Willie Jolley, courtesy of the author

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, President Obama declared keeping the “American Dream” alive to be “the defining issue of our time.” At a time when a large percentage of the working population finds itself questioning whether if it will ever recoup the lost income, property, earning potential and savings lost in the aftermath of the greatest recession of that last 75 years, I talked with one man who says we need to create our own opportunities and stop waiting for  our ships to come in.

Don’t just look for a job; make a job! Financial success is linked to thought, so get creative. – Willie Jolley

Willie Jolley, host of the Sirius XM talk show, The Willie Jolley Wealthy Ways Radio Show and author of Turn Setbacks into Greenbacks (Wiley, Hardcover, 2010) has been dubbed “America’s Comback King” by Success Magazine.  I asked Willie to share his formula for jumpstarting the American Dream.  Warning: His irrepressible positive outlook is infectious.

Cindy Ratzlaff: I’m noticing a lot of fear in the entrepreneurial world. Financing is tight, spending is weak and people are saying this isn’t a good time to start a new business. How can we keep the American Dream alive in that kind of climate?

Willie Jolley: People are still spending money on things that provide value and that make them feel good.  Movie tickets are at an all time high, but people are still going to the movies because they make them feel better. Apple just released their earnings statements for 2011 and they had a banner year. People are buying ipads and Macs because they provide value and they make them feel good. Warren Buffet said that tough times are the greatest times to start a new business and I agree.  There are two kinds of animals in the dessert; vultures and humming birds. Vultures focus on dead things and hummingbirds focus on life. Focus on it and you’ll find it.

Cindy Ratzlaff: The press has talked about the “uncounted underemployed,” those people who have simply given up looking because they can’t find a job that pays what they are used to earning and they just can’t let themselves take a job that’s beneath their previous positions for fear of stepping down the ladder permanently. If we stop progressing in our earning potential, how can we continue to uphold that American dream?

Willie Jolley: Don’t let your pride poison your prosperity. Stop trying to put up a façade of success and get real.  Any work that is moral and legal is honorable. I knew a man who built an IT firm from the ground up. He had 600 of the brightest IT employees and he was doing great. But hard times hit and he had a choice to make. So he took the money he paid himself as CEO and he paid his employees salaries to keep the company going with the talent it needed.  He worked a full day at his own business and at night he drove a trash truck.  And he kept those employees and because of that he kept that company afloat and later sold it for $600 million.  Here’s what you have to remember.  It’s not personal.  It’s not permanent.  Get over it and do what you need to do.  Don’t just think about today or tomorrow.  Think about the tomorrows down the road and get over it.  Do what has to be done.

Cindy Ratzlaff: Close friends and family might logically tell you that this is not a good time to start a new business. What do you say to people with a vision and a dream but no idea how to make it happen?

Willie Jolley: Stop commiserating!  People who sit around and commiserate are the people who would rather complain about problems than do anything to fix them.  Stay away from negative people.  Sometimes those people are right in your inner circle. Read and listen to something positive every day. The news will tell you the economy is down, gas is up, terrorism is here.  It’s all doom and gloom. Turn it off.  Surround yourself with people who believe in your dreams and turn the rest off.

Cindy Ratzlaff: If you could give one last piece of advice to a new business owner or entreprenueur what would that be?

Willie Jolley: Stop waiting for your ship to come in.  Financial success is a choice you must make happen, not a chance that you sit around and wait for.  There’s nothing stopping you. People have lots of excuses like “I only have a GED.” I say so what. Lots of people only have their GED’s. That can’t stop you from success. They say, “I have an idea but all my friends and family think it’s crazy.” I say “stop talking to them about your idea. Talk to people who share your vision and encourage you.” People have “possibility blindness.” If you spend all your time talking about your goals with them, all you’ll get is discouragement. Don’t just go through tough times. Grow through them. Take control of your ideas and dream.  Think like the CEO of Y.O.U.  Figure out how what you know can fill a need for others. And get yourself into the right frame of mind to believe you can succeed.

Have you started a new business during a down economy?  I’d love to hear your experiences, lessons learned and ideas for beating the odds as an entrepreneur in a down market.

This is the ideal time for entrepreneurs to give themselves a few gifts to start the new fiscal year off right.

