0. The end in view – what you’re after.

When you start a blog, you aren’t actually trying to make money off of it – although there is a way to do this, an arduous and convoluted way  – but it can be done. For most of us, just give that idea up. The phrase “throwing good money after bad” comes to mind.

The goal is to help people change their minds. To educate, entertain, enlighten – that’s what the most effective blogs do.

Once you have the basics of blogging down, you really understand the bulk of what needs to be done to get your own business up and running. And this essay with its 10 lessons will take you to the point where you know what you need to and have a blog running.

1. A place to stand:

The first step is to get a blog by any means.  You can actually pick almost any platform which gives you a free blog and work from this. The larger US corporate-sponsored free blog sites (Google’s Blogspot, and Wordpress.com) are known for being subject to pressure from outside. While Google will generally suspend your site with some warning and allow you to export your files, Wordpress.com is known to just suspend your account entirely without explanation (happened to me twice.) So make sure you can get all your hard work back if you need to move it. Better is to pick a stable free blog host to begin with (like off-shore).

I recommend you get a WordPress blog platform, since this is both the easiest and most powerful blogging software out there – because it has far more users and a huge community out there. If you run into trouble or have a question about anything, someone has already answered or solved it. (Wordpress.com is the commercial application of the same software available for free at WordPress.org – a wide difference.) Once you get familiar with blogging and with WordPress, this will make it easier for you to set up your own site with it.

I’ve done some research on various free blog hosts. Almost all of these are WordPress-based, but some are not. All are free. All are relatively easy to get started with.

Blogetery.com
Blogsome.com – Ireland
Paranormaltimes.co.uk – England
iblog.my – Malaysian company, server in Nebraska
mykavita.com
blogaught.com
beedoo.org – not WP
xanga.com – not WP
g4blog.com – Netherlands
livejournal.com – not WP
storeblogs.com – very nice set up, and will help you start your own business as well.
posterous.com – post by email, not WP

There are more than this, but these are more than enough to get you going. (And unless you want to spend days finding these sites like I did – just pick one of the above.)

As I can, I’ll add some reviews of each of these, since they are all slightly different or wildly different.

A search found  a video (below) on what what seems to be a good start – even though the author is describing how to set up a WordPress.com blog, it’s applicable to any free WordPress blog host site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWYi4_COZMU

This is nearly an hour long (51:04 – and fairly boring), so you may have to slot some time for it. He’s got a whole thing of setting up a domain name which you don’t need to do – it’s right in the middle. When I have time to find something better – or a shorter series of them, I’ll update this section.

Update:

I now recommend that people have minimally two of these free blogs – one on blogger and the other on storeblogs. Reason is that you can get Analytics to run on these blogs and so learn how to write and produce content that people more closely are looking for. Blogger blogs are good for affiliate sales pitches – so you can test alternate phrasings and presentation. (I’ll go over more about Analytics in the regular lesson plans.)

Some additional posts of interest:

• Lead Generation made easy – blog it.
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 2
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 3
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 4
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 5
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 6

2. Something to write about:

Get information coming to you to write about.  The trick with being prolific consists of being able to consistently and immediately run with the inspiration you are getting.  A lot of this is simply being able to note down your ideas when you get them and then be able to immediately research answers to the questions you have.

So you are going to need a decent Internet connection and preferably and always-on computer that you can easily access at a moments’ notice.   I also have a lot of letter-sized notepads around (legal pads) that I can “brainstorm” on when I’m sitting around away from my computer. (An idea here – if you rip out individual pages from this pad, get a three-hole punch and put them in a binder in date order, or by subject/date.)

Google Alerts
Now where you get your inspiration is by having a regular traffic/data flow.  How I’ve done this is with Google Alerts (http://google.com/alerts)  How to set this up is over at WildApricot.com as both Part One and Part Two.

Once you have this set up and getting Google to deliver your data, you will probably want to refine your searches. Part Two links to a cheat sheet of operators you can use to fine-tune your searches. Mostly, I’ve used OR to include stuff together. Put a string of names together such as “Joe Scammer” OR “Charlie Frayed” OR “Coltorama Moodless” and you’ll then get everything on all three of these people in one result. Note that you put the names in quotes to only get results with that exact name. Read that cheat sheet and you’ll be able to refine your searches even better than I have (I didn’t know about that reference until today.)

I used to peak out at about 15 searches, so being able to combine search phrases into one search will give you more you can aggregate.

