Why Most People Fail To Make A Dime With Social Media And What You Need To Do Differently

Social Media is definitely one of the hottest items in the marketing world right now. The advent of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc has spawned all sorts of potential opportunities for people to build relationships, add value and increase revenue. Note the order in which I wrote that:

1. Build Relationships
2. Add Value
3. Make Money

If you can just apply this three prong strategy over time, you will make money on social media. Why? Think about it in the real world – don’t you like to do business with people you know, like and trust? So that is exactly what you need to do on social media. Remember, the very premise of social media is that people want to connect. For too long, we’ve been too busy to connect or too scared that the stranger who just sat down on the park bench next to us could be an axe murderer. However, with social media, it’s safe! Sure, the person you are speaking to could be something other than they say, but you can work that out pretty quickly in conversation.

When you are engaging in social media, imagine that you are at a networking function or at a party. When you meet someone at a party, what do you do? You introduce yourself and make small talk right? You don’t say, “Hi my name is Jack. It’s great to meet you Fred – now I have a free sample of some Tupperware that I know you’re love. Come over and let me give you a free demonstration right now.” Well, if you’re Fred, you’re going to think that Jack is a complete jerk – and he is!! Fred just wants to meet some cool people and have a good time, and that’s exactly what it is like on social media.

With the basic premise of social media behind us, let’s look at the 5 reasons why people fail to make a dime off this rapidly growing marketing medium. In fact, if ever someone tells you that you can’t make money off social media, you can almost be guaranteed that they are making one of these 5 mistakes.

1.     Lack of time and prioritisation

If you think you can simply spend 5 minutes a day on social media and make money off it, think again. Social media does require time and effort – you have to be willing to spend some time on twitter, facebook etc building up relationships. I know that may seem quite daunting right now – I can’t tell you the number of clients who have told me that they would love to get involved in this social media thing but they just don’t have the time.

You have to understand that social media is one of waves of the future. Those of us who can harness it will be able to ride the wave of change and potentially transform our business. At the very least, you will have an additional, low cost marketing strategy to add to your arsenal. However you need to give social media the priority it deserves. It has to be something that you or a member of your team spends time on daily – building relationships and growing your database.

Remember, what I said above – people do business with people they know, like and trust. Social media gives you the opportunity to build a massive following of people in your particular niche but you need to spend the time on this.

2.     Lack of persistence and patience

I’ve had many clients who will tell me, “I’ve spent an hour on Twitter every night for a week and I still have not made a dime.” Generally I then give them an analogy – imagine you needed to lose weight and you had not exercised in three years. If you went to the gym for an hour every day for five days, how much immediate improvement would you see? Perhaps a little but if you needed to lose ten kilos, you probably would not have made much of a dent in your goal would you? It’s exactly the same with social media. You need to do it in small chunks regularly and consistently to get the best benefit from it. There is no point going hard for a week and then not touching it for a month.

I normally advise clients that they need to spend around 3 months (you can do it more quickly if you are dedicated) building up their profiles on social media and interacting with people before they can start making money. Conventional marketers often freak out at this because this is foreign to them. Conventional marketing is all about paying for a tv advert, bus stop sign or magazine insert and getting an immediate response. Yet, more and more small businesses are realising that this is the old way of advertising. Unless you have an existing brand and lots of money to spend (think Macdonalds, Coca Cola, Virgin) traditional advertising methods and conventional marketing is not really going to help you grow your business.

With social media, the great thing is that it costs very little in terms of money. However, what needs to be invested is time.  Time is often the toughest commodity for most business owners and entrepreneurs. This is exactly why individuals who are starting their business from home have a massive opportunity. They can spend the time on social media developing their various social media assets and it costs them next to nothing.

So make sure you are willing to get into this for the long haul. Don’t be like someone I met who spent about a month on Twitter and got himself nearly 1,000 followers following the principles I taught him – and then he shut his account down saying it was a waste of time and he could not make any money from it. I was gob stuck when he told me!! Be persistent and have some patience. As with anything in life, persistence pays!

3.     Lack of focus – using social media as a distraction rather than for business

This is one of the biggest reasons why many big businesses have been slow to adopt social media. Many people still believe that social media is a distraction and a waste of time – and to be fair, it can be! Remember, the very premise of social media – it is all about connecting. In fact, I believe there are four reasons people spend time on social media and I call it the CEEC principle.

1. Connection – As explained above, people have a fundamental need to connect with others and social media makes that easy to do.
2. Entertainment – people are often looking for an escape from the daily grind. That does not mean you always need to be passing on jokes and funny stuff, although the odd post about something hilarious does not hurt. However, entertainment can often be enjoyed through a good conversation can’t it? That is exactly what people are looking for in social media.
3. Education – Never in human history has the thirst for information been as high as it is today. The human race has always been curious, eager for new information yet because access to information has never been as easy as it is today, people are thirstier for it. Everyone wants to know the latest news, the newest gadget, the new distinction that could make a difference to them, the best product etc etc.With this in mind, what I’m about to say right now could be worth over a million dollars to you and I am serious when I say that. Since people want to be educated and are hungry for information – if you can position yourself as a Centre of Influence and a Person of Authority in your niche, then people will gravitate towards you for the information they want. Once you have this, then you can make money whenever you want. Read that line again because I believe that becoming a Centre of Influence is your absolute main aim of taking part in social media.What do I mean by a Centre of Influence or Person of Authority? For a moment, let’s ignore social media and look at the real world. Aren’t there people of authority in every market place? For example, think Richard Branson or Steve Jobs in Business, Donald Trump in Real Estate or Anthony Robbins in Personal Development. These people are what I call People of Authority – if Richard Branson puts out a course on “How to become  a better business builder”, how many people would be willing to buy his course? Millions!Now, it’s around about this time that people start freaking out – thoughts like, “I’m not as good as Richard Branson” or “I have not achieved even 1% of what Donald Trump has” start to go through our head. That’s ok – stay with me.In social media, if you can constantly post good quality content (that may not even be yours) and you are constantly adding value to people, over time you will be recognised as someone who is a Centre of Influence and a Person of Authority.That might seem a little strange so let me give you an analogy. Imagine your friend John has a toothache and he has been trying different things and nobody has been able to help him. Then you happen to send him a free report written by someone you know in the health industry who is excellent at what he does and the report contains 5 things John should do to get rid of the toothache. Let’s say John follows those 5 steps and his toothache goes. Hallelujah!! He is happy and he thinks the guy who wrote the report is genius but who is he grateful to? He is grateful to you because you sent him the report – but you got nothing tangible from it did you?  Think again – doesn’t John have a higher level of trust for you than previously? Absolutely and this happened simply because you were willing to help him with no immediate personal gain.

