Here’s what we do know…

1. Business that are considered leaders in a market or niche will survive and may even thrive.
2. Companies that have a steady stream of new, low cost, quality leads will always have new revenue to count on.
3. Executives and business owners that are considered authorities in their field will always be in demand.

As a business owner or executive you have more control over these things than you ever did. Social media is accessible to anyone. Their is no economic barrier, most of the ways to participate are free or low cost. The barriers to success are education, passion and persistence.

I’m always amazed when I meet a struggling business owner that tells me they don’t have time for social media marketing. Or an executive that lost a job, or is worried about losing a job in this economy but does not try to find ways to make themselves more important to their industry and company.

The fact of the matter is you can create a secure future for your business and your career if you put the effort and time into learning new marketing tools. Just start learning about, and doing these things and you can not only survive, but thrive:

• Start blogging and commenting on other thought leader blogs immediately. You can literally set up a blog in 15 minutes. If you have been working at something for any amount of time you have knowledge and a point of view. Share it and get others to participate. This will make you a perceived authority in your market. Potential customers and employers really like that because it takes the “risk” out of buying into you. Once your blog is set up, start commenting on other important blogs in your market or niche. Make sure you set up profiles where you can so people can look you up when they want to see your picture or get to know you after you comment. Copyblogger has some great tips on what to write in your blog.
• Write one 500-600 word article a week and publish it to article directories like ezine articles. These articles will be picked up by websites that are looking for content to publish. The article pages on the directories are also indexed by search engines…so make sure you use one anchor text link in each article and put a two sentence bio at the bottom of each article with a link to your website. You get two for one here, SEO for your site and you build authority in your market. All the directories have great tutorials about how to write an article.
• Over time you can learn about and implement many other social media strategies like Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, video distribution…the list is endless. But don’t get overwhelmed.

If you are not blogging and writing articles, just get started now. That alone will get you noticed and put you ahead of most of your competition. Be consistent and persistent because it will take a few months to start to get noticed.

What do you think? Can you do this?

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….

Building authority in the new distributed web is critical to the success of your Internet marketing efforts. Let’s look at the definition of authority for a minute to better understand why:

au-thor-i-ty noun: [1] A citation (e.g. from a book) used in defense or support; [2] the source from which the citation is drawn; [3] and individual cited or appealed to as an expert.

On the web, the way Google and other search engines see authority is through links from other sites to your site. How influential are those other sites and how many of them link to your site also play a big part in your perceived authority by search engines. So this concept of building authority is very important because while you build authority on the web, other sites will be linking to your site and your business will win search engine rankings (SEO). It becomes self perpetuating…very cool if you can do it.

Here’s the way Brian puts it in his report;

“In order to get the power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior online, you need to become an authority that others cite (link to) in their online content. Which means, of course, you need a content-rich website that demonstrates your authority in the first place.

Your content actually demonstrates your expertise, compared with a website or bio page that claims expertise. This is a crucial distinction, because it truly levels the playing field and allows anyone to come along and build authority that outpaces even recognized and credentialed experts in a particular niche or field.”

The truth about authority perception by humans or machines is what people say about you is much more important than what you way about yourself!

How do you get people talking? Have a point of view and let people know through content you publish on and off of your webiste. Use a blog, articles, guest blogging, commenting, videos, podcasts…the list is endless.

The key is creating content now. Imagine, you have been working your entire adult life building your business and developing a great reputation. Then, some upstart comes into your market and starts publishing content, doing webinars, and suddenly, they are the perceived expert in your niche. Not fun…

We will have a webinar on this shortly….stay tuned.