Google Reader
As you start off with Google Alerts, you’ll be getting these into your email. But a more efficient way of dealing with these is to set them into Google Reader.  This is another options you have with Google Alerts – and allows you to quickly scroll through the relevant points to pick out stuff you will need.

Google Docs
Extracting the data is pretty simple. I recommend another Google tool – Google Docs (which you know about.) Copy past from your Reader directly into a new document on Docs. Add your comments and additional analysis there – then simply copy the whole file and paste into your blog post.

Sometimes you’ll get some oddball formatting that shows up – in that case you may want to copy the whole text into a text editor, and then copy it from there into your blog post. You’ll lose all your formatting and have to do it over, but you’ll also loose the oddball tables and weird html stuff in the background which makes it do strange stuff on your blog.

A note – if you find videos, Google Doc’s won’t handle these. You’ll have to get the embed code and then put it on your site separately. If that’s too difficult, then just get the link.

Wordpress tags search
Another source for material is Wordpress.com – go to this site and then enter your phrase in quotes, like “Internet Auction Solutions” and they will then give you all the recent posts in this area. Over to the right, you’ll also see an RSS feed for this search. If you copy that link and paste it into your Google Reader, these will also be delivered to your Reader.

As well, if you visit these sites, you’ll see that they usually have an RSS feed which you can subscribe to in your Reader and so keep on top of who is saying what.

(A note here: when you leave comments on others blogs you are making that blog post more popular in Google’s estimation. So if you check your Reader regularly, you can comment on all the blogs which are both giving you data and also pointing the spotlight on our infamous scammers. This also puts them to the top in Google’s searches, which drives the scammers off the front page. I’ll go more into this later…)

You can also expand your searches into other venues – and anything that gives you an RSS feed can be dropped into your Google Reader so you can get the data.

Another cute tool
Looking over one of my old desktops found a cute little tool which is a little funky and crashes too often, but it gives you a lot of data from various sources – and can take any given search phrase and find tons of additional data which some of the broader searches can miss.

This is the Niche Browser. And this has probably some of the stupidest promo around, so you are going to have to take my word for it. I found an interesting review of this which has a video from Jason Moffatt, the creator. That video will tell you about version 3, how it works and how to use it.

So have fun with this – and get a lot of content you can follow up on.

Some additional posts of interest:

• Lead Generation made easy – blog it.
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 1
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 3
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 4
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 5
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 6

3. Persuasive Content: How to write effectively and memorably

In order to reach a lot of people, you are going to have to write effective content – stuff that people remember.

The first thing you have to notice is what interests you and how you read the data you get on the Internet.

Most people don’t read on the Internet – they scan. So you have to write in a style which people can scan easily. This has evolved over the years, but has mostly stayed true to a few valid principles:

• Headlines need to be catchy

• Keep paragraphs short and use spaces between them to break them up.

• Also use subheadings to break up the text and introduce sections

• Use lots of bullets – like this list.

• Make lots of lists of things – “5 simple steps to get your money back.”

• Break up long posts into several shorter ones in a series (I’m guilty of violating this.)

If you look over the above, you’ll see where I used (and should have used) these points above. And you’ll probably see a lot of areas I could improve this.

Here’s a key basic to everything online:

The basics of the Internet are Valuable Information and Speed.

Remember that law and etch it into the inside of your eyelids.

The value of your information is how much people will want to track what you are saying. They will come back to your blog for more data if they find what you are saying is valuable.

You’ll also need to look over your site in terms of how fast people can access the data. This has to do with what template you choose for your blog – it’s “look and feel” – which can get in the way of people being able to find the data quickly.

People also like pictures and video’s. But you want to use images that people give permission (otherwise, they have simple programs to remove that image from your site. I use Flickr to search for images which are marked for  sharing – go to http://flickr.com/search/advanced and scroll down to select all the Creative Commons attributes. This means they are saying you can use their images nearly anyway you like, as long as you give them credit.

While I’m limited as to images in this document (size matters), there is one example at the top for you to study (and improve on.) My general policy is to give an image at the top which aligns with the headline – some of the memorable ones were Elmer Fudd on a post about hunting scammers, and one of mushrooms where I posted about Scammers harvesting in the dark.

A Tip: don’t copy the image and download, then upload to your blog. Just copy the link and then insert that image link instead of the actual image. Saves you time and bandwidth – plus your pages will load faster.

