The past few months I have participated in a few online ventures and it has opened my eyes wider to the incredible power of the public. The power of sharing.

Each of these examples are a bit different, so I’m going to explain how they worked and the results.

In the first example, Jalanda James rallied a bunch of bloggers to participate in reading and commenting on each others posts. When you have a group of 25-30 bloggers, that turns into a nice and steady stream each week for 5 weeks of comments. You’re gaining traffic, visibility and the visitors have the opportunity to share the posts on social media as well. In the first round I used one blog and in the second this blog. This way I brought more visitors to two of my blogs. As I left comments at all of their sites, my signature had my blog address and in some cases my latest post, driving even more people. What I gained from this experience was learning more about 25 other bloggers and the topics they write about as I read each of there posts and hopefully, visa versa. The more comments and shares, the more others may read as well and perhaps comment and share. A truly great idea and I will continue this with each new round.

In the next example, Mike Michalowicz rallies some of his email list followers to help promote the launch on his new book, The Pumpkin Plan. He writes to us and tells he’s going to create a private Facebook group for us and provides us with all sorts of usable content so we can Tweet, Post and Blog. After we read an advanced copy of the book, we were able to interact, ask questions, point out important passages and even write our own personal review. The “Buzz Warriors” took on a life of it’s own! Group people posting photos, videos and we all got to know each other and now will keep the group going and continue to help and support our fellow entrepreneurs. How this helped me? It drew more people to my pages and blog, made me laugh as some of the awesome and hilarious photos were posted, and united a group of entrepreneurs. It also gave a good guy like Mike, an amazing book launch!

The third example which I wrote about previously, was Chase: Mission Small Business. By following a Twitter hashtag stream, hundreds of small business owners all started helping each other get to the needed 250 votes to qualify to win $250K. I gained many new followers and met so many awesome small business owners as I looked at their profiles and websites.

So what is the conclusion: Instead of us all yelling to get noticed, how might we unite people to talk about us instead? How might we get our followers tweeting or posting without asking them to do so? What would get someone talking about you?