“Don’t go into blogging to make a living,” says HDNet chairman Mark Cuban. Philip Kaplan from the online advertising firm AdBrite cautions that “only 3 percent of active sites make more than $1,000 a month from advertising.”

These are two quotes from the NY Times article “So You Want to Be Blogging Star” by Paul Boutin. Quotes obviously meant to entice bloggers into sharing some buzz love. (No love for the NY Times here. Just buzzing for your benefit. )

Don’t expect to get rich blogging

That’s the message right up front in the article.

I say; “No Duh” to that.

If you’re counting on getting rich from ads on your blog, you’ve got an uphill battle on icy ground. AlGore’s got a better chance of getting hit by a rogue iceberg than a blogger making six-figures from ads.

The real profit pulling power of blogging is stardom

Boutin does get it partially right when he says “…amassing a large audience is the goal.” (Though I think that was part of a statement meant more as a backhanded critique than a word of advice.)

“Large” is not necessary to create a nice cash flow. But becoming a star in your niche to attract and gather a tribe of raving fans is a requirement.

A strong personal brand and passion for your niche teamed is what makes a blog a powerful New Media marketing tool. That’s what will build trust, rapport, and reputation equity. Once you have those things, it’s a relatively straight forward process to turn those assets into profit.

Some good points

The article does share some good points, especially for New Media marketers just starting out with a blog.

Some of the better points are:

• Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice
• Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule
• Just post it already!
• Keep a regular rhythm
• Give credit where credit is due
• Place, plug and promote yourself

Book-ended by back stabbing

Ahh… but alas, Boutin bookends the good with a snide implication that blogging is am “unhealthy obsession.”

Maybe for those without a plan that’s true. But if your goal is stardom in your niche — obsession is not only healthy, it’s profitable too.

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Seeing that this week was kicked off with Veterans Day here in the U.S., I thought it would be timely to share a quick New Media Marketing example where over $4.2 million dollars was raised for military families in 7-days! It is a good example of how New Media combined with Tribal Seduction strategies work with any size Tribe.

Rush Limbaugh was the catalyst for this big charity drive for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. (An organization dedicated to helping the children of Marines or Federal law enforcement personnel who lost their lives while serving our country.)

Now… love him or hate him — no one can deny that a loyal Tribe of 22-million weekly listeners is pretty solid evidence that Rush is a master at playing the Tribal Seduction game.

I’m a big proponent of modeling success to cut the learning curve. I’m impatient and I don’t like to work any harder than I have to. So I’m always looking for real-life examples to get where I want faster and with fewer mistakes. I don’t care what side of the political isle, industry, business, or obscure niche I find an example.

In the case of this charity fund raiser case, Rush developed a New Media Marketing strategy that you can learn from and model, no matter what the size of your Tribe.

Extensive details leading up to this 7-day campaign aren’t necessary, but I’ll add some of the most surprising to the story as we go along.

So let’s get rolling. You with me?

Record breaking charity event — New Media powered…

Five channels were used to make this game plan work. One “traditional” channel, and four New Media channels.

The traditional:

• Radio

The New Media channels:

• Podcasts
• Online Video (YouTube)
• eBay
• Blogs

What’s encouraging for small business owners and entrepreneurs about this example? It’s that mainstream, traditional media outlets had nothing to do with the success of the effort.

Getting the word out was a grassroots effort. It spread virally when the Tribe (and those sympathetic to the Tribe’s cause,) began using New Media channels like blogs along with additional podcasts and online videos.

The result — 201,000 pages created in one week around a unique keyword developed for this campaign. You can see this awesome display of the power of New Media power in the actual search results on Google.

Yes, yes. I know. You might be thinking, “Yeah, but Rush has a Tribe of 22-million people. That won’t work for me.”

Am I telling you that you can go out and make millions of dollars in 7-days? No way! That would be a load of BS. ;-P

What I am saying though, is these New Media channels work in proportion to the size of your Tribe. They work every time you use them. Yet, you do need to be using them in a strategic way.

Here’s what I mean…

Tribal Seduction in action

Technology only goes so far. It’s the publicity and marketing strategy of this 7-day campaign that really yielded the results. Makes sense, right?

There were a number of Tribal Seduction principles employed to get the word out, raise awareness and raise the record-shattering money in 7-days. But three really jump to the forefront.

Follow along with me here for three minutes and you’ll see all three principles in action:

1. You must know your Primal Key

Since I kept background details to a minimum, you may be wondering what was actually auctioned off on eBay.

It was a letter. Sure it had some liberal U.S. Senators signatures on it. But it was still just a few pieces of paper. Yet those few pages of paper yielded $2.1 million dollars!

Obviously no paper is worth that much money. So why was so much money raised both within the auction bidding and directly in donations to the charity?

It is the “e” from the Tribal Seduction formula DAVeK — emotion!

The value people assign to a purchase is determined by the emotion they attach to it. The sooner you realize that people assign monetary value based on emotion, the sooner you’ll unlock the full profit potential of your business. It’s not about the product itself.

I don’t care if you provide personal services, sell your own products, or promote the products of others — you had better get your Tribe emotionally connected with something bigger than any product or service.

In Tribal Seduction this is your “Primal Key.”

Your Primal Key should be something the Tribe can bond together over. People can’t emotionally bond with a product. But they can bond with you and each other when they are emotionally vested in the mission or movement surrounding an object, product, or service.