Another interesting point is to give lots of links which support your data. Both readers and search engines like this – because it shows that you know what you are talking about with related links to appropriate external sources. (And when you have a lot of material on your blog, it helps everyone when you link back to where you already covered this point somewhere. Search engines really like this – and I’ll go into why a bit later.)

(We are interested to get into the top search engine rankings right off, but in the following course, I’ll show you that this is just a temporary affair until you build your clientele.)

The 3 E’s of Content

Charles Heflin, who’s studied Internet content as a professional marketer for over 14 years now, says what makes good content is one or more of the following:

• Educational

• Enlightening

• Entertaining

To the degree you can incorporate several of these into anything/everything you write, the more people will consider this valuable.  Look them over and see if there isn’t anything you’ve found on the Internet which doesn’t fit into at least one of these categories.

You have to write this from your headline on down. The headline has to be catchy, to grab that person’s attention and invite them to read your article. Your opening paragraph (as well as that snippet description) also have to be inviting and engaging. Giving a funny image at the top which has something to do with your headline is then a plus you can incorporate. (Because pictures are worth a thousand words, but it’s never said what those 1,000 words mean to any given reader. Pictures invite participation.) And then you roll into your amazing copy below this…

As a note: further research on what makes a good blog post is found on http://www.copyblogger.com

The final point: reciprocity
What you put out on your blog determines what you will get back. That’s just one of those laws Life operates from and under.

When you are dealing with people who are unscrupulous in their own lives, you can see that they are actually living an ego-trip and a lie. And that is exactly the world they want to pull you into – to fight their battle according to their rules. As I’ve gone over with many, many people – you have to take the high road. All your posts have to be honest and as close to the truth as you can get. Always link to where you got your information. That way people can verify their information personally. (And if you get a single email which you can’t verify, watch out – shills can see if you are just going to post defamatory content. It’s happened to me – see below.) After that, you can describe your conclusions.

When you’re fighting a pitched battle like this, there’s two accusations they will try to hit you with:

1) Some sort of accusation of defamation. This is defined as purposely lying in order to damage someones reputation (although that’s a simplification of it’s legalese.) So you always work with the truth as you’ve been able to find it and what you suspect is really going on. And end with an invitation for people to comment or contact you if they find other data.

2) Trademark infringement – visit http://chillingeffects.org and proof yourself up on this line.

In both cases, they usually don’t have a case – or you’d have heard from a lawyer by then. And if it’s just a warning from a lawyer, well check it out and see if you’ve been doing something oddball to attract that. Again – they are trying to get you to work by their rules of engagement. Still to the truth and sunshine will disinfect all types and sorts of icky stuff.

And always do correct something you’ve found in error – and let people know you did. That gives you credibility and more trust from your readers. It also drives the scammers nuts.

A point on sources
More than once, I was sent incriminating emails with all sorts of allegations about the two companies I was complaining about in my blog. However, the person never emailed back when I asked for contact details. And some of these allegations didn’t particularly align with other data. So I never mentioned these except obliquely. I was for awhile waiting for some sort of information which would back up what these nebulous individuals told me. Nothing ever showed up. Conclusion: I was being set up to post slanderous and false material.

You need to know who you are dealing with. And you need to verify your sources. Example of this is Rip-Off Reports – initially, I used a lot of their data – at least, until I found out they were shaking down various companies as part of their business plan. A simple search showed all sorts of verified data including court transcripts. So I then posted all the links about that company on my website and quit using them as a source – and told others to quit using them as well.

Make sure you are as close to the truth as you can get – and tell people what you suspect, but still need to verify.

This will give you trustworthy sources in return. And truth is something people who lie have no defense against. This is exactly why politicians and scammers hate the spotlight. Turn it on them and watch them scatter like bugs…

Some additional posts of interest:

• Lead Generation made easy – blog it.
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 1
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 2
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 4
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 5
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 6

4. Reverse Promotion: How to use social media to get your message out

By this point you now have set up your own blog and sources for data and also know how to write effective stuff that people want to read and share with their friends.

Our next step is to get your blog noticed so people will find it and can read it.

Search Engines
The initial way people are finding stuff right now are via search engines. But people don’t keep using search engines once they find their communities for the niches they live in. They bookmark the sites they visit all the time, plus any additional sites they’ve found of value. Businesses find that they rely on repeat customers and get their new customers from referrals.