   Your becoming a person of authority in social media works by the process of reciprocity; the more you give, the more you gain. So be prepared to give first and add value to your social media community and your target market first. There are so many different examples of good quality content you can post – and the best part is that because much of this content is pretested, you know your market place will love it. Also, by becoming a person of authority, you are no longer considered to be selling something. Rather you become a trusted adviser, an expert who is recommending something to me – ask any good salesperson in the offline world and they will tell you that is the easiest way to sell. In fact, once you become a trusted adviser and expert, your prospects will practically be asking you to sell them more product.

4. The final C in the CEEC principle is Collaboration – In social media, people often want to collaborate with others, either by directly working on a project or by asking for expertise. Let’s say that you and I have been connecting via social media or at the very least I have been watching your posts. They seem to be of good quality, often entertaining and I can see that you are a real person. I also know that you are a life insurance salesman from reading your profile – and often insurance sales people have a certain negative stigma attached to them. However, if you have established yourself as a centre of influence by posting good quality content, adding value and being willing to help others out, my level of trust for you will be far higher than the life insurance salesman who comes knocking on my door out of the blue. So when I need life insurance, who will I go to? Of course, I’ll come and ask you about your products and services.

So now you know the CEEK principle – one of the biggest secrets people who are successful with social media have mastered. Always keep this in the back of your mind when you spending time on Twitter or Facebook – there is an end goal which is to make money, not just have great conversations.

Here is a great example of one of my clients who is in the property investment industry.

Connection: He started connecting with people by having conversations with people in his local area about his favourite tv show, where to take his girlfriend for dinner, the latest radio show controversy etc. It was all simply small talk and he was amazed at the responses he got, especially from influential people in the area.

Entertainment: He then moved on the entertainment phase by again having great conversations and posting entertaining snippets from his favourite tv shows, jokes he heard etc. This continued to build the relationship he had with his database.

Education: From there he started to slowly post entries to his blog or to property investment related content. This was purely for education but he was surprised at the result, especially as he was posting content that was not always written by him.

Collaboration: People started asking him for advice on property investment and how he was going with his own property portfolio. And he did all of this within 6 weeks! He has now established himself as Person of Authority within his market and when he starts to push out more content related to his own business, he will have an amazing response!

So apply the CEEC principle and watch the dramatic improvements in your results.

4.     Not building relationships

I hope that after everything you have read, this fourth sin is an obvious one. Many conventional marketers thought Twitter, Facebook and the rest of Social Media was the best thing since sliced bread because it was so easy to build a database and then you could just flog them with content. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A simple principle of social media is: “Don’t do anything on social media that you would not do with friends or people you wanted to build a relationship with in the real world.”

If you try and just use social media to push your products without interacting with your community, without establishing yourself as a Person of Influence, watch your response rate plummet. The scary thing is that most people will remain on your followers or friends list – they won’t ‘unsubscribe’ like on an email database. Instead, they will just ignore what you have to say. Don’t make this mistake – follow the principles I have taught in this report and watch the money come in!

5.     Overselling – Getting Greedy

It is so easy to be guilty of this, especially when your ultimate aim on social media is to make money. So here’s a mantra I use, “Building quality relationships is the precursor to financial success.” By the way, this applies in face to face selling as well as in social media.

People who don’t focus on building relationships (Sin #3) are definitely guilty of this but so are many of us who do focus on building relationships. People will often focus on building relationships initially and then start flogging product. Imagine if you did that in the real world – what would happen? Let’s say we meet at a party and became friends – and then every time we went out to have a coffee I just wanted to sell you something. Eventually you would get sick of me and make excuses for not getting together wouldn’t you? The exact same thing happens in social media – so be careful with how often you promote your products. An accepted rule of them after you have spent some time building relationships on social media is to take an 80-20 perspective. 80% of the time you are spending building new relationships, enhancing existing ones and in general adding value to the community, furthering your position in their eyes as a Centre of Influence. 20% of the time you might send out a tweet to a money making opportunity for yourself.

Final Thoughts:

So there you have it, the top 5 sins of Social Media. Easy to avoid especially if you remember your focus and follow the CEEK principle I outlined. If there was one thing I want you to take away from this report, it is simply this à Build relationships first and the money will come second. Remember, my quote from earlier on, “Relationships are the precursor to financial success.”

If you have enjoyed reading this, please feel free to share this report on Twitter, Digg and Stumbleupon – I’d really appreciate it.

I congratulate you on getting this far and reading the report. My heartfelt wish is that it has been of value and you now put it into action. Finally, please leave me a comment below and let me know your thoughts. I hope this this report changed the way you look at social media.

To your success,

Niro Thambipillay

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