The first step in creating video is having a place to put it – and the king remains YouTube. Even if you don’t have you own videos to upload yet, it’s nice to have a youtube account that you can use to comment on, favorite, or otherwise interact with videos.

If you already have a youtube account, you are not off the hook! Take this week’s time to go through the settings of your existing account and make improvements.

Your first step is to go to http://www.youtube.com and click “Create Account” in the top right corner. Remember that you’ll be stuck with your username and it will be visible to everyone – make it some variation of your name or your business name. Next, youtube will ask you to create or link to an existing google account. (This is a change since google purchased youtube.)

After you’ve finished creating your account, start playing around with your settings. I often get asked the difference between a regular account and a channel – every account has a channel built right in. You can modify yours by going to “Account” in the drop-down that appears under your username in the top right corner, then “edit channel”.

Guest post by Siddhartha Herdegen

When I was an undergraduate studying economics I got the impression people made rational decisions by weighing the costs and benefits of every option available and making the choice which was most advantageous for them.  When I examined the behavior of those around me however, this theory seemed to explain only a small percentage of actual decisions.

I later studied leadership theory and I began to see an explanation for this behavior.  People often make meta-decisions which eliminate the need to make numerous smaller decisions.  The decision to follow someone else can be used as a shortcut to making complex decisions.  This saves the follower time and effort but also gives the leader a great advantage.

In this dynamic, both parties benefit.  The follower struggles less with decision making and the leader gets to set the agenda.  Both are maximizing their efficiency; one by conserving energy the other by focusing it.

If you are reading this blog it’s likely you see yourself as a person who has a lot to accomplish, a person with drive and ambition.  An energy maximizer rather than an energy conserver.  If you want to be a leader rather than a follower there’s one characteristic you must develop to increase your odds of being successful: you need to develop vision.

What Does it Mean to Be Visionary?

To be visionary is to have a distinct view of how the world could be changed for the better.  A person with vision can improve our lives by reorganizing the living room furniture or by reordering social norms.

While there are many things a visionary person can accomplish on their own, the best reason to be visionary is to inspire others to help you accomplish your goals.  Leadership is a way of leveraging our collective abilities, of focusing the energy of many people to create a better world.

Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

While many people have recognized the benefits of leadership, not everyone can effectively get other people to want to accomplish their goals.  When most people study leadership they focus on communicating effectively and creating a connection with others, on being the kind of person others will respond to.

While these are the nuts and bolts of leadership training, the real key to success begins much earlier, with the vision you are working toward.  If you have a vision that is compelling you have a tremendous head start on those who are merely focusing on the mechanics of leadership.

The Secret to Finding Followers

The secret is, people actually want to follow you.  (Well, maybe not you specifically, but they want to follow someone.)  When you provide an inspiring vision you are helping them because you are fulfilling their need for leadership and the desire to be engaged in communal effort.

Everyone has a desire to be part of a group; it’s a basic human need.  Whenever we find ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings we begin looking for a group with which we can associate, searching for likeminded people and developing a community.  A leader provides the mental satisfaction we crave; it’s like a drink of cool water to a thirsty soul.

We all have this need to find leaders but we’re not just going to follow anyone.  As leaders we need to provide a compelling vision that will resonate with potential followers.

How To Create an Inspiring Vision

It’s not about pretending to be something you’re not, it’s finding what’s unique about who you are.

We all have a distinctive worldview or a way of interpreting how the world operates.  This worldview contains both our understanding of how the world currently operates (e.g., rich people don’t go to jail, or it’s not what you know but who you know) and how the world should operate (e.g., all people should be treated equally, or merit gets recognized).

Our worldview is what motivates us to behave the way we do and inspires us to act altruistically.  The people we follow are those who connect with a part of our worldview and who say, let’s work together to make this happen.

The secret is finding a unique piece of your worldview others can connect with.  The more this resonates with them the stronger the connection will be.  Much of our worldview revolves around ourselves, about how the world should operate in order to make our lives happier.  But while this is motivating it’s not really inspiring.

There are a lot of people who use flattery and an appeal to our selfish nature to promote their agenda.  If you’ve ever seen a headline that says “You Can Be Rich” you’ve seen this kind of self-interested appeal.

