John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing follows me on Twitter. He's got nearly 62 000 twitter followers and about 120 000 people signed up to his newsletter. That's serious pull.

In order to be successful in business, it is crucial to build up trust. Trust is most easily established through association - I may not know you, but if someone I know or trust recommends you then you're probably ok to work with.

Learn how the purpose of content is to act as a social catalyst. A social catalyst is anything that empowers people to affirm their social acceptance within a peer group, expand their network of connections, and improve their social standing.

Then see how to go superviral and get ten thousand twitter followers with one blog post. Here's how...

Remember that scene in Fatal attraction with Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, where she just won't die? SEO is a lot like that.

Yes, SEO is something that you need to implement properly to avoid missing out on organic search traffic, but most modern blogging platforms and CMS's incorporate SEO principles into their design. All you need to do is simply write interesting and relevant content about your niche and after time you will build up a sufficient body of content to start driving organic search traffic.

My issue is not that SEO should be ignored, but that it is leeching resources from bloggers, marketers, and businesses who should be spending their energy going after far more important prizes... like authority, social influence and reach.

Ever wondered which bloggers, marketers or social media types are gaining followers and influence and which are starting to lose influence?

It's an interesting subject because, like most industries these days, it is vital that you stay up to date and on-top of what's happening in the world.

Internet marketers, bloggers, social media gurus, startups, entrepreneurs and online businesses are particularly subject to the fickle mistress that is social media. For example, someone who favors one social network over another, or one particular SEO tactic over another, may find themselves in the social media wilderness if they get it wrong and don't adapt quickly enough.

What would a graphical representation of the "social sphere of influence" look like for some of the world's most popular social media and Internet marketing personalities look like? Click on this image to expand it and find out.

The problem with most social metrics used to determine reach, authority, or influence online is that there is such a massive disparity in the scale of influence from one person to the next. To give a true representation of the size of people's followings would mean spitting out numbers that simply don't make sense to most people - they're huge.

To solve this, services like Klout "normalize and manipulate their ranking metrics into an easy to understand, more linear scale. So a person with a Klout of 82 has greater reach than a person with a Klout of 78 - easy to understand, right? The problem is that this completely distorts the real-world picture.

I thought I would illustrate this by selecting a few well known social and Internet marketing types and graphically represent the "true" size of their following as a social sphere of influence.

Klout is a service that provides insight into your social reach and influence. It hooks up to your twitter and Google+ accounts (among others) and uses information like who and how many people are following you to put a number on your "influence".

Now, the phrase "influence" is really subjective here. If you look at my previous article that provides sales figures for the world's best selling business books for the week starting 22nd of January, 2012, you'll see that despite racking up huge amounts of sales, the authors of said books had little to no social reach or influence at all.

That's not to say they aren't influential. In fact, just the opposite is true. One author, David Novak, is the CEO of a fortune 500 company (Yum! brands) and another, Daniel Kahneman, is a Nobel laureate. These authors have serious clout... just not much Klout.

After comparing the sales of books on entrepreneurship and small business in the article entitled "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries sells its way to small business and entrepreneurial success", I wanted to get a feel for the sales figures for leading generic business books.

To be honest, my expectation was that small business books would exceed the sales of more generic business books, with the exception perhaps of autobiographical books covering business personalities like the late Steve Jobs. I included the sales figures for the Kindle version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson in the attached graph, for interest's sake.

I've certainly been set straight. Not only are the bestselling generic business books outselling their small business and entrepreneurial counterparts, they're also outselling every other category of business books, like marketing, advertising, PR, eCommerce and so on. They're outselling everything except a handful of the biggest fiction titles like "The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Businesses can take off overnight. Social networks, global media, the Internet, marketing and word-of-mouth that spans the globe can drive your message to millions of people instantly. But it rarely "just happens".

If you've been marketing your startup, product or business online then you'll have seen product launches that seemed to come out of nowhere to become the hottest thing around, or videos and content that have gone viral driving millions of potential customers through to the originators - the "Charlie bit my finger" YouTube video sensation netted that family several hundred thousand dollars in revenue.

While some people luck out and ride a wave of viral/social popularity, basing your livelihood on success through blind luck is not a particularly fruitful strategy. Most people have to work hard for quite some time before they achieve a breakthrough marketing success. Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to give yourself every chance of success.

Yahoo and Bing are consistently sending more highly targeted organic search traffic to my startup than Google. How is this possible?

Google dominates the search market, with about 66% of US traffic - clearly a far greater percentage of search traffic than all of the other search engines combined.

So if Google has the lion's share of the search market, why are Yahoo and Bing sending my startup, design-a-webpage.com, qualified organic search traffic for the SEO keywords and phrases that are targeted by the site? The answer could be part of a strategy to claw their way back.

Let's take a look...

Getting your small business online can be difficult, until you have found the right combination of tools. In particular, creating a professional look and feel for your webpages is crucial for building trust and reputation (both hugely important for making sales).

This post isn't going to rehash the old favorites like wordPress, Joomla or Drupal. These CMS (Content Management Systems) are fairly well known and widely used. If you're not using one of these for your website or blog then you should definitely take a look.

Instead I thought I would list the online tools, relating to web design, that I can't do without. Tools that make the every day task of adding new pages, changing the look and feel of existing page elements, and updating code so much easier.