Allow me to tell you about a man named Artimis who worked as an apprentice for many years as an iron worker. From the rise of the sun to the darkness of the dusk he labored hard for his Master. Amongst the ten other apprentices, none of them were more skilled and trusted than he.

One day the Master walked in with an announcement that would change all of their lives forever. The Master gathered the men and said to them “I have an opportunity for five of you to open your own iron shop. I will invest the money to open and run the shop for the first years. You will pay me a percentage of sales until you have repaid my investment at which point you will be your own Master. Discuss amongst yourselves who is ready and come to me with your answer.”

Artimis was beside himself with excitement. After all this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. He decided to go home to tell his wife after the days work had ended and talk it over. Artimis recognized the greatness of the opportunity presented to him, but was a bit unsure because of the major change it would make in his life. He would have to work harder than ever before and spend even more time away from his family in order to repay the debt and become his own Master.

The next day Artimis arrived at the Masters tent. Artimis said “Master, I am ready and would greatly appreciate an opportunity to be amongst the five you select”. The Master looked down at Artimis and said “I am disappointed in you Artimis, you are my most skilled apprentice. I was certain you would be amongst the very first to my tent to claim a spot. Your hesitation has cost you as five others less skilled than you took the opportunity before the day was done. Fortune favors those who help themselves Artimis, and you did not act when Fortune handed you an opportunity.”

Your invitation to be one of 100!

It takes new ideas to establish new patterns and habits. It also takes the support of a community to overcome challenges. This is an invitation to join our Soxialize community and participate in the 10 ways in 10 days challenge for free. Over 10 days you will read new strategies to increase website traffic without spending any money. Simply enter your name and email address below.

Soxialize community members have already started working through the 10 way in 10 days challenge.

It’s 100% absolutely free for 100 people! Are you going to secure your spot or will you hesitate?

Hint: Once the 100 spots are filled the guide will no longer be available for free! What are you waiting for?

What if I told you the way to increase you online presence was by going offline?

In fact, what would you do if were banned from email, instant messenger and oh yes Twitter for life right now? If you said go to Facebook you missed the point.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” – John Donne

Human beings thrived because of relationships, alliances and communities they built long before the internet existed. The internet removed the need for face to face time and made it easier to talk to virtual friends in your underwear.

Online social watering holes have somehow clouded our thinking and made it ok to exclusively meet people virtually. I know people who have thousands of followers on Twitter and they tell me “I have no idea who they are or why they follow me on Twitter.”

Let’s Meet Bob, he is “virtually challenged”

Bob is a fictional character from the 10 Ways In 10 Days: Guide to Free Traffic Building, which by the way is free and still available for download!

Bob is a smart guy, not to ugly and has a pretty charming personality. He is trying to build his online presence and is having trouble getting any traffic to his site. He tries Twitter, YouTube, blogging and several ebooks. Spending all his spare time online nothing seems to work. Until…

One day Bob decides to attend a search conference. Sure it costs a bit of money so he saves up. He does a bit of homework and makes a quick list of the people he would like to meet face to face and ask questions to. After all he is paying money and wants to make sure he walks away better than he started.

At the conference Bob meets several Rockstar Bloggers and several people who he never heard of that are also successful online. He buys drinks asks all his questions and makes sure to hand out his contact info to keep in touch.

Bob comes home realizing he should have gone to conferences sooner. Not so much for the sessions but for the face to face time he experienced with knowledgeable people. He also made a few friends who have linked to his site. The more Bob attends conferences, the more he becomes confident and creates a network of personal connections that help him leaps and bounds over any previous virtual connections.

Bob makes a list of some great conferences to go to:

SMX Advanced
SMX West
SMX East
Pubcon
SES San Jose
Affiliate Summit East & West

Bob can’t go to all of them as cash is a bit tight at the moment. Doing some surfing on the net he finds MeetUp.com and quickly joins several groups in his area. Bob is well on his way to increasing his online presence by going offline and making personal and not virtual friendships.

Guerrilla Blogging

Staying in line with the Guerrilla Blogging series. Let’s take a look at how the above story about Bob breaks down to Objectives, Strategies and Tactics. If you need a quick brush up, you can read the Objective, Strategies an Tactics post in the Guerrilla Blogging series.

The Objective defined above was:

Increase Online Presence (a.k.a Letting people know I exist, have a website that sells a product or service and or have a blog)

Strategies:

Attend Conferences
Go to MeetUp groups

Tactics:

- Making a list of people to meet and questions to ask
- Engaging in conversation
- Handing out business cards
- Handing out swag (ie. shirts, stickers, etc…)
- Paying for drinks or dinner
- Show up early and stay out late
- Exchange contact information

Final Thoughts

Go have something new happen to you! Put yourself in a group of people and belong to a community offline to help improve your online efforts.

Check out the conferences listed above also visit MeetUp.com and see what’s going on in your area. Make real connections!

Do you go to Conferences or a MeetUp group? If you have gone to Conferences which ones worked best for you?

Objectives, Strategies and Tactics

Did your eyes just glaze over? If they did don’t worry about it, for a long time I felt like a “deer in headlights” when someone talked to me about Objectives, Strategies and Tactics.

Did you know a military battle and your blog have many similarities? That’s right! Of course you are not diving for cover from sniper fire, but if you want to increase traffic and readership you need to understand what makes them similar.

Fact: Leaders in the military define Objectives, Strategies and Tactics before, during and after real battle scenarios.

Going To Battle

Many of you have served in the military and I would presonally like to thank you for doing so. For the rest of us who have not had the experience, let’s imagine we are just out of boot camp, head shaved and primed for battle.