(While I talk about search engines below, factually any business quickly changes from a stream of visitors who come and go, to a stable of clients who continually visit, stay, and contribute to that company. The emphasis on search engines, like all the emphasis on advertising out there, is not the end product of your marketing or your blogging – it’s only the start. Practically, you can nearly ignore search engines after awhile. But I’ll mention more of this in the subsequent book…)

Search engines are in the business of earning their money by providing a service to their users. Most are advertising-supported and sell space on their results to finance their operation. In order to stay popular, they have to follow the law of the Internet as mentioned above: they have to provide valuable content fast.

So search engines tend to follow what people like and study how people look for things. Search engines are constantly evolving as they do more research and also plug holes where people have gamed their system.

The whole study of “Search Engine Optimization” is how to set up your web pages so that they deliver everything that most search engines want – which is their list of what people use to determine what’s valuable. And as search engines refine themselves through their research, SEO experts have had to change what they say is the best way to get “on top” of the search engine results.

Those two points above, Valuable Information and Speed, are the essential ones which haven’t changed. Sure there are a handful of points to follow that will help a search engine keep your stuff on top, (and I hope to have these as an addendum to this essay), but if you are producing stuff that people can use and solve problems that actually exist in peoples’ lives, then you are going to have content people consider valuable. And if your blog host delivers this quickly to them, then you have it covered.

Just a short note here – if you don’t post regularly, the search engines won’t keep you on top of the heap. They are fresh content driven. But we’ll talk about them later and how you can simply keep your blog on top regardless of newcomers…

Social Media
There is a change happening which is threatening search engines and they know it. Social media – that rough description of networking, bookmarking, blogging, videoing, podcasting, picture sharing, and probably another dozen names – has all but taken over the Internet.

Of course, it was just a matter of time. People are social and tribal by nature. They like their groups and niches and networks. This is how things have always gotten done on this planet – despite how much governments and TV broadcasting networks and newspapers and mega-corporations think they actually affect things.  So it’s inevitable that people started finding their old friends and making new friends online – and developing as well as strengthening all sorts of groups with common interests.

And this has the search engines worried – because most of these groups have built-in or have acquired their own search functions. They also have their own ad-revenue streams – so the search engines are being cut out of the pie.  (You’ll also see this as  your own blog becomes popular – at first, most of the traffic is coming from search engines. Later on, most of your traffic is direct or referred from other sites. This is your own community of followers in action.)

If you’ve never done social networks, not to worry – they are just like blogs, you sign up, write something witty and pithy, then hit the enter/return key. Simple. Rinse and repeat.

The Search Engine Solution
So in order to serve up relevant, valuable content, these guys have been working for years to shift over to rating-based systems, which are determined by the social media. This is why a blog will suddenly show up and take over the top spot in the search engine standings. It’s a social media, after all.

Ratings are a form of voting. You go to Digg and you can “digg” or “bury” an entry there. Same with StumbleUpon or most article directories – you say what you think is valuable and what you consider trash.

On a blog, the number of comments and incoming links say what your blog means to people. Search engines track everything about a site and then make their conclusions about how valuable it is in relation to other pages which use approximately the same words.  And that is what they serve up in their standings.

If you post stuff to social sites, then you can get a huge number of people seeing your stuff and voting on it or rating it. Same way as I suggested earlier for some to go and comment on other people’s blogs and link to them. This makes their blogs show up higher on Google and the scammers drop in those rankings.

(And if you want to do something with your spare time, go to all these places where your particular scammer is found and vote them down. But don’t comment on their blog posts – even if they let you. That puts them up in the standings, if all you did was cuss at them. Figure that search engines aren’t perfect, yet.)

Forums and Boards
If you haven’t guessed yet, this is also the power of these complaint forums and boards. I didn’t know this until I saw the results. Every time you comment on these various boards, they move up on the search engine rankings for whatever they are talking about. Any particular scammer is mentioned – particularly in the title – and if there are 40 or more comments on that thread – it stays on top until something with more current or more voluminous comments shows up.

That fulfillment company we all know has been using social media to take itself to the top of the search engine standings by abusing this system. However, they quickly started sinking when people started complaining about their company and it’s poor service. And they had no defense, since their community of victims was far greater than those of their “supporters”.

And community trumps every time.  That is why voting them down every chance you get is both good for your health and theirs – makes them want to reform. Or any dedicated community of bloggers will make government and others pay enough attention to make them want to reform.

