I am not even close to the “blogging guru” status by all means, but after hitting social media front pages a few times for the past month and reaching close to 70.000 page views in less than three weeks I can say for sure that I get to add my two cents when it comes to successful marketing of your product. On a market that’s over saturated with blogging tips, hacks, advice and wannabe authorities, many neglect the basic human factor. I do agree that knowing a thing or two about affiliate marketing, AdSense, SEO and all the techniques you can read about every day is quite mandatory, but I will state that the most important of them all is successful marketing through your connections, your friendly network that can bring you exposure, advice, help and sometimes even funny conversations all the way to real friendship.

You shall have a real connection to your social media buddies

This may sound quite trivial, but many of us that try to get some reach in our field tend to interact artificially with their social media buddies: I vote you, you vote me. I think a closer, warmer and friendlier relationship can get you a long way. You’ll be surprised of how those people are fun to talk to, smart, sarcastic and helpful. I made some great friends through social media and I can’t refrain from mentioning chris here, along with a bunch of other great guys that I have a personal connection with.

You shall know a “Make Money Online” blogger

Once you start to have a certain reach you will for sure want to make a bit of dough, at least to cover up for the hosting costs. An MMO blogger can get you a long way. No matter how much research about affiliate marketing you can get done in about a week or so, you still can’t beat these guys. They do it for a living. Make friends with one of them, add them on your favorite instant messaging program and feel free to ask them questions. You will get an prompt and direct answer and some of them will go as far as to give you personal advice after browsing your own website for a while. Trust me, it does way more for your monetizing needs than reading all of John Chow’s archive. My favorite friends in the business are the one AdSense expert Garry Conn and the all-around nice Canadian guy Mattaw.

You shall make friends with other bloggers

Rather than wasting valuable time researching for the best keywords and their output on your latest post, you should just go play into the blogosphere and meet some actual bloggers. What they can do for you is more important than any homework you can do by yourself: they can give you an honest opinion about your latest redesign, read your material before it’s published, point out small typos, notice that you might have missed an idea, add their input on the topic you wrote about and on a final note just give you a little “thumbs up” emoticon, meaning they want you to publish it, because they trust it. Believe me, it gives you a great feeling. Some bloggers that I have this kind of relationship with are cybrville, the Romanian wonder kid Tibi, varadinum or maxy. Send them a shout from me if you decide to pay them a visit.

You shall use instant messaging

Nothing says “friends” better than a 1-on-1 conversation on instant messaging. Personally I am quite tired of repetitive formulas like “hey, can you reddit/digg pls? thanks”. I thought web 2.0 was a great initiative in the first place because it promoted closer human interaction. Come on people, let’s add each other on instant messaging, let’s talk about weather in Alberta, chicks, cars, share pictures of our significant others or our dogs. That’s what this is about. As far as marketing is concerned, instant messaging is way underrated: you can mass-link a group of friendly webmasters, use your latest blog entry as your status message, meet your fans “in person”. In my opinion instant messaging beats twitter. (I recommend using Yahoo! Messenger for this, for many reasons that will be debated at a later time)

You shall know a programmer

Quite self-explanatory. For those days when you just can’t understand why stupid Internet Explorer just won’t display your beautiful new sidebar made entirely in CSS3 with the help of 25 images. They’ll know, they’ll laugh at you and tell you that you probably didn’t close a “div” tag at some point. And those 3 hours of wishing Bill Gates the flesh eating disease will go towards a better cause, perhaps even something crazy, like taking your girlfriend out for dinner.