In this example, Rush did it with a letter. He triggered emotions of patriotism and honor for our fallen heroes.

Apple did it with the iPod. Their Primal Key is a movement built around freedom and flexibility.

What is your Primal Key?

Answer that and you’ll unlock your full Tribal Seduction power.

2. Be true to your personal brand to gather a huge Tribe of Loyals

Rush never pulls any punches. He speaks from the heart and says what his audience is already thinking. He gives voice to their thoughts, concerns, and ideas.

Rush doesn’t care what the “haters” say. Only what the Loyals have to say. It’s like I’ve said for years; if your message is not strong enough to turn some people off, it’ll never be strong enough to turn anybody on.

You need to be just as true to your style, your beliefs, and the language of your Tribe. These are the things that build your personal brand and allow you to connect on an emotional level with your Loyals. And emotional bonding is one of the most critical Tribal Seduction factors you can have.

3. Throw yourself fully in the game to get your Tribe surging behind you

Rush put his money where his mouth was. He pledged to match the final bid on eBay with his own money. The final bid was $2,100,100.00. Rush’s matching of that gave the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation over $4.2-million.

By throwing himself fully in the game, it encouraged others who could not afford to get in on the eBay bidding to take action on their own. They donated directly to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. This helped raise hundreds of thousands in additional donations.

Again this is a solid principle. It’s got nothing to do with the size of your Tribe.

Deb and I saw this in action back in September of 2005 after hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. We issued a $1,000 matching challenge and our Tribe of just a couple hundred Loyals, and they responded to raise over $13,700 in donations in 48-hours.

Don’t let the size of your Tribe stop you from playing full out.

Get in the game!

So what’s your Primal Key? Is your personal brand defined? Are you willing to throw yourself fully into the game?

Let’s hear what you’ve got!

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If you want to be perceived as an expert, act like the true experts act.

One of the essential strategies of new media marketing is to position yourself as an expert on your topic. You can do this via a variety of methods: publishing articles, blogging, creating and posting video tutorials, podcasts or talk radio, webinars and so on.

But one of the easiest and still most effective is by participating in a group. This can be a group within a modern social networking site like Facebook or MySpace, or it can be a community built on technologies that have been around for years, like Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups (the modern incarnation of Usenet), discussion forums or e-mail discussion lists. Let’s be perfectly clear that “new media” strategies can be applied to media that is “old”, at least in internet time.

One of the things that I’ve been studying closely over the past five years is how exactly “real” experts behave in these settings. And when I say “real” experts, I mean the ones who have published books, speak at conferences, have peer-reviewed papers in trade journals, and so on. Are they necessarily the most knowledgeable on the topic? No. But they have the best reputations and are generally far more financially successful than the “wanna-be” experts.

You know the wanna-be expert… you’ve seen them. They always have an opinion about everything posted in the group. They’ll ramble on for paragraph after paragraph, making their case ad nauseam. And it seems that whenever there’s a flame war, they’re right in the middle of it, even if it doesn’t look like they started it.

If you want to be perceived as a real expert, not a wanna-be, you need to act like a real expert, not a wanna-be.

So how do real experts act?

In order to understand how real experts act, let’s look first at two key attributes of experts:

1. They’re busy. They’re working — writing, traveling, speaking, consulting for a client, whatever… Point is, they have better things to do with their time than spend all day in a discussion forum.

2. They’re extremely careful about what they say. They know that people are paying attention to them, and that has two consequences. First of all, they know that their reputation is on the line every time they open their mouth — that everything they say will be subject to scrutiny. Secondly, they also know that people will put a lot of weight into what they say and probably act upon it, so they feel a strong sense of responsibility to provide good information.

When you understand those things, it’s easy to see why experts behave as they do in this context:

• Experts post less frequently. They aren’t usually heavily, heavily engaged in the group unless it’s their own group or they have some kind of leadership role. Depending on the overall posting volume, anywhere from a couple of posts a week to just a couple per month is sufficient to keep their name out there.

• Experts aren’t quick to reply. They usually aren’t the first ones to join in the conversation. Remember, they’re not sitting there watching for posts as they come in — they may only even read the group posts once or twice a week. Also, they read and reflect on the reactions of others before posting their own thoughts.
• Experts consolidate the conversation, not fragment it. There’s a tendency in active groups for conversations to “fragment”, i.e., multiple people reply to the original post, then people create replies to the replies, and so on. Experts don’t typically reply to people individually, but rather create a single, longer post that addresses what several people have said all at once.
• Experts substantiate what they say. Experts are researchers. Sure, they have opinions, but most of them didn’t earn their reputations based purely on their opinions. So when they make statements in these groups, they often back it up by citing sources, whether it’s something they’ve written themselves or that someone else wrote. It’s especially helpful if you link to the sources you’re citing. And if it’s yourself, that’s a great promotional tool at the same time.
• Experts keep it professional. They certainly don’t participate in flame wars, and they rarely bring their personal issues into the group.

  Contrary to popular opinion, effective marketing in forums and discussion lists is not about volume, it’s about presence and positioning. Act like a real expert, not a wanna-be, and you will attract more business.

Scott Allen helps people turn virtual relationships into real business. He is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, an A-list blogger as the Entrepreneurs Guide for About.com, and a monthly columnist for FastCompany.com. He runs his latest project, Revenue River, on the BLOG i360 New Media Marketing system.

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