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...

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.

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.

Small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs often have a hard time building up a decent amount of social buzz, hype or interest around what they are saying.

Last week, I "made Guy Kawasaki's day", with this article entitled "Guy Kawasaki's 'Art of the start' outsells other titles by marketing gurus". Guy's share on Twitter drove thousands of hits through to my blog.

The way the Internet has evolved, it is now crucial to build social trust and authority to help drive traffic, in addition to the organic search traffic that comes from creating SEO enhanced, focused and relevant blog (or other) content. In other words, creating great content on its own is no longer enough.

But building up a social media profile takes a lot of time and effort. People have to see you before they can follow you or engage with you. But, how can they see you if they aren't already following you? It's a bit of a catch-22.

I thought I would compare the online sales of the marketing books written by a random selection of leading marketing gurus to see how they stack up against each other.

Now I should point out that making too direct comparisons on the relative popularity of each book is not quite fair because the books were published at different times, and are different sizes and prices.

For example Poke the box is only 95 pages and costs about $6, whereas Facebook marketing is 312 pages and costs nearly $20.

Internet marketing using SEO and social media help drive revenue through my eCommerce site. I help startups, entrepreneurs, small and medium sized businesses to increase sales, reduce costs and generally meet their business objectives. I write books too - my books are translated and sold all over the world. Doing this allows me the flexibility to work from my poolside.

Ok, so I do have to fly off every now and then to build a new business application, give technical advice and consult with a few corporate clients. I also have a hand in helping a few startup companies that require me to work in different places (usually in-doors in front of several computers at once), but fundamentally, this picture of me (taken this morning) shows my office space in the heart of Cape Town.

The criteria for inclusion on this list of "top new social and marketing business tools" is for the tool or service to be online (i.e. not a gadget or traditional business), related to social networking and media/marketing, and new (ish).

The tools/services also have to be either free or nearly free and offer great potential or value - something that makes you sit up and go, "Ah! That's useful.".

The idea behind this list is to help entrepreneurs, small business and startups increase their productivity, establish themselves as leaders in their industry, grow their social following, build authority and trust, drive sales and all the important goodies that go into making a success of your business.

Regardless of whether you are selling cupcakes or oil rigs, it's worth checking out how these tools can help you make important business connections, increase your online visibility and generally help you to succeed at whatever it is your doing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the nicest ways to make a living from the Internet. It doesn't require you to develop a product, manage a supply chain, or do anything else associated with a traditional business, other than promote and market products.

It's also easy to startup. All you need is to sign up to an affiliate program - the most popular one being Amazon's associate program - and start creating interesting and engaging content to encourage and convince people to make purchases.

In particular, for entrepreneurs, startups and anyone thinking of starting a small business, affiliate marketing can provide a wonderful lesson in how to harness the Internet (SEO, search, social media, PPC and more) to drive and convert traffic into sales and revenue.

Search giant Google recently launched its latest version of it's world dominating search - "Google search plus your world" (Gs+yw). Gs+yw integrates the social Google+ platform with Google search to bring you a hybrid of traditional search results mixed with personalized search results - socialized search.

The idea being that you are far more likely to want to read relevant information from someone you know than someone you don't.

Of course, Google+'s integration into Google search uses a softly, softly approach. Google+ results are only shown if you are logged in because Google+ can't tell who you are following otherwise. You are also allowed to prevent Google+ results from being included in your search results. So don't panic if you aren't yet signed up to Google+.