In part two of this New Media Marketing series we looked at three more profitable precepts of marketing with the 5-Channels of New Media: blogs, online video, podcasts, social networks and social filters.

They were:

If you missed the first article and want the full details on the first five profitable precepts you can get all the juicy details here in Part One and Part Two.

Here are the next three profitable precepts for marketing with New and Social Media.

#6. Participate, comment and converse in context

If you enter a conversation on a blog or in a Social Network, take the time to find out what’s being talked about so you’ll have a better chance of successfully contributing. I know this sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many well-intentioned entrepreneurs I see all excited and fired up about their product or service treat EVERY interaction online as a chance to mention what they do.

Instead, observe your target audience. Remember your Tribe’s wants, needs and desires. What are they looking for? How can you solve a problem, meet their needs, or remove pain? Remember — people buy YOU before they buy what you’re selling.

Contribute in context. Make sure your comment adds to the conversation in some meaningful way. Don’t just say, “Oh yeah, I wrote an article about that on my blog, go check it out.” This is the fastest way to break rapport and ruin relationships in the online community. Your comment is your opportunity to prove that what you have to share is valuable – the more valuable, the more likely people are to check you out further.

#7. Content that counts is linkable

If you post any type of content (written, audio, images, video), people need to be able to reference it on their blog with a permanent link for all of your content.

QuanSite software takes care of this automatically. However, as you create new content, it needs to be searchable, and able to be indexed and referenced. There should be no “rotting links.” This happens when a site posts an article then moves it to an archive. The original link changes with no auto-forwarding feature, or worse, you get a “404 error: page cannot be found.” These annoying things stop the new-media marketplace from working properly, and stop your credibility almost immediately.

#8. Assume that readers will enter your site from any page

Old-school Internet thinking: Put up a Website or sales page and visitors will come to your site though the home page and then spider out into those other pages.

Today, your search-engine rankings come from the keyword-rich content in your QuanSite business blog module. When people visit your domain coming from a regular search engine, they’re could land on any post or page on your blog.

E-mails, tweets or poss on Social Networks can reference you. Other blogs can reference you. If that happens on a post that went up three weeks ago, there may have been a dozen posts since then, so they’re now entering your site through the archives section.

Think about what your blog site looks like: how it is structured for name capture? Does it take the conversation to the next level, and making the relationship with your readers even more personal?

Successfully marketing in the New Media Marketplace requires a different mindset. These profitable precepts are simple, but by using them along side persuasion triggers and solid conversion principles you’ll see your online marketing results soar.

In the fourth and final part of this profitable precepts series we’ll cover participation on individual pages; along with testing and tracking.

John Paul Micek is founder of RPM Success Group ® Inc., the leader in software, systems & strategic coaching to double your bottom-line in under 12mos in the New Economy. QuanSite New media marketing software is one of those resources. He is author of the first published book on New Media marketing, the best seller Secrets Of Online Persuasion.

In part one of this New Media Marketing series we looked at the first two profitable precepts of new media marketing with the 5-Channels of New Media.

They were:

1. Be a market thinker, not a product pusher
2. Participate and profit without becoming an evangelist

If you missed the first article and want the full details on these precepts and discover how you’re in danger of being hacked to pieces by a hoard of midget Ninjas if you ignore them — you can get all the juicy details here in Part One.

Speaking of midget Ninjas, a few of our coaching clients emailed me asking me to explain where midget Ninjas come from. (Come on guys and ladies, it’s OK to post your comments here instead of emailing us. ) Anyway, as far as midget Ninjas, I know most come from a remote island chain in the Western Pacific. But if I were to reveal the exact location of that island, I’d be sealing both your and my fate at the same time.

Within minutes, a midget Ninja that’s been hibernating at the back of your refrigerator behind that 3 gallon jar of olives from Costco would awaken to snuff out your life. I don’t want that to happen to you or me, so unfortunately we’ll have to keep the midget Ninjas home location a mystery.

But what I can share with you today are three more profitable precepts of marketing with New and Social Media.

#3. Connection is key

A conversation can occur one-on-one. Or as we’re talking about here, one-on-one x 1,000, one-on-one x 10,000, or even more. Seth Godin predicted this trend of leveraged marketing back in 1999, and most companies STILL haven’t gotten it. Marketing is permission; it’s not interruption.

Interruption marketing (the way old-school advertisers and mass marketers are still trying to do it) doesn’t work anymore. Marketing is permission and permission is only gained after engaging and listening. If you haven’t read it already, Permission Marketing is a great little book where Seth explains this all in more detail.

Once a conversation takes place, a relationship is formed. You nurture that relationship and you build rapport. That rapport leads to trust, and eventually to influence and persuasion. Not influence and persuasion in the way those terms have been bastardized by political correctness, but in a good and healthy way that exists in any relationship.

#4. Understand and honor the wants, needs and desires of your Tribe (target audience)

Your ideal audience of prospects and clients is dying to tell you what they want. But if you don’t know exactly who they are, you can’t use new media to make marketing easy.

Take the time to sit down and define your ideal customer. And don’t just focus on the typical demographic descriptors. Look at psychographics and emotional wants, needs, and desires. Draw as complete a picture as possible and finding members of your ideal audience already gathered together will be a comparative “breeze.”

This is just good solid Marketing 101. But it’s surprising how many business owners don’t have a clear and specific description of who their target market is.

