Just so you know, when I was a suck up? All day long I did not biddy-biddy-bum. That’s what I did when I was a wealthy man.

But now I’m a woman who is still in the process of becoming wealthy. And once I was a woman who had a day job and dreamed of going elsewhere. And when I did have a day job this is how I made the most of it.

I got my work done early and did my own thing with the rest of the day.

Be careful though, this can be dangerous. Even if your boss gives you permission to do non-company work on company time when you’re done with your regular work load, you have to think about how this makes you look. Your peers and their bosses might not like it. So you will have to overlap that with step number two.

I perfected the art of looking busy.

This is best achieved by actually being busy, though not necessarily at the work you’d be doing if it weren’t already done. The trick is to make it look like you’re still doing something your peers or your bosses bosses will think is important. My preference was to carry a clipboard or a stack of papers around and walk briskly. Nod/smile but don’t make eye contact, walk like you’re on your way somewhere. You can also do this with your computer, but get a privacy screen. Nosy people are the enemy.

I took advantage of the training I needed to get me to the next level.

At one place I worked we had $4000 of training every six months for free, we didn’t even have to do that whole reimbursement thing. And you could take this training on company time. So i found what I was interested in and when I got bored, I would train for new things. Sometimes, I’d take a pen and pad out and be writing my novel at my desk after studying. (This was always after I was done with my work - the idea is not to rob the company, just to time shift.) Everyone knew I was taking extra training so they’d assume I was studying. I always helped out when asked though.

I took every break allowed to me under the law, away from my desk.

The breaks are there for a reason. If you’re going to survive working for others, especially at a job you hate, you need to take those breaks. With people you enjoy hanging with if possible. Bonus: sometimes going out to stare at trees helps you relax enough to solve a problem.

I went out to lunch.

Even when I was saving money by bringing my own lunch, I would eat it at the park, or go to a cafe and buy a small drink to have with it. If I was close enough I’d actually go home. That brief change of scenery at lunch does more for you than that extra hour you may be able to get by working through lunch at your desk.

I mingled with higher-ups in other departments.

The managers and supervisors in your department think you want their job. And maybe they’re right. Or they don’t want to be partial if you ever need to be disciplined or considered for promotion. In other departments, or neighboring companies, they’re going to be more relaxed and willing to treat you as a peer. And later when you need references, boom. This worked like a charm when I was in tech support. To get new/better jobs, I’d get referrals from heads of departments whose computer issues I had fixed, or get the head of hardware instead of the head of the help desk. We were friends, so I could get them to say anything (truthful) I wanted them to, plus I’d be side-stepping the politics of my own department.

I spoke to a C level executive in a casual fashion, once a week.

Everyone is scared of the people with the most authority. Having been (and currently being) the person in the company with the most authority, let me tell you, people in authoritative positions who actually want to make things better hate that. (People on ego trips don’t but who wants to befriend them?)

It’s the same way most celebrities find it refreshing to meet someone who treats them like a peer and a regular person. People are afraid of them, so they lie to them, they have to work harder to get good information to make changes. Approach them, befriend them, inform them. Just be careful not to waste their time.

I gave myself a small reward at the end of every work day.

To keep from going crazy, I really had to program myself, Pavolonian style, to be happy about where I was. That included gifts to myself for a job well done.

I plotted my exit in my down time.

More often than not, an opportunity to get to where you want to go is here and gone before you know it. You have to know as much as possible about how to handle the situation before it comes up. It gives you an edge over the next guy, and gives you something to daydream about when someone starts droning on about TPS reports

I solved problems no one else wanted to touch.

Now this mights seem like it would get you further entrenched in the organization, or stuck in your position. Indispensable people don’t get promoted because they’re too valuable to the position they are in. But. When you solve an issue that’s related to uncollected revenue, you are the star of the show suddenly. No, you probably won’t get a kickback for that, but it makes a great conversation point with that C-level exec you just made friends with.

How do you know I’m an expert? I’m not on this topic, actually - this post is based on my personal experiences.

But you can Google me, or read my site on traffic generation and decide for yourself. Test everything - with at least logic.

