The Online Sunshine Plan

VI. Promotion

Money and the amount of friends you have do not accurately measure anything. They are no end result to your stay on this planet. Scammers and others fall for this ego-trap of accumulating money by doing whatever they think gets them more of it. They don’t realize that money is simply a measure of the value you’ve given away to others.

In social media, people can think that the amount of “friends” they have, or followers, or subscribers measure how important they are. Again, you aren’t after a huge amount of celebrity. This is no end result. How many people you helped improve their lives is the real measure of  your worth.

So when you promote, you have to have your real end-goal in mind. Advertising is a great false idol that has been traditionally bowed down to for decades. Like credit cards, it is only a temporary means to an end. If you keep using either of them, you will spend way more than you are able to easily pay back.

While I’m going to tell you how to utilize social media effectively, realize that the “social” in their title means exactly that. These are simply Internet versions of ideas and traditions that have been around since the first human walked on this earth. Tribes and clubs and social organizations are the way anything actually gets done on this planet. (And if you take the lobbyist groups and our Congressmen into account, the way things are kept from getting done – at our great expense.)

Networking and Promotion

As much as they’ve been ridiculed, those informal “good ole boys” networks form the backbone of communities and are the way people get along and keep things running.

You need to respect the value of these institutions, even though some are new and maybe only months old. The principles they are based on have a potency which their users don’t even know, other than instinctively.

That being said, our rundown on promotion covers first the social media online and how these can be added to your marketing mix and then we’ll describe various offline activities you can use. In all cases, you never actually move out of social media to promote. Because people have money – and people are social.

What follows is a buffet (or a’ la carte) version of promotion. Depending on what you produce as value, and what package it is in, this will determine which of the below venues are most useful for you.

Pick and choose the ones which seem to be the best fit for both your company’s product and the resources you have to spend on promotion. (As a note, you won’t see how to use PPC or advertising here. There are many other resources you can use to take advantage of that inefficient and temporary promotional outlet.)