We all know people are first and foremost concerned about themselves, but people also want to see themselves as generous and kind.  Being self-serving is socially discouraged; we’d rather see ourselves as helpful.  Everyone wants to be part of an admirable cause.

So while people may respond to your message out of self-interest, they will share your message with others when it benefits people besides themselves.  And whatever you’re trying to do, you can do it better by enlisting the help of supportive followers.

You can do this by following these two guidelines:

1. Turn your vision into an inspiring story

2. Make it about others

People respond better to stories than to concepts; whenever possible express your vision as a story.  Intellectually believing in equal rights can cause us to be committed to it as an ideal, but hearing about someone’s personal experience being denied a basic human right creates an emotional reaction that is visceral.  This is what motivates us to action.

While a story about yourself can be touching, endearing, even emotionally appealing, nothing inspires people to share a story with others like being part of a worthy cause.  When people feel their efforts will make a difference for someone else they’re much more likely to share it with their friends.

This doesn’t mean you have to operate a charity, it just means you can’t be blatantly rapacious.  Find a way to make your needs correspond with the needs of others.

So Why Should You Be Visionary?

You need to be visionary if you want to:

Become a leader
Inspire followers
Leverage the efforts of others
Give people something to believe in
Get people to spread the word

Siddhartha Herdegen is a philosopher and economist who teaches leadership at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.  He writes for the blog Principles of Failure.

Guest post by Mark Silver

In the spring of 1984, I was ducking out of yet another high school pep rally. I had somehow managed to get the master key to all the classrooms (how did I get that again?) and was hiding out in the school newspaper’s computer lab.

I never made it to a football game—did run cross country, though, but consistently came in last. I got up the nerve to ask a girl out that I had a crush on and she said no. I took refuge in computers, in punk rock, and in stage crew for theater. I was even known to play Dungeon and Dragons from time to time, or suit up and go hit other people with padded weapons.

I was a geek and not in the cool sense we use that word today. Shy, awkward, lacking confidence, I may as well have been living on a different planet from all the popular kids at school.

When I first tried out social media through blogging a few years ago all of that stuff came up again. Ugh! Painful!

I’m not young enough. I’m not cool enough. I’m not whatever enough. I basically used my blog as another place to publish our newsletters and did nothing else with it. I avoided Facebook. Twitter didn’t exist yet, but I would’ve avoided that, too.

Just frickin’ painful, people. Ugh.

Much easier to write my ezine, answer emails, and hang out with friends outside of work time. Besides, did I really need to spend another 20 hours on the computer?

Any of this sound familiar? You may be an old geek like I am. Should we just give it up and forget about social media? Are we just not cool enough?

It might be helpful to understand why social media has made such an impact.

Where Social Media Came From

For most of the last several hundred thousand years humans existed in tribes and extended family units. Everyone could talk to everyone else who mattered just by, you know, opening your mouth and talking.

Then along came the printing press in the sixteenth century, bringing to life the first easily duplicated broadcast media where one person could speak to many, many people.

Literacy rose and communication began changing very quickly. Newspapers, radio, television.

These have all been marvelous means for communicating. That is, in one direction. Although technology has improved over the last 400 years, broadcast communication has stayed one-way.

Finally, though, in the last fifteen years, there has been a breakthrough. People being broadcast to can talk back!

That little 400 year aberrancy in human history, and especially the last century, had been acting like a dam. In all the years people have been zoning out in front of the tube (remember when they really did have tubes?), there has been loads of pent-up self-expression, responses with nowhere to go.

Enter Stage Right: The Internet

In hindsight, we can now see how letters to the editor, published in newspapers, and local-access cable shows foreshadowed the breaking of the dam. Blogs! Facebook! Suddenly, the medium, a screen, that had been only one-way, has become two-way. People can now speak to one another through it.

That’s all that’s really happening in social media. People are waking up from a century of zoning-out and swallowing their half of conversation to find that they can speak to one another from nearly anywhere. The ability to call up a friend without having to show up on their front doorstep, has been multiplied a million times simultaneously.