If someone who was brand new to generating traffic asked me for an uncomplicated plan for getting targeted visitors to their site, I’d tell them to focus on 6 things, in this order;

1. Advertising - on search engines, in ezines, on blogs
2. Blogging and RSS - create a blog, create a feed/podcast, promote it, participate in neighboring blog communities
3. Expertise Marketing - write an article, let other people publish it in exchange for a link back, do webinars, teleseminars, interviews.
4. Joint Ventures - partner with another individual or company for mutual benefit and/or publicity
5. Affiliates or Referrals - get other people to sell your products and let them worry about how to generate traffic, get additional visitors from existing visitors/customers/clients
6. Social Media - bookmarking, news sites, document sharing, networking online, video sharing

Now, that’s not in order of importance, that’s in order of what newbies can do to get up and running fast.

It’s not impossible to do a joint venture as a newbie, but it’s harder when you don’t know people.

It’s not impossible to launch your product with an affiliate army, and with industries like timeshare resales or wholesale airline/cruise tickets, it’s not necessarily practical. And despite what all the $97 course sales letters say, getting social media traffic in your first 24 - 48 hours is not easy. It may be simple, but it’s a lot of hard work to get traffic from it that quickly.

But a blog you can start in a day and your web host may have an automatic installation of it for you. If you’re not technical, you can also go with domain mapping and a hosted service. If you’re tagging, and commenting, and you pick the right topic, you could get a trickle of people in your first day. Same with RSS - and you don’t necessarily have to create new content.

The process doesn’t have to be complicated. The newer ways of getting visitors, like blogging, podcasting, and getting on the first page of Digg are all well and good. but throw some of the foundational techniques in there. Those traditional methods still work.

How do you know I’m an expert? You don’t. But you can Google me, or read my site on traffic generation and decide for yourself. Test everything - with at least logic.

I watched a great movie last night, with a very unexpected twist. It’s a Guy Ritchie film called Revolver, and is kind of controversial. If you’re the type of person who is into both improving your mind and action pictures, it’s for you. IF you prefer not to think during your entertainment, skip it.

Without giving away the film, it has definitely given me a revelation about Social Media, and helped me realize with additional clarity what is wrong with the way most people approach it.

For the beginners, let me just quickly say how we’re framing the discussion. For our purposes, social media refers to media that includes some sort of interactive element which allows you to more easily share resources with a person you know. That would include blogs, social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, social voting sites like Mixx, embeddable video like you might find at YouTube, or embeddable, shareable media channels like you can create at kyte.tv.

Most of the time, people look at social media and think of how it can benefit them. Which is fine - what’s the point of doing things that don’t benefit us? The problem is, if you take that mindset into social media promotion, you’re going to miss out on the most powerful aspect of it.

Yes, you can get massive traffic from your site being on the front page of Propeller.

But you can also make great connections by sharing useful information that isn’t about your site or any site you’re affiliated with. Through those connections you may find a person who runs a community of people who have a pressing yearning for your products or services that don’t compete with the owner’s offerings. And that could bring you massive, targeted traffic from a population that’s more willing to buy, click or subscribe. Or you might meet the person who introduces you to someone who is best friends with the person who hires your company for the biggest project you’ve ever done.

My personal favorite use of social media is to connect with people I never would dream of being able to correspond with through email. You may not have heard of Bob Doyle but I just about idolize him - he makes a really touchy-feely subject very practical. He created a product in the late 90s that gave me part of my life back. And I found the path to his latest product by shyly connecting to him through a social networking site.

Small world.

You don’t have to be completely altrustic either. Just include the perspective of the recipient in your promotional ideas so they can go farther. If you have an account where you only submit your own links or the links of people you are affiliated with, think about how that looks to people who come across your account information. Would YOU befriend you? Which is important, because you’re going to need those connections to get your submissions popular.

Or say that you’re starting a campaign to get a bunch of bloggers to talk about you to their audience. The first thing you’re going to have to think Very hard about is: why would they do this for me?

Here’s a hint: I’m not necessarily talking about incentives…

For the next week, think of social media in a different way. Each day, instead of thinking, how can I get more links out of this, and how can I build more traffic to my site, approach it from this standpoint: How can I meet the best people for my professional life? And what can I do for THEM?

It could be that you can write them a private testimonial. Maybe you noticed a problem on their site no one is fixing. Perhaps you have access to a secret river of incredible resources that you can share with them and their audience. You could comment on their blog post. You could submit a really good post of theirs to Mixx. You could email one friend, just one, and tell them about the site.

For just a week, focus on the Social in social media. Track what you’re doing and in a month, compare Those results with what you have now. I bet you’ll be incredibly and pleasantly surprised.

So you probably already know that I’ve been out of pocket due to my on-going illness. The tide is shifting, though, and I’m having a bunch of really good days. I’m gonna continue this series now, though it may not be a daily update.

