Building your brand through online forums and groups

Let’s talk about online forums and groups. People talk all the time about how hard it is in online forums and groups. I don’t get it, I’ve gotten some of the best traffic in the world from forums, and I’ve had clients do amazingly well with forums. Yes, it is a pointless job. Yes, it’s a matter of finding the right post to answer. Yes, it’s a matter of becoming a trusted poster so you can put a landing page on your signatures. No, that’s not easy. Yes, it takes 2 to 3 months to do it. And if you’re not willing to spend 2-3 months building a great traffic source, forums and communities are not for you.

You are posting great content with some videos and you are posting to a forum or community. Now layer in interviews. Where do I get interviews? Here’s the thing, if you write enough articles, people will ask you to be interviewed. I get a lot of interview requests. I reject most of them, because I don’t have time anymore. In fact, I wish I had found a way to do them all, I really do. But if all you did were interviews, you couldn’t create trainings like this. I couldn’t do all the other things that I hope add value to the world. If when you’re starting out, you write a few hundred articles and you put them on your website, and you write a few hundred more, and you post them here and there, and you start ranking on Lifehack, and you start ranking on websites in your niche, and you start to position yourself in the forums… I can almost guarantee that you will receive interview requests.

You may say, how can I tell if it’s a good interview or not? Do them all! Do them all until you feel overwhelmed! Then we’ll talk about when to trim. And then you start noticing things, you cut back. This is what you do, when someone interviews you, you’re going to post that interview. The first thing you do when someone asks you to interview them is ask, “Can I have the right to record it too and use it in my marketing the same way you will use it in yours?” They will almost always say yes, and if they say no, say no, thank you. Unless it’s obviously somewhere you’re going to interview.

When you get interviewed, you also record it and put it on your website as the so-and-so interview. It creates instant credibility for you and you share it on Facebook, you share it on G+ and you get instant credibility. And when 50 different people interview you over the next year, and they all show up on the front page of your website and start showing up on Google, what’s going to happen? You will have instant credibility.

Before I continue, I am going to touch on three more things that I want to give you. Some of you are still wondering, where is the 1-2-3 formula? THERE IS NOT ONE!

Hopefully now you have this idea that you need to know what your website is going to look like, you need to know how you’re going to change the world, and you need to start changing the world right there on your website, and then tell everyone that you know.

One thing I’ve talked about in the past is that you have a list of 100 Facebook friends. And most of you probably have 100 friends on Facebook. You should be able to post a post on your Facebook page that says, “Hey, as you know, I’ve been working on starting my own business and started one. Creating a scrapbook is my new business and I know you’re probably not interested in scrapbooking.” scrapbooking, but could you tell everyone you know who might be interested in scrapbooking?” Here’s the thing, if someone unfriends you because you spammed them on Facebook, because you told your friends about your personal pet project. Do you REALLY want to be Facebook friends with that person?

If you’re afraid to tell your friends about your business, maybe you need to create a business that your friends will like. Or maybe you need to reassess some of your friends. I’m serious! Your friends should be the number one people who support you. You say, “well, so-and-so isn’t supportive”, maybe you just need to unfriend him for 3 months. I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t know all the rules of social etiquette, I don’t know if you stop being friends with someone your child goes to school with and they won’t talk to you or your children anymore. we can’t play together. I don’t know how all that works. You’re going to have to figure that out for yourself, I’m not a relationship expert.

What I’m saying is if someone dislikes the business you’re building so much that they want to stop being friends with you. I question your kindness.

I think you should be able to tell everyone. I think you should be able to get a business card that just has your website name and logo on it.

And every time you run into people at the grocery store, and you’re talking, and you say “hey, what are you doing,” and they say, and they ask you what you do, you pull out your card and you say, “I run this website.” It doesn’t make any difference if you started 3 days ago, you run that scrapbooking website, right? Great, “I run this website and let me ask you this, do you know anyone who is interested in scrapbooking? Here’s another card.” You may not want to be that aggressive, but I’m just trying to give you an idea, you can also do this offline. This shouldn’t be some secret project you have online. Do you think Dropbox was a secret project? Do you think Taskrabbit was a secret project? Is Google a secret project? Is Facebook a secret project? Is Business Insider a secret project?

NO! They are not secret projects, they are social projects!

When you take your website and allow it to become a social project, you will find that amazing things are going to happen.