Change Your Passwords

Make a new end of year ritual.  Change your passwords.  As a small business or entrepreneur, you’ve no doubt shared your password with designers, virtual assistants, and others during 2011.  Changing your passwords sets up an automatic review of everyone who has access to your accounts.  This can momentarily disrupt the flow of work as you review and reassign passwords and access to trusted contacts, but this is an essential end of year security practice.  Adopt industry best practices for secure passwords by using a combination of capital and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.  Make sure your new password is at least 10 characters long.  Afraid you won’t remember your new passwords.  Store all your online passwords in a safe, secure site that only you can access, from wherever you are. Roboform is a terrific online resource for securing storing your passwords for easy access (by you only).  This is safer than writing them down and carrying them around with you or entering them into your mobile device.  Theft or loss could be a nightmare for your online security.

Training

Entrepreneurs and business owners need to honestly assess where the weaknesses in their knowledge base exist, seek training programs to resolve those weaknesses and then look for challenge or stretch goals for themselves and their teams.  Training in new technologies, general knowledge base upgrades and software training do not need to be expensive or time consuming.  Many trainings are served up via webinars you can view and absorb on your own schedule.  Some reasonably priced trainings that I can recommend include:

Publicity and promotional training from Ragan Communications online, on-demand courses are priced well and consistently deliver excellent resources and training.

Small Business Summit 2012 is a program run by Michael Stelzner, founder of the Social Media Examiner.  His strategy of bringing together multiple top industry resources to cover a wide range of topics and giving entrepreneurs the option of viewing the webinar material live or later on-demand is great.  This year they’ll be covering trends, copywriting, Facebook marketing, LinkedIn, Google+ and much more. I also the fact that Michael allows people to try before they buy and offers a free class to showcase the program.

BookExpo America Webinars are specifically targeted to authors, publishers, booksellers, agents and others in the book publishing industry, however, the information aimed at this audience is particularly valid for entrepreneurs, who are often solo business owners, much like an author.  At just $25 a class, these are a bargain.  NOTE: I am speaking at the next webinar on using Facebook for Business.  I do not receive any compensation for the webinar, nor for telling you about it.

Concept Inventory

Businesses and entrepreneurs need to be thinking about new products or services to add to their offerings, as well as deleting any products or services suffering from fatigue or obsolescence. Now is the time to take an inventory of your intellectual property offerings such as coaching programs, how-to books or trainings, speeches, proprietary software, apps and other products to make sure they’re up to date. For example, if you teach people how to use Facebook and haven’t including training about the new Facebook Timeline, pull that product off the shelf and update it so future customers aren’t disappointed.

What gifts will you be giving yourself and your business this year?  I’d love to hear from you.

You are a brand.  Your products or services are your brand offerings.  When you add something new to your offerings, that becomes your brand extension.

Let’s say you are a successful author.  You’ve written a great book on marketing.  You’ve promoted the book with advertising, personal appearances, traditional media and even social media.  Your brand, to the consumer, is “marketing expert.”  Now you’re ready to add something new to your services.  You might add consulting, coaching, webinars or live trainings.  But if you were to add a cookbook to your brand, you’d have a great deal of work to do in order to bring people along with you as you evolve your brand from business to baking.  BUT, if cooking is your passion and you’re using cooking as a metaphor for blending, mixing and creating a product, you’d have a brand extension.  If the book were about your favorite cookie recipes, you’d need a new branding strategy.

It’s possible for a personal brand to evolve and include a wide variety of products and services.  However, adding things far afield from a brand’s original DNA is best done once the brand is mature and the brand leader (YOU) is well established and has a strong and loyal following.

For the rest of us, annual evaluation and planning for our emerging brand life cycle is an exercise worth doing.  As you plan your growth, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Where’s the money? What is my most profitable offering right now? In other words, what are people buying from me now?  When people are willing to part with their money to purchase your products or services, that’s the simplest and purest market research.
2. Customer needs: are my current clients or customers asking me for additional information or services I don’t yet provide?  If those services or products are within your skill set, this is the proverbial low hanging fruit.  Put energy and time into providing your current client base with what they are already asking you to offer.
3. Next offer: after I’ve delivered my first product or service to a client, and I know they are happy, what do I want to offer them next?  This is the beginning of your funnel.  Take note of the needs of your clients. See if there are natural additional ways to serve your client base.  Repeat this question after every new product or service to create additional offerings.
4. Brand extension: once you’ve developed a client base the trusts you and is thrilled with what you offer, you can begin to stretch your brand. This is best done in increments.  Taking our example, the marketing book author might now write about sales by making the connection in the consumers mind between sales and marketing and letting marketers know they also have to be salespeople, especially if they are entrepreneurs or small business owners.  Next, our expert might branch out and claim mind share as a provider of information about product development, distribution and even sourcing.  He or she might divide upcoming product offerings into categories that provide deep knowledge in the how-to aspects of each phase of creating new products or services. Then our expert could create speeches, live events, webinars, DVD series, more books and other creative delivery systems for those new products.