Before I was interrupted, we were talking about how small businesses can get found online - particularly small businesses that aren’t internet marketing sites. Too often, the techniques being touted by various experts are taken out of the true context, which makes people feel like they don’t work at all. Not so. They just need to be adjusted to work for business owners who are expanding their existing offline businesses to online properties.

We’re of course told that if you want people to find you, you’ll have to rank well in the search engines. (And I’ll tackle the whole host of misconceptions about what it means to rank well in the search engines, in another post at the end of this series.)

Further, it’s explained to us when we’re new online, that if we can’t get ranked, then we should buy our rankings. What isn’t explained is 1- what if we can’t afford it, and 2- what else is out there behind search.

Well. Here’s what I know, which is at the center of the theories I teach at my main site about web traffic, and elsewhere around the web.

Yes, search is an excellent place to get leads. Yes, there are ways to maintain good listings even after search engines periodically change the way they rank sites. Yes, you can keep good rankings for years. And that comes from making sure that in each thing you do to promote your site online, you keep search considerations in mind.

But.

Search isn’t all there is to getting visitors. And some of the ways you can get more traffic can still bring you visitors from search as well.

Let’s take article marketing. For newbies, that’s when you write an article about a topic that is related to your site, and submit it to editors and other publishers to republish in their ezines and sites, and sometimes even offline. In the basic version of article marketing, it can also help you build links, which can help take more people to your site. One thing few people talk about is that sometimes, if you can’t get your site to rank for a given group of keywords, you can get your article posted on sites that will easily rank.

Of course, you’ll have to write one heck of an article to get the people who find it to then also click your link and visit your site, however, 10% of 5000 visitors a day is a fair sight better than zero percent, is it not?

So there’s one reason to go beyond search.

Another is that people don’t always look to search engines to find things, immediately or first. And sometimes they can find you in other places Before they start looking. We’ll take that in the case of social media in the next article.

Whether your business is fully online or not, we all know the drill about being found online. Or at least we think we do.

We tell ourselves to buy ads in search engines, because that’s where people look when they want to find something. To an extent, that’s the truth. But it’s not the whole truth, so help me God. (What a strange expression.)

To see this clearly, we can simply turn to our offline lives. I once needed someone to assess whether we needed to pull up the carpet in the basement due to too much flooding. The first thing I did was call someone I already knew did something similiar. They weren’t available so I asked my friends and family if they knew anyone. Of the people I could reach, most of them didn’t have basements that flooded, but made suggestions. Finding the suggested paths would take too long (in my mind, I needed someone today), I looked online. Before searching I went to some local home improvement sites I knew about. Then I tried a couple of sites with national audiences. Then I did a few searches, a general search, then finding nothing, got more and more specific until I game up.

After finding no one with the searches I made, I then went and looked in the phone book. Finally I found someone to ask who actually referred me to someone else.

Let’s break that down.

First I sought out a person I knew already. Then I wanted people my friends or family knew. ONLY after finding my resources and their advice unsatisfactory, did I go looking online.

But what happened when I looked online? The phrases I used to find someone did not yield the results I wanted. Local businesses in my area either aren’t catching on to the fact that people use the web so often to find information or they are not producing content on the subject their clients are searching for, and hence, not getting ranked for them.

Even worse, the topics that their clients need help aren’t being discussed at other sites in connection with their names. I saw a bunch of clues in forums, blogs, even social bookmarking sites that helped me figure out that it was probably a good idea to take up the carpet. But no one to help if I didn’t want to do it myself.

That made me wonder, where are the small entrepreneurs who work for these companies - why aren’t they, or someone who works for them, doing more to be proactive in these discussions? Then, when someone like me looks for information about my problem, in places where I might gather online, or through a search, it would lead me to their site for the solution. They could do things like:

1. Write articles about the types of problems a homeowner could have, but not be willing to fix on their own.
2. Comment on the types of articles written by do-it-yourselfers, offering additional tips
3. Create a blog and make blog posts about the types of problems their clients have had and how someone like me should know to call them, maybe with some tips on what I could do on my own in the meantime.
4. Join discussions in communities where they are being held, with links back to their site
5. Create content on sites that can redirect traffic to them

The tactics you see online businesses use to get the word out about what they do can help you too. Just because your business is offline, doesn’t mean you can’t create a site that is more than a billboard– offline businesses can turn their sites into 24 hour a day online lead generators.

We’ll keep talking about this topic all week.