Marketers must adopt an entirely new strategy — more than that, an entirely new mindset. They must get away from trying to create new desires in people, trying to push and force themselves on people, trying to control people.

Instead, find a more natural way. Find out what people want, and then give it to them. Offer them value, and they will appreciate that. Be a resource. Give things away. Don’t force — let them come to you, because of all the value you offer.

Leo lists these points, each explained more in his blog post:
• Accept things as they are.
• Don’t control.
• Don’t force.
• Do less.
• Do small things.
• Be valuable.
• Attract, don’t smother.

The authors post about the e-book at their blog, ChangeThis Manifesto “I Am The Walrus” Released!.

The possibility of finding and spreading remarkable ideas, creating great things, and sharing them with others represents a wealth of opportunity (largely untapped). We hope that reading our manifesto helps you figure out your brand; that it encourages you to take some risks and be extraordinary. It’s easy to stay put and avoid change, but when you look back will you wish you’d said yes to do something different? We chose to say yes and we are doing something different…with a little help from our friends.

There is a series of “I Me Mine” that continue the process from the e-book.

Never mind the “P”s. Marketing has five elements: Data, Stories, Products (services), Interactions and Connection.

The “P”s are the standard four P’s (Product, Pricing, Promotion and Place) of marketing.

Seth Godin has created a new approach, five easy pieces, and describes how they work together. Data and stories are the foundation, connection is the fifth and hardest part.

I like his way of putting these pieces together, it makes me see marketing in a different way.

Twitter can pay off, I found Seth’s post due to a twitter from Maki at Dosh Dosh.

More for the sake of it I did install the All in One SEO Pack in WordPress, put in on automatic (the plugin autocreates SEO keywords and excerpt) and forgot about it.

A while back I installed the StatPress plugin in my blogs. This is an excellent plugin that shows an overview with number of visitors, pageviews, spiders and feeds. More interesting though is the details shown about last hits, last search terms, last referrers and last pages shown. Suddenly I had a simple yet effective instrument inside my blog that showed me what brought people to my blogs.

I started to look at the search terms used by people coming to my blogs. And to my surprise my posts, for some of those search terms, could be found on the first page of search results. For instance some of my book reviews turned up among the links to Amazon and other giants. This made me realize that SEO works for the small sites too and that the All in One SEO Pack even on autopilot can improve your visibility a lot.

As a result of this research in Statpress information I am now using the All in One SEO Pack more actively. When creating a new post or page I enter keywords that I think are relevant. I have also decided to use the SEO thinking already from the beginning for my new sites, Key Coaching and CoachGuiden (in Swedish only), in order to market myself and my services.

An example of visibility, my post about Starbucks and The Ultimate Customer Voice Survey is shown above the links to Starbucks when searching at Yahoo for starbucks customer voice survey.

See also WordPress and SEO.

Update June 21, 2008
Chris Garrett has posted about Blog SEO: Boost Your Search Rankings With Internal Links.

Update July 7, 2008
Do set the options in Statpress since it gathers a lot of data. I no longer collect information about spider visits and only save the information for one month.

Update July 10, 2008.
ProBlogger has a post about How to Grow Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog.

Note: Photo by dbking.

As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices.

As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot.

I will learn from the article in order to make my own WordPress-based sites, Key Coaching and CoachGuiden (in Swedish), and my blogs easier to find in search engines.

Over at TheChangeBlog is a great post about How to Sharpen Your Networking Skills.

Jonathan Mead has 10 Tips for Effective Networking.

wakeuplater writes about 5 Mindsets to Reshape Your Networking. I like this part:

Instead of fitting people into your goals, find out what their big dreams are, and try helping them out.

JibberJobber has Thom Singer’s 66 Tips for Better Networking (the complete list!).

Chris Garret posts Thoughts on Reciprocation, where should the line be drawn?

In Make Your Network Links Strong Like Bull is a really good point:

How often do you follow up from a networking event, or a Social Networking connection by asking someone what you can do … FOR THEM? How often do you offer to give first, without asking for anything in return?

For more on networking, see my Networking Tips.

For decades, the only way to spread our ideas was to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write (or broadcast) about our products and services. But now our organizations have a tremendous opportunity to publish great content online—content that people want to consume and that they are eager to share with their friends, family, and colleagues.

It is a great read about viral marketing or word-of-mouse, how it can help you promote yourself or your company for free. There are examples of viral marketing such as eBooks and videos at YouTube. There is also a word of warning:

The power of the Internet makes it easier for people to fall in love with you faster. But beware—it also makes it easier for them to fall out of love with you faster.

The story of Website Grader by HubSpot and HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog is one of the examples, an interesting concept.

Help shape the future of Starbucks—with your ideas
You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen.

Rich mentions free Starbucks wi-fi as an idea that came up from the survey site. He also asks a relevant question, Why doesn’t every major online business offer a survey site like this?

Update.
Please note that the Starbucks site is at My Starbucks Idea. I close comments on this post since some people has posted comments here that were meant for Starbucks.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Warren Buffett (Investment Entrepreneur)

What will YOU do differently?

There’s no better time to think about Me, Inc. Sit down, strategize, pull your board together (close family, mentors, etc.), and figure out what you are going to do in 2008 to make sure Me, Inc. is successful for 2008 and beyond!

It is time to network and build your own personal brand.