1. Start a Twitter account and give people incentives to follow you. The more topical the better - it keeps people interested and they’ll stay tuned. Like this:

2. Use Google’s keyword tool to find whatever keywords related to your business are being search for the most. Blog about them and Make videos about them. Make them entertaining. Watch your web traffic go through the roof. Like this:

3. Become an expert, start a blog and use your knowledge for good. Industry secrets don’t exist anymore. If you try and keep them to yourself someone else will trump you. We’re operating in a knowledge-based economy. Be the fountain of knowledge, be prolific and people will turn to you, and when they turn to you, you can start relationships with them (you know what I mean, don’t be rude). If you can’t write, podcast it. If you can’t talk, make videos out of it. Make claymation. Do something, don’t just sit there hoping people will come to you because you know so much. Publish. It’s free.

4. Start a Facebook group that people will want to join and subtly sponsor it. Don’t just start a fan page for your business, create a community that people want to be involved in. If you sell surfboards, create a fan page for six foot waves. If you sell wedding photography create a page for people who hooked up with a bridesmaid and are proud of it. If you sell candles start a Facebook group for people who are afraid of the dark. Like this:

5. Figure out whoever the key influencers are for whatever it is you’re selling. Read their blogs and leave comments on them regularly. Proper ones. Ones that make them feel loved. They’ll get to know who you are and then when you want to sell something you won’t have to make a bunch of new friends. Never forget thatthe purpose of a conversation with a new friend is not to sell something. It’s to have another conversation. Seth Godin told me that. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, or what you’re selling.

If you’re interested in marketing or economics (or blogging) and you haven’t read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, do it as soon as you can. It’s a brilliant book which explains that although a few market leaders account for the majority of sales in pretty much any industry, in any sales graph there is a ‘long tail’ of less popular items which don’t sell anywhere near as many as the most popular, but when you add them all up together, it still makes up for a lot of sales. For example, in the music business the number one album of the week might sell 100,000 copies, whilst ‘Pipe Organ Classics’ and 100,000 other obscure albums might only sell 1 copy each. If you have a store in a shopping mall (or even a warehouse near an airport) you don’t have enough space to stock 100,000 albums, but if your retail space is a website, you can afford to do that because there are no restrictions on what you can put on the shelves.

A typical ‘long tail’ sales graph might look something like this:

I could have grabbed that graphic from any number of websites which discuss long-tail theory, but I didn’t need to, because it’s actually the graph of popularity of articles in this blog. The most-popular one is about how mobile phone networks powered by Australian telecommunications provider Optus went down for a day. It racked-up a huge amound of hits on that particular day and has been largely ignored since (much like a cheesy hit song: think Crazy Frog Ringtone, if you even remember what that is). The least-popular article is a little thought-piece I wrote last week about imagining if every product you bought came with a photo of the factory worker who made it. I really like that piece, but nobody else seemed to (think art-school poetry, if you’ve ever read any).

But the major hits and the massive misses aren’t the key to success or failure in any business (or any blog). Scoring one big hit is down to a lot of luck and even in pop music, there’s no longer any tried and true recipe to make it happen. The most popular articles (and products) over time are ones your core audience connects with, blogs about and tells their friends about. Here at Zakazukha Zoo, the most popular articles over time are a post about how to promote your company in Wikipedia, and a couple of different case-studies with practical examples of real-life applications of online marketing strategy.

Whilst it’s fun to write little thought pieces, and it’s tempting to jump on the band wagon and yap about the most popular topic of the day, neither of those is the best strategy for building long-term relationships with readers. If you’re trying to decide what to blog about, follow these rules:

1. Have a list somewhere of things you want to blog about, don’t rely on just coming up with something insightful every day. Unless you’re The Buddha, you won’t.
2. Ask your audience what they want to read about.
3. Keep an eye on your most popular articles and follow suit.
4. Don’t just follow the bandwagon, if you want respect (and readers), be a leader.
5. Whinging can be fun and it’s good to get things off your chest, but before you hit the publish button, ask yourself whether your motivation is really to make the blog world a better place.
6. If you treat your blog like a soapbox, your readers will expect suds.
7. Before you write anything, ask yourself ‘would I still write this even if I knew no-one was listening?’
8. If you wouldn’t be proud of it in ten years time, don’t write it.
9. If you don’t want your grandchildren to read it, don’t write it.
10. If you don’t want your mother to read it, don’t write it.
11. Check you’re speling and grammar if you want people to take you seriously.
12. Don’t blog when you’re angry.
13. Every blog post is a job interview.
14. Think about what people who disagree with your point of view will say, because they will.
15. Anything you say will end up somewhere on that long tail graph, but aim for the left.
16. You don’t have to blog.

I wrote yesterday about how smart corporations should be engaging bloggers in dialogue. Not just idly watching with Google alerts, but actively reaching out and befriending those who are talking about their products and services. They know that bloggers are as powerful, if not more so, than the radio shock jocks of yesteryear. Adding mildy relevant comments only when it suits just isn’t good enough, if you want people to blog about your product you need to have started cultivating relationships well before your latest campaign rolls out. It’s public relations 101 (well, public relations 2.0 perhaps).

No matter how small, or seemingly unpopular you think a blog is, I can guarantee you that more than one person is reading it. If that blogger mentions your product favourably to one person who is actively listening it’s worth more than 100 random poster impressions from people waiting for the bus. In fact, if you’re a disgruntled customer, one little blog post could be enough to make you switch banks.

