Whatever form of online business you engage in, you can probably benefit from batch processing. This could mean blogging, writing sales copy, combing thorough analytics, cold calling…whatever. For those not familiar with batch processing, it is the practice of lumping together related business activities in an attempt to be as efficient as possible.

So what is this first secret ingredient suggested in the title? Well before we get to it, let’s consider some background. Engaging in any sort of weekly routine with diligence for month after month obviously requires self discipline.

And there seems to be a direct correlation between discipline and financial success in online business, especially in the early stages when there is usually only one person working on the business. There are however limit to self discipline as even the most disciplined entrepreneurs run into snags, emergencies, other miscellaneous delays. So what should happen to our batch processing schedule when we run into these inevitable distractions?

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My favorite movie so far this summer has been Kung Fu Panda, and my favorite character from the movie is Master Oogue. I’m an Oogue fan for two reasons, first he is super wise and second, despite the fact that he is obviously a high-mileage turtle, he is fast when he needs to be.

So how does this relate to online business? One thing in particular which Oogue says to Shifu, “let go of the illusion of control”, I think resonates especially well in the world of online business.

Human beings, as creatures of habit, naturally want to feel in control. The problem is that in the crazy world of growing your own business, rarely are things ever under control.

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If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

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A story made its way around the Twitter-verse starting about two day’s ago regarding a seemingly ground breaking event had occurred. An eBay auction for the right to sponsor the Twitter feed of Ian Schafer for one month had ended with a closing bid of $1,082.01. For more complete details on the auction you can view this auction’s auction page on eBay.

At first this would seem to be a momentous event. Certainly being able to raise over a thousand dollars for the right to sponsor a Twitter feed with less than 600 followers, for one month is noteworthy, even if the purpose of the auction was not for profit. According to Mr. Schafer’s Twitter feed all proceeds from the auction are to go to the David Wright Foundation.

The winning bid for the auction came from a bid from eBay user “teammetacafe” who prior to winning this auction had zero eBay Feedback. I am assuming that the eBay user “teammetacafe” refers to the metacafe.com website, though I am not sure. It is important to note that this winning bid may well have been totally legitimate and un-engineered in any way, shape, or form.

What is particularly interesting however, about this auction is its bid history. If you look at the bid history you will see that there were 22 bids from what appears to be 5 eBay accounts. If you examine this bid history closely you will see that with the exception of the first bidder who seems to have an eBay feedback rating of 50, none of the other accounts had a feedback rating higher than 1 prior to the end of this auction.

Hmm… a bunch of eBay accounts with little or no feedback history bidding what some would consider a surprisingly high amount for the rights to sponsor a Twitter feed for a month. What could it mean?

Regardless of how the end result of this auction came about, I think that there is an important lesson in this story. The lesson here is that marketing, to a large degree, is about creating a spectacle and it is clear that Mr. Schafer here has succeeded in doing so with the sponsorship he has obtained for his Twitter feed.

Assuming that you have a WordPress based blog, and your own hosting, then there are several ways that you can add social bookmarking buttons to your posts. This post will briefly go over two options for adding this functionality to your site.

The first option that I would suggest is the option that we use here at Feedback Secrets. We use Feedburner.com to syndicate our RSS feed and FeedBurner allows you the option to add social bookmarking buttons to your posts from inside the control panels of your FeedBurner account.

If you are currently using FeedBurner, then log in to your account and click on the “Optimize” tab. Then click on the “FeedFlare” link in the left hand sidebar. Here you will have the option to select various social bookmarking links to be added to the posts on your site. Please note that next to the option for each link is a check box for adding the link to your site and another for adding the link to your feed.

The next option that I would like to suggest is the plug-in available from ShareThis.com. The ShareThis plug-in is probably the most used method for adding social bookmarking buttons to a blog that I have seen. The advantage of this plug-in is it’s clean and unobtrusive look.

The plug-in appears on the bottom of your posts as a single button in the shape of the ShareThis logo. Once you click on this icon you are given the option to bookmark the post with a host of other social bookmarking and social networking sites.

We hope that this brief overview provided you with some idea for adding social bookmarking buttons to your site. If you have used another method to add the functionality of social bookmarking to your site please leave a comment and let us know about your experience and whether you would recommend that method.

The following post about keys to social bookmarking success was submitted by Marsello Oentoro. 

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com’s browser toolbar are great sources of website traffic.  The key is to get enough Diggs or Stumbles to get your latest page of wow content a significant burst of traffic. This usually happens when enough users “vote” for you content, in a relatively short period of time, to make your content the hot story of the minute. Let’s examine some of the ways we can improve our chances of getting there:

1. Remember that Content is King
 
Readers are not stupid; you simply cannot cheat them with a poor or spammy content and expect those readers to return to your site.  If your want to submit weak content to your site, let’s say exclusively for SEO purposes, then don’t even bother bookmarking it.  Keep in mind that if any of these social bookmarking sites comes to the conclusion that you are a spammer, you run the risk of getting your account banned.

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Obviously if you are interested in building up search engine traffic to your site, it’s a great idea to find up and coming trends that are related to your niche. Once you have identified such trends, it’s in your interest to write a lot of content for your site, in relation to that particular trend. Whether you have a blog or a static page site, the more pages of content relating to trend based keywords, the better.