Not bad, eh? But, maybe we’re not cool enough to participate?

Everyone Is a Dweeb

We’re all lacking in confidence. I have a friend with several best-selling books, the epitome of cool, who still has moments of being wracked by doubts. It’s not uncommon for me to sit down in the morning, before my spiritual practice and have the zapper thought: “No one cares about you or what you do. Just go watch videos.”

It’s hard to realize it, but everyone has feelings like this. And what does that mean?

It means that all of our hearts are aching to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be loved. It means that we’re sick of feeling isolated and alone and disconnected. We’re so wanting appreciation and recognition that we’re lovable despite everything.

I don’t mean to say that the mass of humanity is a steaming pile of sobbing neediness. I do, though, want to suggest that when you’re feeling all dweeb-i-fied, to take a moment to breathe and remember that the super cool people you’re comparing yourself to have moments of self-doubt. They need the same things you need:

Love. Appreciation. Acceptance.

Laura, who has been kind and generous enough to invite me to write this guest post, has lots of easy ways for you to engage in social media. She’s teaching you, for instance, that you don’t need to spend more than ten minutes a day on Twitter.

What I want you to realize is that social media actually represents a return to some of the most nourishing impulses in the human heart: the desire to connect and give to one another.

You don’t have to be cool. You can talk about the weather. But be sure to ask yourself: Do the people your business is meant to serve use social media? If so, show up for them with your full heart. Use social media simply as another place for your human heart to do what it naturally wants to do: give and receive love.

Mark Silver is a business tenderizer and Sufi spiritual nut. He founded Heart of Business nearly ten years ago to help people who ended up with a small business to make a difference in the world and found that they really needed to make a profit, too. He and his team have worked with thousands of small business owners, helping combine grounded spirituality and the nitty-gritty of business. Follow Mark on Twitter and grab his FREE Business Heart Toolkit, here.

Valuable content that positions you as an industry leader is the backbone of social media marketing. And today I want to introduce you to a free tool that makes your content easy to share – SlideShare.net

SlideShare is just like YouTube for documents and presentations. It allows you to upload your presentations (from powerpoint, keynote, open office and more) or documents (including microsoft word and PDF documents), tag them, add descriptions, and share them with the world. SlideShare can be really useful for taking your offline marketing materials online – for example you can upload your brochures, case studies, white papers, or articles. You can also share the presentations from any live speaking engagements.

Like any social site, at the end of the day you want SlideShare driving people back to YOUR site, so don’t forget to include your link in your document’s description. Your assignment this week is to sign up for a free account at SlideShare.net and upload your first document – play around and see what happens!

Guest Post by Hector Cuevas

Download The Autopilot Syndication Method PDF Here

Hector Cuevas can be found at HectorJCuevas.com, a blog about how online entrepreneurs can grow a business and create influence through their own personal blog. He is a marketing and blogging coach who will help you position you and your business as a leader in your industry.

Of course your website is incredibly clear and easy to use . . . to the person who created it! While you totally understand that “the magic center” is where someone goes to purchase your services, your potential clients may be left scratching their heads.

One of the most effective ways to get a wake-up call on the problems in your website is to watch someone actaully use it. I can promise you’ll be surprised at where they go and the conclusions that they jump to. Make sure to take off your defensive armor because I have to tell you, this can be an uncomfortable exercise!

I want you to find a local friend or family member and ask them to use your website. The less familliar they are with your site and your business in general the better. Ask them to perform specific tasks and speak aloud their thought process as they do it. Instruct them to do whatever you would want a customer to do on your site, which will be specific to your business. Don’t give them any hints! The whole idea is to see if your website is easy enough to use to complete the task without guidance. Some examples:

• Find the services that I provide
• Find my phone number
• Sign up for my newsletter
• Find the most popular basketball that we sell
• Make an appointment for a free consultation

You can also have them look through each page of your site and give their feedback on what they understand and what they find confusing. Again, remember to put your defenses down – this is valuable information!

Guest post by Greg Digneo

When you ask someone with a successful social media presence how to build your own audience, the answer most often is, “Write a blog post, tweet it to your following, and share it on Facebook and LinkedIn.” But what if you do not have many followers on Twitter or Facebook Fans?