You are standing in formation when you hear the command “Attention! General on deck!” You see before you a man with more awards pinned to his chest than you have ever seen before. Decorated, proven and respected his first words to you are “We will win this battle!” What he just told you is the Objective, in simpler terms “win the battle”.

As he continues he says, “You will be in one of three groups who will shutdown enemy communications, provide distraction and flank the enemy.” Now what we just heard are the Strategies. Of all the offensive strategies in the military arsenal the General has chosen these three to win the battle.

You hear your name called out and your group assignement. As you huddle in the group you are explained the details of your mission. You are now hearing the overal Tactic along with broken down tasks. Everyone has a task and each must be completed without fail.

Each task is important to the success of the Tactic. Each Tactic is important to the success of the Strategy. Finally each Strategy is important to complete the ultimate Objective.

Guerrilla Blogging

Now lets apply the battle scenario above to your blog. We have already established our Objective which was to Increase Traffic and Readership. Most of us do not have unlimited resources and an army of people at our disposal, so lets make a short term Objective for a beginner blogger:

Increase Traffic to 100 visitors a day

We are going to add one extra element to our Objective and that is a hard date:

Objective achieved by when: In 30 days from today – September 13th, 2009

Did you feel your heart squeeze when you had to pick a date? That’s a normal feeling because now you have a finite amount of time to achieve your Objective. This is important because it defines what strategies you need to use.

Sustained traffic like 100 visitors per day requires a Strategy that is a bit more basic. Everyone starts at zero and increasing traffic requires people to know you exist and liking what you write about. Keeping it simple here are a couple of Strategies:

Blogging
Blog Commenting

Seems simple so far right? Just like the General in our story above there are tons of Strategies that can be used. Being a smart General is knowing what Strategies fit the time frame, resources at hand and will lead to achieving the Objective most efficiently.

Lets break down the two Strategies into several real Tactics you can use to reach the Objective.

Blogging:
- Write a weekly series on your blog
- Write a guide
- Write several How To or DIY articles
- Publish new articles no less than 3 times a week
- Review products or services

Blog Commenting:
- Find and build a list of related blogs to comment on
- Comment on no less than 10 blogs per day
- Write great comments instead of one liners
- Setup gravatar to show logo on comments
- Engage in conversation via comments

Now you are ready for battle! You have an Objective with time frame, Strategies that have been used with great success by others and Tactics to keep you focused on what you have to do. Using this framework like the General, you can now create new Objectives with corresponding Strategies and Tactics as the needs of your site change.

Final Thoughts

Knowing what Strategies to use and developing new Tactics comes with time. The General didn’t get his rank and respect by reading books, at one point he was in the trenches. Start out simple and measure your results, be honest with where you are at and what you can accomplish in the time defined in your Objective.

Many of you have already reached or far surpassed the 100 visitor per day mark. In the spirit of Soxializing and helping new bloggers, what Strategies/Tactics worked for you?

Twitter account users hand over username and passwords for just about any new online tool or report created by some marketer or programmer.

Would you so easily hand over your password to your email account or the pin to your ATM to see stats?
continue

How many times have you heard great reviews about a restaurant, only to be told something like “just between us though, don’t eat the shrimp!” Just like that, the desire to want to eat the restaurants great food is tarnished by the fact you might get sick to your stomach.

No doubt your customers, clients and even website visitors are saying this about you to others right now! So how can you find out what your “shrimp” is?

Know Your Customers

Keeping in contact with your clients, customers and website visitors is very important. In fact getting to know them just shy of a personal level will probably be sufficient. Following up with them after services have been rendered or products purchased can provide insight on how your service or product rates. Most importantly you must ask something like “Now that you have received our services, is there something we can improve upon for you?” or if you have a product “Now that you have used our product, how can we make it better for you?”

Website visitors are a bit different as the exchange is in information versus a product or service. Luckily several solutions already exist that allow for communication between web visitors like:

Blogs (WordPress) – Adding a blog enables you to keep visitors updated with your latest news. The great part is WordPress comes with a comments section where visitors can leave feedback on what you write.

Forums (vBulletin) – Adding a forum gives your visitors a way to exchange ideas and provide feedback on

FeedBack (Kampyle) – Kampyle has repackaged and old tried but true method of asking for feedback. They simply put a button on your site that asks for feedback! Kampyle provides analytics data and easy cut and paste code to get started.

Newsletters (aWeber) – If you don’t have a list start building one. Its better to have one and not need it instead of needing and not having it. Keep in contact with visitors, provide them extra tips, discounts or secret new products. When its time to ask for feedback, you have a list at your fingertips.

Fix What Is Wrong

Getting the information is one thing, acting on it is entirely different. I am as guilt as the next guy, sometimes I sit on information a bit to long. But customers of Soxialize software get my immediate attention and I make sure to place request for enhancements at the top of the priority list.

To go back to the restaurant story, what would happen if the restaurant kept serving bad shrimp? If they didn’t changed the recipe or supplier and kept serving poor food. I will tell you, eventually more people would get sick and the word would spread rather fast. Aside from getting the health inspector to visit, customers would label the restaurant as a poor food experience.

Now let’s say that the restaurant Chef took the news of the poor shrimp dish and acted on it. The Chef fires the cook, finds a new supplier and changes the recipe. Now when a person says “between us, just don’t eat the shrimp” the reply would be “why not? I had it the other day and it was great!”

Stop Serving Bad Shrimp!

Everyone makes mistakes, no software is released without bugs, no book can go to publishing without editing and a hair will always make it into someone food. What you do about it is what makes the difference between an isolated incident or a reflection of poor quality products or services.

Go the extra mile, fix whats wrong, occasionally give a dinner on the house and keep your customers happy!