Have you ever noticed over time that many people have subconsciously elevated authors above them? This phenomena isn’t by mistake. As children we are taught that books represent ideas, imagination, creativity, insight, and experience. We learn that every page has something new to look at, valuable pieces of thought put into words and pictures that we can digest for our own personal needs.

The world of social media, especially blogging, has taken this fundamental childhood lesson and given every single professional the ability to share our knowledge with thousands of other interested minds.

Unlike books however, there is little or no cost to this process. The only barrier to entry is a voice with personality, the wisdom to share your thoughts, and the discipline to take action.

When you understand how little financial requirement is needed to utilize the available tools, a sudden and massive economy of scale takes place. Within one week, this site was already producing 100 unique visitors a day. Within a month, who knows.

The worth of an audience is mathematically staggering. Imagine if you had to pay for enough brochures that 100 people could read them- even at 25 cents, you would be out $25. Take in the reality that you have to create 1000 flyers to get 100 people to read them and you spent $250. If you tried purchasing the traffic with pay per click advertising with Google, you could pay anywhere from 5 cents to $2.50 a visitor (the value of our keyword traffic is generally around 40 cents per visitor.) So you could end up paying for that traffic, or go through the effort of realizing your own expertise and knowledge to attract those visitors.

The chart on the left detail the number of views the articles on this site received in the first week of being active. If you look at the highest read at 658, that one article produced at least $100+ in readership exposure value.

The attention that a professional can reach through social media is astonishing. As a marketer, I have tried many other forms of advertising and promotion - radio, TV, newspaper, banner ads, flyers, business cards, yellow pages, door signs, car magnets, custom pens, embroidered shirts, trade show booths…. and they all have an economy of decreasing scale.

Social media however, is like a hot air balloon that uses the interaction of minds as its fuel. It goes higher and higher, limited only by the number of people who share an interest in what is here.

While I take no great assumption knowing social media has “buzz” around it thanks to media like Advertising Age or Business Week, the essential math is this: regardless of what viewpoints you have as a person, whether “straight-laced” or “street anarchist”, or if you are talking about government contracts or walking your dog- some percentage of the world wide web will be interested in what you are talking about.

This is an amazing fact. With 250 million users online in the U.S. alone, having a .1% interest means that you have 250k readers. What business professional wouldn’t want to share information and viewpoints with 250k interested souls?

Even drilling the numbers down into a local geographic level or into a niche market, knowing how to reach just 2,500 interested prospects would radically change almost any business.

So the problem becomes not if these people exist (they do), but how to reach this audience by providing them with the information they are looking for. With strategy and effort one reader turns into five, five turns into fifty, and fifty turns into five thousand.

• If you are offering products or services, social media promotion is an evolving and growing form of marketing. It lives.
• When was the last time you saw your business card hand itself to someone across the room?

A healthy volume of traffic isn’t the “end all, be all” of social media, but it sure doesn’t hurt!

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