Brand development is like story telling. Don’t try to take your reader from “Once Upon a Time,” to “the wicked witch was dead” in two steps. Tell the full story. Lead the consumer through your thinking process by offering logical, helpful, inventive product and service development. And, every step of the way, double check to see that your brand development is ringing true with your customer base.

Do you have questions about extending your brand? Let’s talk.

Among the new features being rolled out this week from Facebook are the enhanced friends lists options which many feel was a response to Google Plus Circles, and the introduction of a Subscribe button with multiple implications and applications.

The subscribe button is, by far, the most radical of the changes and for the first time, allows people who are not your friends to see your personal profile updates if you enable the subscribe button.  So, Guy Kawasaki or Pete Cashmore haven’t accepted your friend request.  Bill Gates is ignoring your pokes and messages.  You can now subscribe to their personal profile posts if they decide to enable Facebook’s new Subscribe button.  Why should you or your brand care?  You should care because Facebook has just opened up an interesting option for celebrities, authors, entrepreneurs, speakers and other high profile public figures to create great reach for their posts, beyond their friendship circle.  However, this comes with some challenges, privacy concerns and the need for those users to understand exactly how this works and what they’ll be sharing.

What does this mean for brands, small businesses and entrepreneurs?

For business people who use their Facebook profile as yet another entry point to their brand, albeit a more casual one, you can now place a subscribe button on your profile.  This allows people who aren’t your friends access to those posts you mark as public. This will be useful to celebrities, speakers, authors or other very public Facebook users who have reached their 5,000 friend cut-off, but still want to allow new friends to see their posts.  If you use your profile strictly for personal communications with family and friends, you’ll want to skip implementing the subscribe button and continue to decline or ignore requests for friend connections with business contacts.

What does this mean for you, the user?

As a user, you can subscribe to the posts of industry leaders, celebrities or political figures who set their personal profiles to allow subscriptions and you can decide what types of posts you want to see.  For example, you can hide all posts related to games so that you’ll never know when Lady Gaga hits a new high score on Bejeweled, but you’ll always be notified when she posts a new photo.

Facebook provides more details and the link to add the Subscribe button to your Facebook profile here. The profile owner can choose to be notified when someone subscribes, too. This is one to watch as it evolves in use.

Will you enable the Subscribe button?  Why or why not?

Using digital marketing tools can help authors and publishers by-pass the network television gatekeeper and take book messages directly to the reader.  Digital tools help authors connect with potential readers wherever they spend time online, be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs or search engines. And, it is essential to remember that nearly half of all web users are accessing the web throughout the day via their mobile devices so creating digital content that plays nicely in mobile formats is key.

I recently spoke on the topic of digital tool kits at BookExpo America 2011 on the Digital Marketing Panel with Sally Dedecker, Fauzia Burke and Kathleen Schmidt. The panel consensus was that authors and publishers need to consider utilizing a wide variety of digital strategies to reach new readers. You can view my powerpoint presentation here. But many digital tools are expensive to create and not every author or publisher has the budget to develop and implement the more complicated and costly digital strategies used by major brands.

Here’s a list of my favorite low-cost digital tools authors and publishers can their book campaigns.

Blogsite or Website with a blog

This is the author’s home base.  Readers should be able to read more about the author, find  links to the current and previous works of the author, view a personal appearance schedule and read the author’s blog.  Readers should also be able to sign up for a continued relationship with the author, perhaps through a newsletter or to receive a sample chapter of a new book.  Whatever the offer, the author needs to capture the e-mail addresses of people who express an interest in hearing from them. Authors can create a free blog using WordPress or Blogger and an e-mail management system like MailChimp is free until the author has attracted 2,000 fans.  MailChimp automatically generates the HTML code needed for an Opt-in box, which the author can place on his or her blog.  By working with the publisher to offer a sample chapter as a digital download, authors can offer a sneak peek for new books for fans who sign up for the mailing list.