Recently, my young marketing company decided to start over – completely from scratch. We wanted to see if we could generate leads using inbound marketing in 30 days. Here is how we did it.

Week 1: Create a Story

You as a consumer and as a business person are completely inundated with information. Whether you are checking your email, reading your favorite blogs, online magazines and websites, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, there is information everywhere. You receive so much information on a day-to-day basis that you don’t have time to consume all of it. When was the last time you had everything read in your RSS reader, or your inbox had 0 unread messages? I’m guessing it’s been a while.

Your customers and your audience are also suffering from information overload. Think about what you read – whether it pertains to your business or not. It’s the stories that resonate with you the most. Whether it’s a blog post on how to grow your business, or news relating to your favorite football team, or the heartfelt story of a mother reunited with her child. Determine what your story is for each marketing activity. As part of our 30 day strategy we created a webinar to be the main piece of content promoted during the month.

Create a Landing Page

Before you start publishing content in the form of a blog, or networking on Twitter or Facebook you need to create a landing page. Every person who comes to your website is a prospective customer. I hear many business owners say “I only have 500 people a month visiting my site, how can I get more traffic?” When I ask how many visitors became customers of the business, very often the answer is none. What would happen to you business if 20% of all web traffic turned into paying customers? Instead of asking “How do I increase blog traffic” you should ask “How do I turn that traffic into customers?”

Week 2: Content Development

After writing great content pertaining to your story, you need an audience to read it. In order to grow our audience, we would email our most helpful posts to friends and ask them to share it with their friends. Please do not abuse your contacts. Only send a few posts, otherwise, you risk becoming a bit of a spammer and annoying. Even if you do not have a large following on Facebook, Twitter, etc., chances are that you are in contact with someone who is highly connected, who will be happy to share helpful information with their network. Make sure that your content is easy for them to share. Finally, creating content is an ongoing process. Even as you start to adopt other inbound marketing strategies, creating content, such as a blog is a continuous effort.

Week 3: Guest Posting

We found many blogs, looking for guest posters and fresh content. If your story is compelling and unique, chances are they will allow you to leverage their network and help you grow your audience and expand your reach. By pitching the story we created in week one to various blogs and friends, we have been able to set up a few guest posts over the course of these 30 days. We get the benefit of expanded reach, and they get the benefit of fresh voices.

News Release

We have also submitted a news release announcing a webinar where we will share this story with small and mid-sized business owners. However, instead of emailing the news release to journalists, we used the online distribution service PRWeb. This will help with our search rankings and increase the visibility of our story as it gets picked up by various news aggregation sites.

Week 4: Paid Advertisements in Facebook

Our final focus is on PPC (pay per click) advertising. However, instead of using Adwords, we decided to use Facebook’s advertising platform. There are two main reasons for this. First, it is cheaper. We are in a competitive space, and Adwords clicks would be well over $1.00 per click to get onto the first page. Second, Facebook ads will help you develop your buyer persona. You have visibility on things like age, gender, likes, and job titles that you are unable to see using Google Adwords. This will help us target our ads more precisely, increasing the efficiency of our campaign.

Results

At the start of this plan we started with exactly one visitor to our website. When we presented our webinar at the end of the 30 days, we had over 1200 visitors to our landing page, website and blog. There were 107 registrants to the webinar and we have already given out four proposals. Finally, due to our PR efforts, we’ve been featured on 2 blogs, and contributed to an article on Entrepreneur.com…all in 30 days.

Greg Digneo founded Cloud Marketing Labs which offers technology entrepreneurs and small business owners an experienced part time marketing department.

Guest post by Corey Huff

Photo: Miles to Go by Darlene Foster

If you don’t see it coming, then stick with me for a moment.

Recently a large number of thought leaders have talked about how the artist mentality is where this century is going. Dan Pink’s book A Whole New Mind talks about how we are entering the Conceptual Age – a time that is post-Industrial. It’s no longer about efficiency and low cost, but instead about new ideas and visionary concepts. If it can be outsourced or automated then your business is in danger. Besides Pink, luminaries like Seth Godin, and Mark McGuinness are also preaching the Gospel of the Artists.