Using social media to get the word out
There’s an interesting set of services which are starting to show up on the web. These can take any blog feed you have (RSS) and send it to any number of social media. This is post once, publish many times. Actually a form of broadcast promotion for your blog. The trick is to just use one of these, as they can interact and you’ll get several copies of your post floating around.

Best I’ve found so far is Ping.fm. Just visit that site and set up an account. Then set up accounts with all the various places they forward your stuff to.  Make sure you fill out all the profiles as you sign up. All those little squiggly details like your favorite movies and such. (You can keep a text editor handy with the responses you type and then copy/paste the relevant data.) You go to Twitterfeed and just take copy the RSS feed of your blog and paste in there – ping.fm will then automagically send out notices that you’ve just posted again.

There’s a good article about doing this on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2009/03/07/manage-multiple-profiles/)

As you can (if you want) you’ll be able to revisit all these profiles and leave links to your other social media as well – so people can find you more easily. )

Now, there are more and more of these type services showing up. So only use one. And also set it up on your desktop so that you also “ping.fm” other sites and make it interesting for  your growing list of followers…

Some additional posts of interest:

• Lead Generation made easy – blog it.
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 1
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 2
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 3
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 5
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 6

5. Re-branding Yourself or Others: Find network associates and interconnect

This was one of the funniest scenes I’d encountered when I was researching my particular scammers. Not only did they not bother to actively defend their logos and phrases as trademarks and service marks, but due to their misuse of social media I was able to find out how to re-associate their brand with other meaning.

Now this isn’t new. It was originally called “Google bombing”, where you get a bunch of people to all link a particular phrase to an individual. During the 2008 campaign, waffles were associated with John Kerry’s campaign. Search for waffles during that campaign and you’d find out about John Kerry.

How search engines figure out what you’re talking about
There are about 6 or 7 different things Google and most search engines use to determine what a page means (here’s your short lesson in SEO and getting your page on top of the standings):

1. Title of the page (what shows up in the browser at the top of your screen)

2. Headings of the page (large sized text)

3. Bold and Italic (emphasized) terms on the page

4. Synonymic content of the page – what words are associated with what your page title contains

5. Words used in your link to this post

6. What words people use to link to your post.

7. What words are used by people on the page that links to your post.

There used to be this incredible emphasis on incoming links – getting a lot of people to link to your site. However, this has changed over the past couple of years. Now it’s how they vote on your site. And what they are talking about on that page that links to your site.  Relevance counts in Search Engine Optimization – big time.

So it’s not enough to have Digg link to your site.  If enough people come along and “bury” your post there, then Google is going to disregard that link. Same thing with Stumbleupon and the half-dozen decent article directories. If there is a vote function, then Google takes this into more account than just the fact of someone linking there.  That’s the 7th point – how people vote on what you wrote.

This brings up communities.
In every single part of the Internet, there are communities surrounding every single blog or site.  This isn’t understood by the majority of Internet marketers and scammers are completely blind to this. Historically, this is the way societies function. Even hermits had small communities of people who knew they existed and shared data about them. No person is an island – we are all near to others and interconnect on various levels with others.

While scammers want to be associated with “making money”, “online education”, and “financial success”, what quickly happens is that communities of dissatisfied customers start forming at various forums where they all post their complaints. And this goes to the old rule that when a person is happy with a product they tell 4 others, while where a person is dissatisfied, they tell 10.

Over the course of blogging about my particular scammers, I saw this effect. At first, they had all the top spots for their brand name covered with glorious reviews. But within a few months, four of the top five spots were complaint forums and boards. As I kept posting, I started taking some of these positions myself. This was the social-media community effect.

And when this happens to a company, they lose sales. When people start researching on the Internet, they find out that the company is a scam and so they won’t conclude the sale. And if they find out the next day or so, they are able to get an immediate refund. If they find out within two months, they can usually get a charge-back – where the credit card company takes it directly out of their bank account and tells them after the fact.

How to help re-brand a company, how to brand yourself
Branding is all what ideals you are associated with. It’s known by half-a-dozen names.

Branding by using social media has probably been best described by Chris Brogan. Here’s a collection to get you started (he also has an ebook or two you can download from his site): http://www.agglom.com/set/544/Chris_Brogan_on_Personal_Branding

You just get a lot of decent, dependable content of a certain high quality out there – all posted under the same name.

