The concept of Tribes and Tribal Marketing is fascinating. I first learned about it from Seth Godin in one of his books. Applied to the internet marketing arena it can be VERY powerful.

It makes you think a bit deeper about the power of Social Marketing, or Attraction Marketing and it gives a whole new meaning to the old term, Network Marketing – You can see how it can really become a “change agent” more powerful that anything you’ve used in the past.

In a nutshell, a tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, and a leader or leaders, and an idea… a vision.

It’s our human nature to want to be in a tribe. For millions of years, humans have joined tribes…

Religious tribes
Ethnic tribes
Political tribes, even
Musical tribes (think of the Greatful Dead and their Deadheads.)

Now the internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and even time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born – groups of ten or ten million who care about their business opportunity, or their iPhone aps, or a political campaign, or a new training community.

Who’s going to lead all these tribes?

The web can do amazing things, but it can’t provide leadership. That still has to come from people. People just like you who have passion about something. Anyone who wants to make a difference now has the tools at her fingertips.

If you ignore this opportunity to lead, you risk turning into a “sheepwalker” – someone who fights to protect the status quo at all costs, never asking if obedience is doing you any good.” Sheepwalkers don’t do very well at anything these days.

Learning about Tribes and Tribal Marketing indeed, helps you to think (really think) about the opportunity for leading your fellow marketers, teams, customers, employees, believers, readers… It’s not overnight, or get-rich-quick, or easy… but it’s easier and more powerful that you probably imagine. It’s a way to use social marketing in a focused and powerful way to make a difference, add significance and create movements.

Tribes are more powerful than they ever have been. Before the internet, building and leading tribes was difficult. It was expensive and hard to get the word out and share a simple message. It’s was difficult to grow and motivate and manage action. Today, with the internet, communication is instant, free and global. In today’s world, politicians can raise $50 Million in twenty-eight days. In the fluid tribal world of today, Twitter and blogs and online videos and a whole variety of other tools combine to add whole new dimmensions of what it means to be a part of a movement – a tribe.

All that is needed to turn a mob, or unorganized and unfocused crowd into a movement… a tribe that can effect change fast is:

1. A shared interest – a vision – a story – and a purpose
2. A way to communicate

The actual communication can be on of four kinds:

1. Leader to tribe
2. Tribe to leader
3. Tribe member to tribe member
4. Tribe member to outsider

A leader of a tribe can help the tribe be more effective and truly effect change and progress by:

1. Transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change
2. Providing tools to allow member to focus their communications and share the message
3. Leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members, effecting more change and gaining momentum

Implementing social marketing in the form of Tribal Marketing and understanding how all the tools or pieces of the puzzle come together to advance your movement is the critical key to implementing focused, lasting change and being significant. The world is truly your oyster. All you need is the courage to make the decision to be the leader your tribe eagerly needs and wants.

Franco Gonzalez is a professional internet marketer who helps individuals build effective internet businesses using social marketing. Visit his tribe to learn more about Social Marketing Tribes Learn Attraction Marketing on his free newsletter too. You’ll receive free training tips and videos to help you understand how to leverage the internet to create multiple income streams.

While links used to play a more important role in Google SEO, they still are very important. Using Social Networks can create a pool of very good, high quality links. We will detail a strategy to help you achieve great links and help your Google SEO Strategy.

When Search Engines began, especially Yahoo, they were nothing more than a compilation of links, which slowly grew into what is now known as the internet. As Search Engines evolved, so did their tools and abilities. Search Engines then moved to the crawler system, which as the name implies, is software driven web page scouring device, created to follow links from page to page, and web site to web site. These crawlers then added parsing features that analyzed entire pages, and websites. With the advent of Google’s PageRank algorithm, all this data was then given a numerical value and a ranking was derived.

Now you have Social Networking sites so large that they are considered secondary search engines from their sheer size. Twitter is the most powerful tool in creating a white had Google SEO link strategy, but nothing happens overnight.

The strategy is as follows. Get a twitter account with a username that relates to your site. Link it to your site, and begin following members.

Following the right Twitter members is crucial in your Google SEO link building strategy. Start by searching Twitterholic for members with the most followers, then look through their followers and begin following members whose following/followers numbers are almost even. This means that they are likely to automatically follow you if you follow them. If you get followed by someone with 5,000 followers, you then will have access to his/her 5,000 followers. You can probably begin to see the potential.

Begin by NOT sending links in your Tweets, simply talk about what you enjoy to do, preferably if it is of value to others. Over a 1 month period keep conversations interesting and keep building your Twitter network.

Twitter imposes a limit on how many people you can follow, which corresponds to 10% than your followers. So if you have 1,000 followers, you can follow 1,100 members.

Grow, grow, grow, and after about a month you can begin letting people know about your product. I prefer to use my entire web site URL rather than the shortened version available through TinyURL and such. Once your network is larger, each link potentially will reach thousands of people and Google will begin giving importance to your twitter page, which is linked to your site and most of the time it will index the links that end up on other member pages, created through your tweets.

Try it out, I guarantee you will have fun, while building your link assets.