Building Profit Generating Partnerships for a Linked In World

 In my last article, Organizing Content for New Media Writing, I concluded by talking about the need to build a community of people upon whom you can rely for skills/connectional services you’re not capable of doing yourself.  Even in this Brave New World of “multitask everything,” there are many things you can’t  - and shouldn’t – do yourself.

 I first read of the Master Mind concept in the book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.  The idea is that you identify and surround yourself with people who will help you stay focused on your goals.  Each person in the group shares their expertise to assist one another in achieving their goals, and in some cases contributing skill sets in a collaborative effort.  Here is a link to the mastermind group I belong to, the Indy Speaker Connection.

On Hubpages, the equivalent of a Master Mind group is provided via a group called Hubnuggets.   With the help of the Hubnuggets Team, writers on Hubpages can learn how to leverage the power of this site better.

As the Internet connects people globally, we can identify others who possess skills we lack. For example, I needed a graphic artist, and so I partnered with Steven Peavey to help me create this image for my web page, Wise Jargon. One gentleman who reached out to me from India, Ebenezer, was looking for Christian authors. We now work and pray together on ideas for his organization, the Christian Communications Center , as well as for my writing projects. I needed help in editing a video of myself to embed power point slides to create this video promoting my new novel, The Sword of the Scroll, so I turned to a company called Amy's Answers to produce this video for my book.

In these and other instances, I’ve followed a practice I first described in my book, Buying Technology: Understand your business, and what it takes to be successful at that business. Identify vendors who will enter into a long-term profit-generating partnership with you. Based on the relationship you develop with your vendors, you will have the confidence to move forward to achieve your business goals.

The new buzz is The Social Network. Facebook, the subject of a movie by the same name, is not the only tool of social media. However, it is perhaps the most pervasive of a group of services that include Linked In, MySpace, and Twitter. In order to become noticed in the “Long Tail” of marketing niches, it is important to leverage the connective power it commands.

There are many applications one can use that facilitate one’s use of the social network. Here, I want to mention three.

As an author of historical Christian novels, I want to let people know about the books I write – and create a community that might discuss them. Rethink Books provides an application called Social Books that lets you do that. In addition, they also provide services to track your social network marketing campaign.

Because a quarter of the world’s internet runs through Facebook, it’s important to have your webpage featured in Facebook. To do that, you need a fixed page that doesn’t change, where you can tell people about what you do. Miproapps is a company that provides an application that lets you create fixed pages on Facebook. Here’s the page I created on my Facebook page.

Finally, in order to tell the world about what you’re doing, you need to post. But, doing this on your blog, twitter, facebook and other social network platforms can take time. Hootsuite lets you set up your posts in one place and then hit “send” to all of them. And, a very cool thing I like about them is they provide a series of tutorials with ideas on how to use their services to promote what you write.

So, to Build a Profit Generating Partnership for a Linked In World, we need to:

1. Build a Master Mind group of people who hold you accountable, and who encourage you to do our best at what ever it is you do.
2. Identify vendor partners who understand your business needs and who see to build a win-win partnership.
3. Leverage social networking platforms and applications that will help get you noticed in the “long tail” of niche marketing.