Artists Have A Different Mindset

Artists live every day saying ‘What if I…’ They look at a blank canvas, a lump of clay, a piece of music or a script, and they find new ways to express anger, fear, happiness, and joy. Their primary concern is with creation. The mental and emotional toll that creativity takes is familiar to artists, and we wake up every day, ready to face rejection and failure over and over. It’s who we are.

We often don’t think linearly, and that’s a strength for us. Artists make connections where there don’t appear to be any. It’s not that only artists can have these moments. It’s that artists actively seek them out and are trained, or compelled by an inner drive, to do so.

Here are some examples of artistic leaps as they apply to business:

Jump the Gatekeeper. If your industry traditionally has a gatekeeper between you and your customers, then Artists can help you figure out how to bust that mold. For hundreds of years the only way to be a successful artist was to work through the gallery system, or the record labels, or the Hollywood film companies. Now, all of those monoliths are under attack. The music industry record labels are in near-ruins. Artists have figured out how to jump the gate and connect directly with their fans. For readers of Laura’s blog, this is the most directly applicable situation. Social Media Marketing has helped hundreds of artists bust the Starving Artist Myth by allowing them connect directly with their fans and not worry about pricey middlemen.

Blue Ocean Strategy. Nike famously went from being a shoe company to being a global brand by doing things that no other company would have thought of doing. In addition to having a great product, Nike was one of the first companies to partner with graffiti artists to design their shoes. Nike now has a long-standing connection with the hip-hop community that has been a huge boost to their sales. It was risky for Nike to do, but they looked at what artists were doing and saw the underlying movement that they could align with.

Products As Works of Art. Apple became the most valuable technology company in the world just on the strength of a handful of patents that make their products unique. The Multi-touch capability of the iPhone and the iPad are going to keep Apple ahead of the game for years. Not to mention the fact that Apple partners with artists in very successful ways. The iPod commercials with silhouettes dancing are some of the most successful commercials in the world. Apple employs Design Think in all of their product creation. Design Think is part research and part artistic process, and it helped Apple be innovative enough to reinvent themselves. There’s a reason that most designers do their work on Macs.

Engage an Artist

So, how can you engage an artist to help you change up your business? Here are a few ideas:

Crowdsource Your Graphic Design. Websites like 99Designs.com will help you get logo and graphic design work from a small army of artists who will compete for your business. This is basic engagement that gives you design, but doesn’t really focus on helping you expand your thinking. It will, however, give you some inexpensive access to creative minds, if in a limited way.

Sponsor an Artist. There are artists like Natasha Wescoat who are technology and social media savvy who love doing inventive things like live-streaming painting sessions over the Web or writing about how technology is changing the world of art. You could try sponsoring an artist financially to support their work, and in return get so many hours of creativity and image consulting. If you want to sponsor an artist, I can help you with that.

Hire An Acting Troupe. Improv actors like On Your Feet will come to your organization and help you out by getting you up, moving, and creatively engaged. If you’ve ever seen the show Who’s Line Is It Anyway, it’s like doing improv games, but then at the end you suddenly have a bunch of new ideas for your business and enthusiasm for how to get them done. Alternately, they’ll entertain at your event, and somehow people miraculously remember what was talked about a little bit better.

Find a Graphical Facilitator. Some artists have a mind for business and art – they’re very valuable. Many of these artists will come to your strategy meetings and draw out all of the ideas that you put out, giving you visual feedback on your ideas. It’s relatively new, but Graphical Facilitation is an innovative way of getting your ideas down and coming away with a road map to success. For an excellent explanation of Graphical Facilitation, check out Brandy Agerbeck’s website.

Find An Artist Near You

To find an artist to work with, you might try a local gallery owner, an art fair, or just do a Google search. Also, you can check out my For Business page on my website. I have an extensive network of artists all over the world who can help your business flourish with new ideas.

Cory Huff is an actor, director, voice-over artist, and internet marketing troublemaker. In addition to helping artists dispel the Starving Artist Myth at TheAbundantArtist.com, he also offers social media and search engine optimization consulting.

