Attraction marketing is about attracting the right people to you and the business opportunity you can provide them.  One of the true beauties of attraction marketing is the simple fact that if you’re creative and highly self-motivated, you can design and implement numerous ways for your leads and prospects to be attracted to you, being drawn to you like a magnet.

Most traditional marketers focus far too much time and energy in trying to find leads and forcing their sale pitches on prospects that may have little or no interest.  If this is you, make a New Year’s resolution to implement attraction marketing into your arsenal next year and replace the time you’ve been spending combing and reseaching your marketplace for prospects,with time spent answering questions and making your presentation to people that have become attracted to you via the attraction marketing channels you create in 2010 and beyond.

Now I’m not going to write an encyclopedia and list 1,000 ways to attract prospects to you like a magnet.  But the point I want to make is the ways that one can successfully build a reputation through an attraction marketing plan are practically endless.  Still, many marketers lack creativity, so I will list several key attraction marketing methods that I use successfully in my own network marketing business.

Classified Ads

Point ads to information websites that peak people’s interest and attract them further to you and your business opportunity.   Many people would question me for listing classified ads in an article about attraction marketing, but they, just like search engines, represent just another search tool that people who are looking for an opportunity will use.  I don’t use classifieds regularly because my other free forms of marketing online bring me more leads than I can handle sometimes.  But when I do use them in my attraction marketing campaign, I always use them as a front-end lead development device that will push the lead to one of my information websites.  Once they arrive at my website and click for my free ebook or my free business evaluation kit, they’ve reached the halfway mark on their road to discovering the facts about me and my opportunity that will attract them to me and cause them to contact me via email or phone, without me having to initiate contact with them.  Through the information materials they’ll get for free by responding to my classifieds, they’ll learn everything they’ll need to know about me and my network marketing business opportunity.  And from what they learn, they’ll either be attracted to me or not.  Those that are, generally approach me on a first-name basis, for after reading my book and materials they feel as they know.  And frankly they do, for I’m brutally honest in my book and don’t sugar-coat the opportunity.  If you have the right business opportunity, you shouldn’t have to sugar coat it to draw interest.

Social Media

This is a form of attraction marketing that does get sugar-coated by almost everyone.  Does it work?  Yes.  Is it easy?  Yes.  Is it demanding and time-consuming?  Yes.  And that’s the one fact most social media marketers won’t tell you.  Sure, you can purchase scripts and software for ramping up your number of followers and weeding out prospects on forums like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, but don’t let anyone fool you, you can spend a lot of time on social media marketing before the results start pouring in.  My point is simple, it (like all roads to success), does take an effort.  In the beginning, you may quickly find that the reward doesn’t measure up to the effort.  Twitter is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.  If you want to turn Twitter into an attraction marketing machine you can, but it implies you need to tweet a lot and you need lots of followers.  I view Twitter and Facebook as just another arrow in my attraction marketing quiver.  I suggest you do the same and don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Branding

Yes, branding.  Butbranding as an attraction marketing tool?  That’s right!  If you want to develop an attraction marketig tidal wave to your business, you need to establish a brand so that there is one cohesive thread that ties everything you do together.   I have since created a Twitter account under watpros, a You-Tube account under watpros and more recently a Facebook page for watpros.  The more people that come to see the watpros brand, the greater the likelihood that my brand will become impressionable and they’ll become attracted to me.

Traditional Websites

This one’s a no-brainer. Obviously, if you plan to implement an attaction marketing plan online, you will need a website.  I own and operate many that attract people to me and my business opportunity.   A perfect example of a highly optimized SEO-friendly website I built as part of my attraction marketing plan can be found here.

This has turned into a pretty long article.  But for more great tips on how to launch and build an attraction marketing machine for your business, and learn about the remaining ways to attract new leads that make up my list of 1,000 — keep reading my Attraction Marketing blog.

What a wonderful world: Thanks to Fox, Comedy Central, and the other TV networks that are generous enough to post the latest episodes from their hit shows online, I can watch all of my favorite episodes on the Web on demand without paying a dime to Comcast (oops, “Xfinity”) for premium cable channels or DVR rentals. It’s hardly a case of altruism, of course. The networks make money on online video by selling so-called “pre-roll,” “post-roll,” and “in-stream” ads. In exchange for all that free content, I’m happy to sit through the ads—pretty much.

There’s just one thing that puzzles me. Having watched quite a few online episodes of 24, Glee, and Fringe (does it say something disturbing about me that most of my favorite shows are on Fox?), I’m getting pretty tired of watching the same ads over and over again. Literally the same ads. During a single episode of 24, Fox will show me a single 30-second ad eight or 10 times—at the beginning, at the end, and at every commercial break. Lately it’s been Red Bull, Double-Stuf Oreos, and Bioshock 2 ads. Evidently the network has me pegged as a twenty-something software developer with a cookie and video game habit.

