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Guest Post: Unlocking the Social Inner Circle Code

By Andrew Wee

I probably clear hundreds of blog comments and MyBlogLog comments on a daily basis.
The reason? Falling foul of "schmoe" rules.

Schmoe, in case you're not familiar yet, refers to a "social media optimizer" gone wrong, a nice term for someone who tries to game the social networking system.
A schmoe schmoes up when their comments is deleted. And even though it might take all of 20 seconds to block copy and paste your comments on a strangers profile, it's still time wasted.

Want to up your Social Networking skills? Here's a primer.

The Social Inner Circle Code

It helps to be familiar with humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (check out: Do what you love, love what you do. 

Maslow is one of the granddaddies of the theories now taught by motivational gurus like Anthony Robbins, T. Harv Eker and the like.

Breaking into the social circle requires that you provide value to:

1) The blogger

2) The blogger's community

Value is created when:

1) You provide a new piece of information

2) You provide a well-supported opinion to what the blogger said.

3) You provide an application of something the blogger wrote about.

Just to name a few.

You provide all this information freely and without any expectation of receiving anything in return.

Confused?

Some schmoe might be thinking, "Silly advice! I'd rather put 'Hey, nice blog! Come visit my blog at: www.Blog-I-Want-To-Pimp.com'"

Yeah, right. Those are the first comments I delete every morning.

Creating value means you give something freely, and something magical will appear.

Welcome to the concept of "social reciprocity".
9 times out of 10, the person or community I've contributed that information to, will send traffic to me without asking.

I'll get multiple backlinks to my blog entry.
And I'll sometimes get included on multiple blogrolls too.

How's that for breaking into the "Social Inner Circle"?

The moment you start doing this, there's a "viral" effect to this too. A single piece of advice might lead to 10, or even a 100 blogs linking back to you.

You may think that building a huge network takes a village, but in reality, it only requires a single good intention.
Be well.

Andrew Wee is a MyBlogLog Advisor and blogs about blogging, affiliate marketing and social traffic generation at WhoIsAndrewWee.com. His MyBlogLog profile is: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/andreww/