And this is what screwed the scammers. They were using social media just to get a lot of links back to them. But the social media started mentioning their name over and over and over in relation to scams. So they became more well known for scams than for whatever they were trying to get known for. Sure, they have hundreds of links coming into their site – but guess what the next 4 spots are held by? Complaint forums. They just got rebranded big time. Most people don’t look past the first two pages of items. And scattered down the rest of the page are other blogs which state they are scams. So now Google is looking through everything that is linked to them and starting to say that they are defined by the word “scam”.

Again, I found out how this works after I found out that it works.  I’ve been telling people who were wanting a refund to 1) Do a charge-back, 2) Report to the FBI, FTC, and Utah A/G, 3) Go to the boards and forums and post your story, then find 5 other people and help them.

What happened was that all these people would find this post and start doing these steps. And the communities of people who were scammed got larger and larger. And so these threads on the forums became as popular with Google as the main site of the scammers. And this tells us how to get the truth out in a big way – something that will both hurt these scammer’s income while also keeping others from being scammed.

Now, if you wanted to shine a big spotlight on scammers and re-brand their efforts:

1. Find and join communities that already exist around your scammers.
2. Contact people in these communities and work to help them, individually and directly. This builds trust in you.
3. Research for places where your scammers have used the Internet to just get their name promoted via social media.
4. Find blogs which mention those scammers (just the negative ones)
5. Get these people you contact to visit those blogs and social media sites and add comments to the blogs, while voting down the posts where they can.
6. Blog regularly (daily is best) and comment back to everyone who leaves comments on your blog.

You might see here that what we are influencing is the off-site factors – which Google apparently places at least as much value in as what is on the page itself. How I can say this is in watching brand new blogs suddenly show up of the first page of Google results, while traditional factors (such as how many pages a site has and how long it’s been around, as well as weather it’s a government or educational site) don’t seem to have that effect. And it’s not just me that noticed – but Google it for yourself (as this section is already long enough…)

Now for scammers, this was just their normal bad business practices finally showing up. If  they somehow miraculously stop having complaints today, they won’t regain their all positive results for probably another 6 months – and this will mean paying people to game the social media in order to pump up new entries in those search engines.

But they won’t get that idyllic scene to show up again. Because the Internet has a long memory.

These companies who game the search engines have a warped view of life. They game everything around them. That’s why they are scammers. It’s a mind-set. But Nature can’t be gamed. It’s natural laws, like gravity, work all the time. So scammers only are able to work their scam for a very short time before it backfires.

Can anyone get rebranded?
Sure, it happens all the time. Ask politicians during any election cycle. How do you prevent it happening? Give far greater valuable service to others than you ever expect to get paid for. Pay it forward in advance is another phrase for it. And put your name on everything you touch – which is covered by getting that ping.fm scene going above.

Scammers reap the whirlwind because they expect others to scam them – life to them is one huge scam. And their end result is always bad. Always. Right now, they have money – but they can’t keep it. Law of the Golden Rule. What you give out comes back to you.

So your solution? Always, always, give far greater value than you get paid for – and preferably give away far greater value than you can ever get paid. Then money, wealth, success, fame – whatever you think you want will be all but thrown at you.

And anyone who comes up with some negative silliness will simply be laughed out of existence. And voted down.

Warning
I have to give this caveat: Can’t you just vote up your own stuff? In a word, No. It’s against the terms of service for most of these social media. People simply don’t listen to others who talk about me, me, me, me all the time.  Yes, you are able to “get away with it” if you post probably 12-20 or more of other people’s stuff – but the social media networks log your network address. So they’ll catch you trying to Digg or vote up your own content. And it’s beyond the technical level of this essay to advise you how to do it. It can be done, but I don’t do it and don’t advise doing it – it’s just another way to scam the system, which never works forever.

Using ping.fm should be enough for now.

Just find and befriend many people in your community. Leave plenty of helpful comments around. Always only post your best, most helpful stuff. This helps everyone concerned. And actually fills the purpose these social media exist for – to find valuable stuff and get it recognized. You’ll find people who appreciate your stuff and both vote for you and leave helpful comments of their own.

Again – check out Brogan’s posts above as he gives you the complete layout of how to help build the community you are part of.

Some additional posts of interest:

• Lead Generation made easy – blog it.
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 1
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 2
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 3
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 4
• How to Roll Your Own Blog – Part 6