Social Media

Social media amplifies the authors website and blog messages and creates a connection to help readers feel as though they’re involved in the author’s world.  Authors can share tour information, preview books, give fans special content such as original stories on their website or blog and spread the word via social media. It’s easier and faster to amass a large following on Twitter and Facebook than to acquire a large subscription base on a website because millions of people are already gathered on social media sites.  Go to where the readers are already gathered.  Bring the author’s message to those readers instead of waiting for them to stumble upon that message on a website.  It’s free to sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.  There is no cost to use them.  However, investing a few hundred dollars in design and custom tabs will allow authors to sell books directly from their Facebook Fan page, offer that sneak peek free chapter through an opt in box right from Facebook, create the look and feel of their own television channel on YouTube and give readers a sense of their personality on Twitter.  For under $500, each of the author’s social media sites can be design to promote the others and ultimately to drive fans back to the author’s blog or home base.

Opt in

The theme for an author’s digital tool kit is “make it easy for the reader to find, follow, friend and like you.”  By developing an e-mail database of readers who have expressed an interest in what an author writes, authors and publishers will be able to easily and efficiently push updates and marketing messages to potential book buyers who have already identified themselves as being interested.  This permission based digital marketing is cost effective and can have a higher ROI than nearly any other book marketing.  Adding an Opt in box and an enticing sign up offer on both the author website and their Facebook Fan page is an easy, inexpensive digital marketing strategy.

Video

We’re living in a social world where Facebook is the Wal-Mart of digital platforms.  With nearly 700 million users now conditioned to expect to see a face attached to every brand, authors who use video effectively will have a competitive advantage in reaching readers.  Readers like seeing and hearing from the artists they admire.  In the past, meeting a favorite author or even a new author, was relegated to book signings and perhaps major events.  Now authors can create short home videos and talk directly to their potential readers, sharing their tour experiences, their creative process and even concepts from their books.  Readers enjoy authors who share a bit of their personality and their time by creating short video messages.  This, too, is an easy and inexpensive digital marketing concept.

Digital Assets

Authors can now  create digital badges, original digital content like blogs or articles, downloadable author photos and bios, digital press releases, quizzes, games and contests.  All of these digital assets can be used to create visibility for the author and his or her books online.  The more interesting and compelling the digital assets are, the more likely they will be referenced, shared and valued by potential readers.  Creating 5-10 original essays or blog posts that can be used as guest blogs on sites visited by an author’s ideal reader is a free way to use these digital assets to promote an author’s books.  The topic of the posts could be related to the topic of the new book and the author by-line can reference his or her latest work.  By providing desirable content to other websites, the author extends his or her own visibility and attracts new readers.  Sharing charts, graphs, photos, videos, quizzes or other interesting and relevant content on these high traffic websites is another strategic use of an author’s digital assets. Think about what digital assets you can create to support the launch of your books and prepare those assets so they’re ready and available at launch time.

Online Advertising

Facebook advertising campaigns can fit any budget.  Authors and publishers can set a daily or a lifetime cap to the dollar amount of the campaign. If an author already has several thousand fans, Facebook’s sponsored stories ads display an image of the author’s fan page to friends of that author’s fans with a subtle visual that implies “Your friends like this page.  You should too.”  Authors and publishers can try different types of ads, different images and different creative messages until they find one that drives new fans to press “like.”  Facebook ads can also be created to redirect Facebook users to the author’s blog or website.  Again, even a budget of $100 to $200 can have an impact, not just in new fans or readers, but in author and book visibility.  Hundreds of thousands of impressions can be achieved for a very modest budget.  This is a digital marketing strategy that is often overlooked because publishers and authors think advertising is expensive or that it’s difficult to measure the ROI.  With Facebook advertising, daily metrics will tell the tale of these ad campaign affects.

These are just a few of the digital marketing strategies authors and publishers can implement for little or no monetary outlay.  Are you using digital marketing strategies effectively?  We’d love to hear your ideas and success stories.

Twitter is to a social media campaign what PR is to a book marketing campaign.

Twitter, however, is not a marketing campaign.  Twitter is part of a full strategic campaign and acts as a megaphone to blast your message to millions of people and invites them to your website, Facebook page or other venue for a deeper conversation. A book marketing campaign needs distribution, point of purchase display, publicity, an advertising concept and a highly motivated author. With those things in place, Twitter can:

• Share the author’s excitement with followers in real time.
• Direct people to a link to buy the book.
• Blast out late breaking news such as media appearances & live events.
• Share excerpts from the book either in short snippets or via a link to a longer passage.
• Encourage others to spread the word.

Here are 5 quick tips and techniques that any author or publisher can use right now to enhance a book marketing campaign.