In the video above I reference this video, which shows how to update all of your social networking profiles at once.

Guest post by Ije Ude

The experts are wrong when they say fear is one of the biggest obstacles between you and your business success.

Well, at least they’re only half right: lack of self-trust is the other half of the equation. During one of my past lives as a youth program coordinator, one of my favorite things was facilitating workshops for middle school students. (Not a group a lot of people enjoyed.) I actually appreciated the awkwardness and attitude they spewed off as they navigated that murky space between childhood and full-blown adolescence. And as a budding entrepreneur building a consulting gig on the side (to supplement my measly nonprofit salary), I could relate to the vulnerability of learning a new role and feeling like everyone’s eyes were on you as you were practicing in public view.

After a recent laser coaching session with Laura, I suddenly remembered a warm up activity I had led for them and I reflected how it was connected to social media, marketing and trust. Here’s the set up: each person is given a note card with an animal group on it. The point of the game is to find your tribe. The rules are you can’t use words, only your animal sounds to achieve this. After the first few seconds of awkwardness, the possibility of winning a prize pushes them past their awkwardness. The team that wins is usually the one with the loudest, unabashed barks or moos.

What’s this have to do with social media?

The other day, Laura and I were talking. She asked how often I was re-sending links to my content. My reply: “Once.” When she suggested I re-send links to the same content at least once a week to catch tweeps who may have missed the first round, I quickly responded: “Oh! I’ll do that when I finish re-designing my website. I don’t want too much traffic right now.” Laura’s response: “That’s exactly why I put together a program on ending website shame!”

I was busted. I didn’t trust what I had was good enough and as a result was half-stepping with my marketing. (Can you relate?) I realized I was doing the equivalent of letting out a little croak and still hoping to find my tribe. I wasn’t playing the social media game full out.

I was letting my fears win out:

• I’m not ready.
• I’m not good enough.
• I don’t know my niche yet.
• I haven’t fine tuned my USP.
• What if no one likes my stuff?
• Worse yet, what if they laugh at me?

Sounds kind of like an awkward teenager, right? Action is the easiest way to disarm your fears and move through this awkward stage. And it’s fueled by the trust that if you own the particular card you’ve been dealt, sound off as loud as you can, you will find your tribe and maybe even win a prize.

Some suggestions for using social media to build your self-trust

I don’t know what my niche is. If you feel you can’t make your mark on social media until you’ve nailed your niche…or target market…or ideal client…or whatever you call it, you’re in good company. Finding a niche is often talked about like finding the Holy Grail. In my experience it’s been more like dancing with a new partner. You may have to give it a couple rounds before you get in sync. You can use social media to explore and test out your niche:

• search for blogs that cater to niches that you are interested in and interact with the writers and fellow commentors
• search for new friends to follow on twitter by putting in keyword describing your niche in the “Find People” tool and connect with them
• look for meet up groups, forums or ezines that cater to your niche interests, then join them and interact

Doing this, you’ll quickly discover what’s jiving and what’s off.

I’m not ready, not good enough or any derivative of this. Another great thing about social media, is that it’s a great place to get feedback. If you view people’s response as judgment, you’ll be missing a great opportunity to build your trust in the value of what you offer.

• research popular blogs in your niche interest and notice what topics they talk about
• notice what blogs posts receive lots of comments or get re-tweeted the most and create content continuing the conversation or adding your own unique spin
• share helpful tools, articles or blog post from other writers
• lead from your strengths and create content on material that you feel most confident talking about
• share what’s unique about you…if you’re a indy-film fanatic share clips of your favorite clips or pictures of your latest crochet creation

What if no one likes me? Social media is a great tool for discovering what people want.

• ask questions at the end of your posts, in your comments on other people’s blog, or in your updates to discover what people want or need or would like to learn about a particular topic
• start a discussion on a social media portal

Use social media as the tool it is, to shout our your unique call and see who responds. You may be pleasantly surprised and discover there’s a whole tribe who’s been trying to find you too.

Ije Ude writes about navigating the ups and downs of creative entrepreneurship at www.soulpoweredsolutions.com.