#5. Listen, learn, observe and adapt

There are two types of listening and observing:

Active listening is like being at a party: you’re interacting and you’re engaged. This type of listening is where you build build rapport and trust.

Passive listening is like being behind the glass of a focus group: you’re observing the market or your target audience from a distance. This type of listening is where you can discover the specific hopes, fears, wants, needs and desires of your Tribe. What just a few years ago large corporations paid $10,000 to $20,000 for a day with “focus groups” you can now get for free with a plan and the knowledge of where to look in Social Networks.

Both forms of listening are necessary in the New Economy. And both are easier than ever before because the New Media Marketplace is so connected, dialog is so active in social networks, and search engines are so well adjusted to the new LIVE nature of the Web.

In the next installment we’ll take a look at the profitable precepts of marketing with New and Social Media that have to do with participation, conversing in context, and linkability.

John Paul Micek is a co-founder of the RPM Success Group ® Inc., the leader in software, systems & coaching to double your profits in 12mos or less in the New Economy. QuanSite New media marketing software is one of those tools. He is author of the 1st published book on New Media marketing, the best seller Secrets Of Online Persuasion.

When marketing with the 5-Channels of New Media: business blogs, online video, podcasts, social networks and social filters — there are some precepts that you must follow. Similar to advanced practice in secretive martial arts; If you break these precepts you’ll die a horrible painful death being ripped apart by a gang of midget Ninjas!

OK, so they aren’t really precepts in the true sense of the word. They weren’t written in stone by the finger of God. You won’t be struck down by lightning if you break any of them. And it’s likely you’ll escape the wrath of those pesky midget Ninjas.

Seriously though — much of what you’ll read about New Media Marketing is laced with personal opinions and common practices positioned as so strongly as rules that you’d think they were commandments.

Now don’t get me wrong, some rules are good (and necessary) in many areas of life. But very often in business and marketing rules do nothing but hinder creativity and create a herd of mediocrity. Sometimes, to spark creativity, you just have to poke fun at the “rules.” Remember that “industry norms” make you normal, and in the New Economy — average is death. Profitable precepts make you stand out and move you to the top of the pile.

The only rules worth remembering are the ones that help you NOT to break rapport with your ideal audience

When you’re getting started marketing with New Media, the only rules worth remembering are the ones that help you NOT to break rapport with your ideal audience. And the only guidelines worth following are those that help you develop the right mindset for Marketing with New Media. A mindset that helps you focus on people, participation, and persuasion.

Marketing success through failure

One piece of advice my Dad gave me when I was 12 has always stood out for me over the years, “Don’t just learn from other people’s success stories. You’ll learn more from other people’s mistakes, so you won’t have to make them yourself.”

When it comes to online persuasion and influence, there are things you can learn from the success and failures of other business owners. This is what will give you a huge edge over your competitors who don’t know any better.

Now I’ve made a lot of mistakes before I came up with these ten precepts as a primer for New Media newbies. Over the next few posts, we’ll take a look at these ten profitable precepts for successfully marketing with New Media.

These guidelines come from over 12,000 hours of research and testing with our coaching and consulting clients and QuanSite members, as well as our own personal experiences. If you break them once, you may not get caught. If you break them over and over again, you’ll feel it where it hurts – your profits…pocketbook…ego — or all three!

Let’s get started with the first two New Media marketing precepts since they’re the easiest to follow:

1. Be a market observer, not a product pusher

This means you are going to be part of the marketplace without being engulfed by it. The goal is to look for problems people have and solve them.*

Contrast that with the typical salesperson or traditional interruption-type advertising campaign. They’re all about pushing a product or service, with no regard for the end user. The focus is on one more sale. Like a crack dealer pushing a temporary high for a quick buck, these product pushers have no regard for the long term satisfaction of their clients and customers.

The market leader defines his or her ideal audience, then looks to understand, interact with, and ultimately deliver what people in that ideal audience want, need, and desire… persuasively, without ramming another offer down your throat.

(*Note: Ultimately to maximize persuasion, positioning and profits; this means becoming a leader using the principles of Tribal Seduction. Something you’ll be learning lots more about here.)

2. Participate and profit without becoming an evangelist

Observe, participate, and leverage the new media marketplace without getting caught up in the hype or the technology. You want to always stand guard at the door of your mind while participating. But don’t follow the Social Media crowd who blathers on endlessly about New Media this and Social media that . . . it gets old real quick.

Many evangelists tend to be hammers and, therefore, see every problem as a nail. When’s the last time you had a pleasant experience with a self-admitted street evangelist? You get the point, right?

Just like any other idea or technology, when enough people get going in a line, it’s just like a flock of sheep headed back to the pen. You need to stay outside of that herd mentality. If you enjoy using New Media channels and they work for you and your business, great! But share your excitement by example, not by evangelism.

It’s like a saying I remember one of my old pastors using; “Preach the gospel and sometimes use words.” Constantly innovate using lateral (instead of literal) thinking, and keep an independent mindset. You’ll win more fans and profits, and have more fun in the process too.

In the part two of this series we’ll reveal two more profitable precepts of marketing with New Media that will help you connect with your ideal audience… even if they’re a bunch of midget Ninjas. … Hey! Where’d those damn midget Ninjas come from again!?

John Paul Micek is a co-founder of the RPM Success Group ® Inc., the leader in software, systems & coaching to double your profits in 12mos or less in the New Economy. QuanSite New media marketing software is one of those tools. He is author of the 1st published book on New Media marketing, the best seller Secrets Of Online Persuasion.