to that basic truth about building authority:

What others say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

So, the goal in your social media marketing program is to make friends with influential people in your niche or industry who trust, like and talk about your business and expertise. Make friends with social media power users in your niche/market who can promote your content on Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. Make friends with people on Twitter who can retweet your content to their followers. Once that happens, other followers will start doing the same, and the benefits of authority really start to compound.

Key here is to target your activity in social media…go deep within a community versus covering lots of ground but not really getting to know anyone in the community (especially the people who run the community). Spend time searching the major social networks as well as local blogs and social networks to identify a handful of active communities you can participate in. You can search by geography as well as market niche and interest.

Start targeting influential communities and participate. Listen and try to give something to the community before you start to sell anything. Take conversations offline at the right time so you can discuss how your can help each other grow your respective businesses. That’s how this stuff works….