Case in point: yesterday one of the other partners here at e-CBD read my blog post about NAB’s new electronic statement facility. She was helping her father-in-law with his tax and his bank didn’t provide more than three months worth of statements online. He’d lost a bunch of the paper versions and didn’t keep his receipts, so it was causing her all sorts of grief. She didn’t even know that banks were providing this new service for free and while it was a bit too much hassle to try and make her father in-law switch banks (he’s 80-years-old and he would rather change his left nostril than go through the paperwork of changing banks), if it had been her, she would have seriously considered becoming a NAB customer on the spot. And that’s just one person. If anyone else had been hit with some hefty random account-keeping fee by their bank, or had to wait too long in line at their local branch, or been given the run-around by a ‘customer service’ phone system, or been denied a credit card and then read that blog post, it could well have been enough to tip them over the edge too.

Don’t underestimate the power of one little blog post. Every time a blogger hits publish it creates another piece of the long tail that will more than likely live forever.

Olive Riley loved the Internet and had hundreds of friends all over the world, but she didn’t have a Facebook account. She didn’t have a MySpace either. In fact, it was impossible for Olive Riley to have a Facebook account because she was born in 1899 and Facebook’s sign-up process only accepts people born after the year 1900, MySpace won’t let anyone over 100 join. Olive did, however, have a blog, and a YouTube account. Her tragic death over the weekend will probably lower the average age of social media users, but not by as much as you think.

A recent survey by Deloitte & Touche found that 43% of Internet users over 61 spent time sharing photographs with people. 36% watched and read personal content created by others. The average blogger is a white, 37-year-old male. 38% of Facebook users are over 35. More than 67% of MySpace users are 26 or over.

Don’t let anyone tell you social media is a youth phenomenon. Everyone is paying attention.

NineMSN are giving away prizes if you use their search instead of Google’s. The concept is simple: for a few weeks you can go to their secret search page, (which is different from their normal search page) enter some words into the search field, hit the search button and as your results are displayed, some little poker machine-style spinny things show you if you’ve won a prize. This happens every time you search. You get more chances at winning if you make it your homepage and more still if change your default browser search to theirs. It’s a great campaign and very nicely done, I like what they’re trying to achieve (ie. after using their search for a few weeks you’ll realise it’s pretty good, so you won’t bother going back to Google). It’s well-executed, clever and ticks lots of boxes. It won’t work for me because I realise my chances of winning a prize I actually want are dismal, I love the search results I get from Google and I hate the advertising on NineMSN, but that’s not the point.

The point is how I heard about this campaign.

It was here.

Not from NineMSN, not from a media release, not from a banner ad, not from a promo in Internet Explorer, not from a news article, not from a popup window. It was from a cool blog by an 18-year-old university marketing student. That’s the real power of social media. This is the core. This is the buzz. If your brand is interesting, people like Zac Martin will start talking about it, and people like me will start listening. Not because the message is forced upon me, not because anyone got paid to do anything, just because it was interesting.

Be interesting.

OK, so you’ve got yourself a blog, congratulations! You’re blogger #50,000,001, welcome to the fold; I hope you enjoy yourself. I’m presuming you’ve got a pretty little orange RSS icon on your site somewhere so people can subscribe to your wisdom and/or ranting? Good. If not, get one, syndication is kinda’ the whole point.

…Except; do you know how many people: a) know what that icon does and b) know how to use it?

Answer: 2

If you’re going to go to the trouble of writing a blog, make it easy for EVERYONE to get your content; provide an email option. If you don’t know how, go to Feedburner. You’ll be far more popular that way.

Six points to NAB (Australia’s biggest bank) for trying, but their recent attempt at infiltrating a football blog with advertising messages about their new SMS banking service (they were giving away free tickets to a game as part of their launch promotion) raised the ire of many, including the respected online magazine Crikey and blogger Duncan Riley, who started a reasonably successful call to boycott the bank.

I happen to be an NAB customer and I can’t say I like their tactics either.

The idea to spam the comments sections of private blogs was a recommendation of PR agency Cox+Inall,  and had been undertaken by Cox+Inall with the bank’s full knowledge and approval. A NAB spokeswoman said that no-one at her company or at Cox+Inall had considered approaching blog owners first for permission before posting their promotional messages.

“Cox+Inall had searched for blogs that included AFL coverage and were well-enough read to attract readers who might be interested in our offer. We identified five or six blogs where we felt we’d give it a try.” the spokeswoman (Felicity Glennie-Holmes) said.

“Blogs are a public forum”, said Ms Glennie-Holmes. NAB and Cox+Inall felt this meant commercial interests could feel free to contribute unsolicited and irrelevant commercial material as comments.”

I have to pop into my local branch this afternoon to give them some documents relating to a credit card account I’m trying to close. I might hang around for a little while in the foyer and hand out flyers to customers who look like they might be interested. You know, just to give it a try. NAB won’t mind surely?

• Seth Godin — He often gets referred to as a marketing guru, and it could just be the haircut, but Seth comes up with a nuggety bit of original marketing gold pretty much every single day. It’s worth reading because it’s always fresh and it is guaranteed to shift your perspective.
• Creative is not a Department — Marketing and branding observations with a freshly Australian perspective.
• Marketing Vox — News, news and more online marketing news. If you like to digest a digest, Marketing Vox is the place.
• Shoe String Branding — A useful, insightful blog on marketing for independent professionals
• Google Webmaster Blog - If you’re not getting found in Google you’ve got a serious problem. This is their dialogue with the world and I’d consider it essential reading for any webmaster or mistress.
• Duct Tape Marketing — John Jantsch has been called the world’s most practical small business expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies. And he’s not afraid to tell you so either.
• Ypulse — Research and articles about reaching the Y Generation.
• Adspace Pioneers — Julian Cole’s perspective on social media; a refreshing blog from someone who ‘gets’ it.

What have I missed?