Positioning your self in this way can lead to great rewards as the trend matures and eventually peaks. This trend based strategy will mean that you get double your moneys worth when it comes to residual traffic. You’ll get the traffic from your content, multiplied by the increase interest across the net for information on that particular trend.

Right now, Twitter, may well be the up and coming SEO trend to watch out for. If you look at all the internet marketing related blogs across the net, right now there is an incredible amount of posts being written on the subject of Twitter.

Add to that the fact that more and more main stream corporations, political candidates, and casual users are flocking to the site, and you may also come to the conclusion that Twitter is a bubble that has not yet peaked.

There have been quite a few posts written recently on the subject of building your Twitter following. There is one strategy in particular which seems to be the source of some controversy. That is the strategy of following other users, involved in niches similar to yours, with the hope that they will follow you in return. I like to call this kind of follow, a reciprocal follow.  Some people have been advising Twitter users to use this technique while others have suggested avoiding it like the plague.

Maki of DoshDosh recently wrote a post on the subject of building your Twitter following. In the post one of the strategies suggested is to use your existing presence on other social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace, as a means of promoting your Twitter profile. This is a great strategy for all those who already have a sizable presence on another social networking site.

If however you are just starting out in online business, effectively employing such a strategy might be harder to pull off. Business trends move in cycles, and sites that where once considered hot beds for marketing through social networking such as Facebook and MySpace may have cooled down in comparison to some up and coming sites such as Twitter.

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For a small business owner, there is no better feeling than waking up after a good night’s sleep to discover ecommerce, affiliate, or advertising income that was not in your account when you went to bed. The problem is that when you are just starting out is that at times, you can go days without making a cent.

This lack of income can make it feel as if all your hard work is for nothing, like the wheels are spinning but you haven’t moved an inch. The solution is to focus on building equity instead of income.

In the early stages of online business, equity is almost always easier to build than income. Before we get into specifics about how to build online equity let’s start by defining what online equity is. I would define online equity as any measurable statistic, associated with your online business that increases your leverage for making money online.

Let me give you some examples… Gaining 100 new followers for your email newsletter would count as an increase in online equity. In addition adding 10 new pages of content to your website would most likely count as an increase in online equity. Gaining 500 new friends, all interested in your businesses niche, on a social networking site like Facebook would count as an increase in online equity as well.

Let’s take a closer look at our Facebook example. If your particular niche is affiliate marketing, you could search on Facebook for groups that have already been created around the subject of affiliate marketing. Once you have found the groups that you would like to target you can work through the member’s of these groups systematically. For instance you could add 500 Facebook users as “friends” on your profile in a single evening.

Within a 24 hour period, even if only 10% of these users decided to reciprocate (by adding you as a friend), you would still have gained an additional 50 friends by the end of the next evening. If you gain 50 friends in one day then while you sleep the first 20 or so of these followers might have added you as friends. This example is just one way that you can build online equity while you sleep.

The next time that you decide to promote through your Facebook profile, your audience will now be 50 profiles larger than it one before. The larger your following on a particular social networking site, the larger your sphere of influence and as your influence grows so does your leverage to make money online.

What other methods can you think of for building your online equity?

I recently heard the term “Social Media Equity” for the first time in a recent post entitled ”The Benefits of Social Media Aggregators and Lifestreaming: A Look at Friendfeed” written by Maki of DoshDosh.com. I have to say that I like this term a lot. The virtual world has become a fascinating place and its financial impact is beginning to rival that of the physical world.

Take the term “digital real estate”, which some use to refer to virtual properties in online games like Second Life. According to the article “Is there real money in online real estate?” by MSN Real Estate correspondent Christopher Solomon, Ailin Graef may be making around $150,000 per year from her digital real estate empire.

When speaking of digital real estate, it is important of course not to confuse it with “virtual real estate”, which is a term that some use to refer to web domains. Domain names have potential cash value or equity based on several factors which might include how clever the domain name is, the amount of incoming traffic, any pre-existing name recognition, or similarity to a popular pre-existing domain.

For about $10 a year you can sit on a domain name without the need for any hosting in the hopes that someone will come along someday and buy it. Starting at about $5 a month you can ad hosting to your domain and change your online prospects dramatically.

With virtual real estate, as with physical, it’s not just the address that is important in determining value, you also have to look at the size of the property. With hosting you can add as many pages to your site as you want, with each and every page that you add your SEO presence grows, and as it grows so does your site’s value.

All of this suggests that the equity of the virtual world has very real value in terms of real dollars and cents. What is great about this is the nature of the barriers to entry in the online world.

At Feedback Secrets, we believe that if an opportunity has no barriers to entry then it is not a very good one. There are definitely barriers to building your online equity; however they are barriers of desire as opposed to barriers of circumstance.

For example, if you wanted to get started with investment properties or flipping houses but you had $100 in the bank and no job, you would most likely be out of luck. The barriers to entry, when it comes to virtual equity are the willingness to work hard, be creative, and potentially risk your time.

Tags: social networking, social media, virtual real estate