A Backstage Pass For Growing Your Circle Of Influence

If you want to grow your referrals and expand your business, you should consider expanding your circle of influence.   Your circle of influence is the collection of people who know you, like you and trust you.

I can’t remember who said it but I really like the saying “It does not matter who you know, instead it matters who knows and remembers YOU!”

Your circle of influence is one of the easiest ways for you to grow your word of mouth marketing efforts. Many small business owners only think of their clients when they think of their circle of influence.  This narrow definition will leave many profitable opportunities untouched and out of sight. 

Your circle of influence should include everyone you come into contact with:

• Family members
• Friends
• Past clients
• Current clients
• Other professionals
• And more

Expanding and cultivating your circle of influence will help you grow your business year after year.  The famous author, Joe Girard, once said “On average everyone knows 250 other people. So one of the most economical ways to grow your business is by meeting more people.”

With the advent of Facebook, you can now “meet” new people and build trusting relationships using your Facebook Business Page (also known as a fan page).  We have found this to be one of the easiest ways to get to know people who are one or two relationships removed from our direct contacts.

Our coaching clients often ask us for good ideas for how they get more fans of their Facebook fan page.  Over the next few success tips, we are going to show you one of the easiest, fastest ways to get fans and expand your circle of influence – run a contest or sweepstakes.

A sweepstakes or contest is easy to run and does not have to cost a lot of money.  Many people think that running a contest or sweepstake is hard or complex.  Nothing could be further from the truth – both can be done at minimal cost and deliver huge results (that is why you see so many of them).

To start, let’s look at the difference between a sweepstakes and a contest:

• Contest – Participants do something, like submit a photo or answer a question for some reward.  For example, it could be as easy as having people submit a photo of their pet doing something unique.  Then you judge the entries and award a prize to your winner.  The prize does not have to be big – just fun.
• Sweepstakes – You give away a prize to someone at random based on those that enter your sweepstakes.  For example, you could give away an Amazon Kindle to everyone who enters the sweepstakes.

Contests and sweepstakes are extremely effective, so we decided to show you exactly how to run your own cost effective contest or sweepstakes.  Because it is easier to learn from someone else doing something, we are going to run both a sweepstakes and a contest with our My Social Wizard fan page and we are going to show you exactly what we did step by step so you can follow along.

Now for today’s homework – go to www.facebook.com/mysocialwizard and enter our free sweepstakes for an Apple iPad.  Look at the graphics and wording.  Notice how we put the sweepstakes on the page.  Check out the rules of the contest.  We will go over all of these in our next success tip.

Trust me, you will get a lot more out of this if you follow along.  So go to www.facebook.com/mysocialwizard and enter our sweepstakes and you will have a backstage pass on how to run your own super effective sweepstakes that will expand your circle of influence!

If you have any questions you want us to answer in our next success tip about sweepstakes, just go to www.facebook.com/mysocialwizard and post your question on our wall.  We will answer all the questions on the wall and in our next success tip.

Dedicated to your success
Greg and Bill

P.S. Learn how to run your own sweepstakes to grow your business.  Go to www.facebook.com/mysocialwizard and enter our sweepstakes to learn how to hold your own killer sweepstakes.