The Online Sunshine Plan

Your community fits your passion and fits your solution. Don’t consider out of the rapidly growing tens of thousands of social networks that you have to even join twenty in order to server your community.

You want to find those entry points into your community which are active and while appeal to your interests, your capabilities, and your preferences. Your level of social activity is up to you.

Facebook isn’t the best social network for everyone, and actually isn’t always the best niche group to join.

You want to find groups which deal with your particular niche, your precise area of expertise. In finding these groups, you also want to find active groups (lots of posts there) and study up the high-volume posts in that group. This tells you what people are interested in – within that community.

At this point, you want to listen. Only listen. Note what conversations are happening and what solutions people are looking for. And be the good listener – find out what these people are about and how their own sites are set up.

Marketing goes social by not selling, but educating, enlightening, and entertaining. You will find these 3 E’s in all popular posts, either by themselves or in combinations. What you won’t find is promotions.

By looking up what the pulling content is and who is saying what, plus what their own website looks at, you can start finding experts. And this is a key study all on it’s own.

Learning from the Experts in your Niche

There is nothing wrong with sitting at the feet of masters, or even mimicking someone else’s successful patterns in order to learn how to duplicate their success. Some tips below thanks to training by Charles Heflin:

Some of what you will want to learn from these:

• Keep your audience informed about timely information

• Gain content ideas to engage your audience with

• Begin networking with them to grow your credibility

• Learn what to sell and how to sell it

• Learn what is important to your audience

• Learn what it takes to compete

• Learn how to create better products/services

• Learn what inspires participation from the social crowd

And there are probably 5 reasons to do so:

1. Quickly find the cutting edge of your market

2. Know who is influencing your market

3. Become an expert yourself

4. Develop alliances and relations with the top of your industry

5. Rise above the chatter in your market by becoming recognized as an expert through mention by the experts

These are pretty self-explanatory and are all achieved through homework and study.

First, how to find them.

Alltop – search by categories. Find relevant authors and subscribe to their RSS feeds in Google Reader.
Technorati – look up your keyword and look for blogs. Check out the top-ranked blogs and again, subscribe to their RSS feed.
Blogrolls of the experts you find are also sources for related experts they trust. Follow the link, subscribe to that feed – and you can even follow the blogrolls of that site, continuing (without going down a rabbit hole) until you have enough really valuable experts to follow.
Google Blog Search – similarly.

How to know if they are actually an expert? Study their site. If it only exists to sell ads, forget it. Unless you are studying how to sell ads. Ask yourself the questions that are obvious:

• Is this person giving real value through his site?

• Is the site just a promotion for his sales?

• Does that “expert” care – does he respond to comments (or even accept them)

• Is that expert really contributing to the community – or just touting himself?

• Is there more sales offers than content on the main page you arrive at?

• Are the areas your eyes go to first dominated by promotion or valuable content?

Another tool for determining expertise is Yahoo! Site Explorer. This free online tool shows the backlinks coming into that site.

Low quality sites will have:

• Little to no quality content

• Little to no incoming links from social networks

• A lack of inbound links from other blogs or websites

• All of their inbound links are from social networks, especially bookmarking type networks

How to use the Yahoo! Site Explorer:

Step 1: Go to Yahoo.com
Step 2: Type ‘link:domain’ in the search box
Step 3: Select ‘Entire Site’
Step 4: Browse the listings

Now browse the results that come up to determine their quality.

If you are new to a market you should spend more time determining who your experts are prior to following them in your Google Reader.