1. Move content. Use Twitter to move content from your Blog and your Facebook posts to your Twitter fan base by installing the Twitter app on your Facebook fan page. This will auto-tweet everything you post on Facebook, with a link back to your Facebook fan page to read any post longer than 140 characters. If you are auto-importing your blog to your Facebook fan page, it will also be tweeted out to your followers automatically, again with a link to continue reading. This serves a couple of purposes. First, it shares content on three different sites, increasing the number of potential readers for every post. Second, it invites Twitter users back to Facebook to become fans whenever they click on the shorten Twitter link. Third, Facebook will have a live link to the post on your blog through Networked blogs. So one post introduces your Twitter fans to two additional points of interaction with you.

2. Increase SEO. Each Tweet is a unique URL and is viewed by Google as fresh, unique content. This Google juice makes it more likely that potential readers and fans will find you and information about your book. Google now serves up Twitter mentions and references on page one for most searches. Strategically include the name of the book, the name of the author, the genre or topic of the book in your tweets. These are your keywords for search engine optimization. Think about it this way. What would someone enter into a Google search to find you or your book? Those are your keywords. Use them strategically in your tweets to help readers find you.

3. The Big Ask. Bestselling authors such as Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeffrey Hayzlett and Guy Kawasaki all give their fans an emotional shareholders stake in their book projects. They talk about them for months before publication. They ask followers opinions on titles, book jacket design and topics. They share nuggets of what’s to come. They thank followers for helping them through the process of creating a book. Then, when the book comes out they simply and honestly ask their fans to help them spread the word about the new book, and people do, by the thousands. Creating a community that is emotionally invested in you and your work is a powerful marketing strategy but can’t be faked. Authors must be engaged and genuinely enjoy conversing with their followers about their area of expertise. They must have, and display passion. And, this kind of loyalty and relationship building cannot be done overnight. Authors, especially authors with multiple book projects, should consider Twitter engagement to be a regular, daily practice.

4. Google’s Real Time search: Google now allows you to search something called Real Time. So Google your name or the name of your book and in the left hand navigation bar, choose Real Time. There you’ll see if any Twitter conversations include your name or the name of your book. Next authors and publishers can click on each Twitter account mentioning the book or author, follow them and thank them for their comments. A savvy author will then engage that Twitter account in a deeper conversation, turning the casual chat into a fan building opportunity. All of this is, of course, done on a very public platform. The advantages of this are that other Twitter users see you, the author or publisher, engaged in fun and interesting discussions about your book, your passions, your travels and your life. This becomes an opportunity to attract new fans and new readers. Followers are surprised and delighted when authors notice and thank them for their support. This strategy can create a life long fan who will help you spread the message about your work.

5. Tweet Ups: Whenever an author is speaking, doing media or making a bookstore appearance, there is an opportunity to create a Twitter event or a Tweet Up. Plan ahead, just as you would for any event and use an event organizer like Eventbrite or MeetUp to manage your guest list, RSVP’s and invitations. Create a real call to action for the event such as making a special announcement or having a desirable guest speaker or even a high end sponsor offered door prize. Giving followers an early heads-up about a special event with the author is like a VIP pass. Followers want, and need to feel they have a special relationship with the author.  Now, here’s the most important thing. When you create opportunities for followers to meet authors in person, the author must be willing and able to engage in conversation, thank the followers for their support, and spend some time with them. These are mixers and they are social. Authors who cannot or who are not willing to be social should avoid this strategy.

You’ve no doubt noticed a theme in this post. Twitter is a cocktail party and the author can be the guest of honor. But, it’s better if the author is the host and treats his or her followers as the honored guests.

If you found this post useful, please leave a comment. It’s important to me to know what you think so that I can create articles that are useful to you. For more Twitter tips, techniques and strategies, click here. And, thank you for finding me and reading this. I appreciate the time it takes to follow a link and read a blog.

Publishers want to know.  What is your platform?

We need to know how you are going to sell your book.  As a publisher, we’re going to provide professional editing, design services, expert sales people and great distribution.  We’ll put marketing dollars toward selling you book and work hard to give your book the visibility it needs in stores and online so that YOUR fan base can find it and buy it.  It all starts with you.  The publisher wants to know, before they buy your manuscript, what you bring to the table in terms of a ready made audience.

1. Do you have a radio or television show with a lot of viewers and great ratings?
2. Are you a celebrity?
3. Are you a lecturer with many firm bookings for the coming year?
4. Do you head a vast organization whose members will want your book?
5. Are you social media savvy with more thousands of followers?
6. Do you have a large database that can be utilized to rally your fan base to purchase your book?
7. Have you previously published a bestselling book?