I don’t mean to second-guess video advertisers at their own business, but it strikes me that showing the same ad over and over to someone who’s never going to buy the product is not an optimal use of all of the advertising time that goes along with a 43-minute TV episode. In fact, it can be counterproductive. By the time I’ve watched the same Red Bull ad 10 times, I’m so sick of the company that I’m even less likely to buy their sugar-and-caffeine concoction, even if it does promise to give me wings.

Other networks seem to have slightly more on the ball when it comes to online ads. I was intrigued the last time I logged onto Hulu, and it asked me before 30 Rock which of two Southern Comfort ads I preferred to watch. But after that one spot, the rest of the ads during the show were non-interactive and were chosen, as far as I could tell, at random. Not only that, but the 30 Rock ads looked to me like the same 30-second spots that the ads the networks show on broadcast TV, just repurposed for the PC screen.

So, here we are in 2010. I’ve got a 30-megabit-per-second Internet pipe into my house, and my browser is loaded up with glitzy interactive video software like Adobe’s Flash Player, and the cookies on my computer probably know me well enough to guess my toothpaste brand. But to the network advertising executives, it’s still 1975. Whatever happened to all the talk about targeted advertising? I could use a little bit of it right now.

“The dirty secret is that most pre-roll is not targeted,” says Bill Day, the CEO of ScanScout, a tech startup that buys ad slots from a network of 1,000 online video publishers and sells them to advertisers. “The ‘targeting’ is literally as simple as, ‘You’re a premium brand, so whatever you give us, we’ll assume it’s of interest.’” No wonder Hulu keeps showing me a Dove soap ad, even though I prefer Dial.

Day says ScanScout is working to make online video advertising work better for everyone—advertisers and viewers alike. “Our clients suffer from this incredible problem,” he told me when I visited the company’s headquarters in Boston’s Leather District last week. “People are becoming better and better at tuning ads out, while at the same time ad frequency keeps going up and up. So the question becomes, how do you create advertising that is interesting to users?”

Google solved this problem in the realm of text ads long ago. First, it realized that people searching terms like “kitchen remodeling” are more likely to be interested in ads for Home Depot than for Travelocity. Second, it introduced a payment system so that Home Depot only pays for the kitchen-equipment ads when people actually click on them. Everybody wins.

“We see the potential for a similar model evolving” in online video ads, Day says. How would that work in practice? You can see for yourself in ScanScout’s online ad gallery. The most advanced example, right now, is what the company calls “Super Pre-Roll,” in which designers at ScanScout take standard ads supplied by its ad-agency clients and soup them up with interactive Flash-based features such as real-time polls. ScanScout believes that if it can engage viewers through such features, it’s much more likely to leave them with a strong impression of the brand supporting the more engaging content, and maybe coax them to take an action such as clicking through to an advertisers’ website.

It’s so confident about this theory that it’s proposing charging advertisers under a completely new system—CPE or “cost per engagement,” the video equivalent of Google’s cost-per-click pricing, rather than the traditional CPM or cost per thousand impressions.

“When you make an engagement model work, it powerfully aligns forces that haven’t been aligned,” says Day, who co-founded ScanScout with president Waikit Lau and chief technology officer Steven Lee in 2005. “Clients only want to produce really great creative, and they only want to show it to the right people. We only get paid for showing it to the right people—so if you are not inclined [to watch], we are not going to waste your time.”

But ScanScout doesn’t rely solely on the allure of its Flash features to boost engagement rates. Before its network even delivers an ad to a viewer, its software goes to work indexing the video programming itself, sifting through both visual and audio cues and associated information on the Web, such as comment streams, in order to divine what the show is actually about. That allows it to target ads alongside related content—and keep ads away from controversial content. (”Tiger Woods was a very salable name to brand marketers six months ago, and now his name is radioactive—nobody wants to be next to him,” Lau told me. While Tiger’s travails are obviously common knowledge, ScanScout’s system crawls the Web all day long for clusters of negative concepts that it wants to help advertisers avoid.)

ScanScout also tracks and categorizes what people watch on its clients’ websites. That way, when Procter & Gamble comes along with a body-lotion campaign aimed at 18-to-34-year-old females, ScanScout knows which viewers to show the ads to. It even knows whether viewers are more likely to engage with an ad in the morning or the evening, and serve up something appropriate based on the time of day.

Together with other Boston-area video analytics companies like RAMP (formerly Everyzing) and Visible Measures and video delivery companies like Extend Media and Brightcove, ScanScout is gradually dragging video publishers—the companies we used to call broadcasters—into the 2010s. I say the faster ScanScout can spread the idea of cost-per-engagement ads, the better. Because if Fox shows me one more “The Donalds vs. the Mannings” Oreo commercial, I’m going to rub Double Stuf all over my computer screen.

“It’s not lost on us that in an ad-driven economy, ads are the price for getting to content; they are a means, not an end,” says Day. “If it’s a choice between paying for content or viewing ads, you will choose ads. The key is to make them as good and as infrequent as possible—but pre-roll, the way it was invented around 2007, is an exact copy of how TV ads were run for the last 40 years. If that’s all online video becomes, then we’ve way undershot the mark.”