Gone are the days when a publisher could easily take a risk on an unknown writer.  Although that still happens, thankfully, it happens less frequently than one would wish.  So how do you make yourself a more desirable publishing partner to attract the attention and investment of a big publishing house?  You create and execute your own pre-publication marketing plan.  This is a good strategy even if you are self-publishing…in fact, especially if you are self-publishing.

Here are just a few things every author and would be author can do to being now to build a platform that will help promote your book at publication time.

1. Create a Facebook Profile so you can easily connect with everyone you every met.  Those people are the most likely to want to purchase your book and support your newest endeavor.
2. Create a Facebook Fan Page for your book so you have a professional page with your book title that will be indexed by Google, increase your SEO and give you a proper place to talk about the making of your book.
3. Start a Twitter account in your own name.  Every tweet is a unique URL and again, online is all about search.  Every tweet is new content, all new content increases your Google juice, the more Google juice the more people will see your name and find your book.
4. Write a blog.  Do it on WordPress or Blogspot because both of those platforms are already optimized for search.  You need a blog to communicate longer thoughts than can be done through either Facebook or Twitter.  Additionally, your blog can be reproduced as a “guest blog” on sites with more traffic.  This, of course, increases your visibility and the likelihood that readers will find your book.
5. Make videos.  Talk about your book or your area of expertise.  Tell or show viewers something they don’t already know that fits in with your book theme or ideas.
6. Write a book club guide with questions and discussion prompts.  Put it on your blog as a free download for book clubs.
7. Make your own book trailer for free with a program called Animoto.  Upload it to YouTube, Facebook, and your author page on Amazon.com, as well as your blog.
8. Offer yourself as a guest on Blog Talk Radio shows, webinars, teleseminars or any other outlet where your most likely audience already gathers.

These strategies take time to implement.  Most of them are free.  Once you write your book, your new job is marketing.  Having a well plotted strategy will help.  What platform building ideas are you employing?  I’d love to know.

Recommending books to your fans and followers is a good marketing strategy.

If you love to read. have ever recommended a good book to a friend or reviewed a book online, then setting up an affiliate relationship with Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com can help pay your web hosting bills, increase your position as a trusted source of information and support authors and writers through recommending their work. You simply sign up for an account and when you find something you’d like to recommend, you grab the link and share it on Twitter, Facebook, your blog or even through your e-newsletter.  You can build a “recommended reading” widget through these affiliate programs and add new books easily.  These sites pay you a small commission on each sale resulting from your recommendation.  You will not get rich with this strategy, but you can bring in enough to pay for a book or two per month that you’d probably buy anyway.

It’s not the money that makes this worthwhile.  It’s a win-win marketing strategy that helps your visibility, increases your social currency and frankly, gives you something to blog about now and then when you’re stumped.

I only recommend books I love and in the case of Amazon.com, I occasionally recommend other products that I personally use like the Flip Mino Video Camera (which I use every day and love) and the Kodak Zi8 (which I use for speeches and conferences because of it’s exterior microphone capabilities) as well as the really inexpensive but awesome tripod I use which costs less than $15.00 and has a travel case!

I know that I enjoy reading lists from trusted sources.  Trust is the key issue here with dabbling in affiliate marketing.  If you recommend things you don’t like, people will come to view your lists as a waste of time.  So don’t squander your social currency.  Recommend the best and earn a little change in the process.

I’d love to see your recommended reading lists.  I’ve been so busy reading non-fiction books by clients so I can help them with their promotional plans that I could use a good novel to sweep me away.

Twitter Supercharged

Twitter has rolled out a new featured called “Who to Follow,” that has the potential to supercharge your efforts to build an influential and interested following.

Take a look at the right side of your Twitter homepage and you’ll now see, just below your following/followers stats, the headline “Who to Follow.”  Just to the right will be a highlighted live link called “view all.”

When you click on that link, you’ll be taken to a page that has suggestions for new people you may like to follow based on your current patterns.  Twitter even gives you a couple of names of people you already follow who are following the suggested Tweeter.  You can go right down the list and accept the invitation to follow all these suggested new connections and then Twitter will look through their database and suggest more to you.

I used this feature to find authors, bookstores, book reviewers and publishing people and found it to be easy to use, fast and effective.

I was impressed with the great choices Twitter offered me and they were mostly spot on in terms of my interests.

You can also use the “Browse Interests” tab to drill down and find people who use a key word or phrase in their bio and follow them as well.  This has enormous implications for using Twitter to find and follow your target market.

I’d love to hear how you are using Twitter to reach a new audience.