The invisible gorilla, Get Satisfaction, wellness community, Bikewire, kiva and etsy are just some of the online places we’ve shared for fun, money-making, justice, special interests, tips or support. With more free time and the spread of “public media” ordinary citizens can “pool free time to pursue activities together” suggests Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus, his follow-up to Here Comes Everybody.

Yet, where are we heading with this growing capacity to actively share and co-create?

Towards extraordinarily satisfying and dangerous “opportunities” I’ve found.

Shirky covers the upside. Here are some points from his book, followed by the dangerous downside of the trends he cites that are covered in other books. These effects will touch all our lives so it’s vital to be aware of them.

The Benefits of More Free Time and Capacity to Share and to Organize

•  “The wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.  Our cognitive surplus is only potential; it doesn’t mean anything or do anything by itself. To understand what we can make of these new resources, we have to understand, not just the kind of actions it makes possible but the hows and wheres of those actions.”

• “Back when coordinating group action was hard, most amateur groups stayed small and informal.  Now that we have the tools that let groups of people find each other and share their thoughts and actions, we are seeing a strange new hybrid: large, public amateur groups.  Individuals can make their interests public, more easily, and groups can balance amateur motivation and larger coordinated action more easily as well.”

• “The geographic range of collaborative efforts has spread dramatically.  When Linus Torvalds first asked or help creating what would become the Linus operating system, he received only a few replies, but they came from potential participants all over the globe.   Similarly, Julie Clarke, Valerie Sooky, and Meg Markus all lived in different places when they were forming Grobanites for Charity, but that didn’t stop them from creating a charity that’s raised a million dollars.”

• “Today people have new freedom to act in concert and in public. In personal satisfaction, this goal is fairly uncomplicated – even the banal uses of our creative capacity (posting YouTube videos of kittens on treadmills or writing bloviating blog posts) are still more creative and generous than watching TV.

• “Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.”

The Dangerous Downside to Most Anyone’s Increased Ability to Share and to Organize

Yes, people like sharing and collaborating, as Shirky suggests yet many are adept at both for illegal goals. There is a tragic and growing dark side in this increasingly connected world as Moses Naim points out in Illicit. From trading in women, guns and drugs, illegal activity has also grown more “creative” and “active” and connected groups of bandits, terrorists, pirates and self-described global businessmen in a more efficient, larger activity.

As Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have found there are now more enslaved and traded girls and women in than there were blacks at the height of slavery.

As well, we increasingly connect with people who share our beliefs, according to The Big Sort and Going to Extremes. A dangerous consequence of closer connections with like-minded people is not limited to terrorists.

As a group continues to bond it tends to take more extreme stances on the beliefs that brought them together – and to become more intense in those beliefs.

With our innate desire to belong, contribute and be known – and the greater capacity to connect, share and organize described by Clay Shirky, it behooves us to be aware of the downside tendencies of organizing groups as we enjoy the upsides.

Also as low-paid writers for eHow and LIVESTRONG, wine and other “content farm” workers have discovered, we’ll see other downsides to increased connectivity.

Many social media businesses offer everything for free.  Founders want a strong base of users before charging.  Some start-ups might take a closer look at charging sooner, as the battle between Twitter and Yammer demonstrates.  Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging tool (’”right now I am…”).  You use the Web or your cell to send 140-character messages to your group of opt-in friends and fans. It has millions of users, uneven service and no ads or other revenue sources.  Alternatively, copycat service Yammer, dubbed by TechCrunch as leading “Twitter with a business model” made money almost from the beginning.

As Yammer’s chief executive David Sacks boasts, “because it spreads virally like a consumer service, but earns revenue like a business service. Anyone with a company e-mail address can use Yammer free. When that company officially joins — which gives the administrator more control over security and how employees use the service — it pays $1 a month for each user. In Yammer’s first six weeks, 10,000 companies with 60,000 users signed up.”  (Of course the service has to work.)

Next year Twitter will create profit centers.  Ironically, one under consideration is emulating Yammer by charging companies. Twitter founder, Evan Williams promotes a “growth-first approach” to demonstrate a track record before monetizing yet attracting customers is a credible record.  My preferred “stay in touch” tool is Socialcast, what Rafe Needleman calls a “Friendfeed for business.”

One lesson from these startups: A hybrid approach of either “free + fee version” or “ free + advertising” seems best for many us, both as social media business owners and as sought-after “customers.”  Hybrids have proven to be popular and profitable, for example at Flickr, Ning and wikiHow. There are glorious exceptions (craigslist and PostSecret) where free is forever for a legion of fans – but that’s part of the unfolding wonder of social media.

That question sparked the start of an image-based, international social network that millions use yet, unlike Facebook, few people know about.  The peculiarly-named name PerfSpot started by co-hosting small events with photographers who took pictures of the partygoers.  Attendees get cards at the gatherings, inviting them to visit the site.  There they can see photos of themselves and of others at any of the parties covered by PerfSpot. That’s proved to be a simple yet profitable idea. (In a moment, I’ll suggest how clubs and associations could offer a fun member benefit and get a new profit center, adapting this approach.)

Observes Jemima Kiss, “brands including Coke and Sony are keen to advertise on the cards handed out to all those party goers.”  Today the company has over 800 photographers who cover these parties called PerfNights. Plus it has around 220 million videos, 400 different video partners and millions of member-uploaded pictures. Around 20 million people have joined Perfspot. The site gets a whopping 46 million unique views a month.  It site serves people in 200 countries and 50 languages and is adding new services via partners. Yet some describe it as a “mySpace clone.”

While the site is free to members, it was profitable within three months through advertising revenue. This Scottsdale-based firm just launched in March, 2007. For a social network, Perfspot pledges to take unusual care of its members.  The staff reviews images to remove pornography (if not risque images) and has a free number to call to answer members’ questions – yet some have complaints. It’s a site for youngish, casual users.  Not my demographic. I couldn’t find anything captivating but that doesn’t matter to PerfSpot.  In March it overtook Facebook as the fastest growing social-networking site in the UK. Thanks, Mark Brooks, for the tip.

Here’s a what-if scenario for membership-based groups:

While the PerfNights’ service is popular for the masses, the overall brand image and extra “make friends and share” options of PerfSpot may not appeal to many associations. What if a respected association expert and a social media expert co-founded a firm to set up and manage stand-alone social media sites for associations  –just offering their custom version of the PerfNights service?

The firm could forge agreements with associations to photograph and video their gatherings.  Those might include the annual conference’s award banquets, social mixers and perhaps some educational sessions. It could recruit local professional photographers and videographers to be hired under contract for such events.

As well, this firm could hire experienced vloggers and podcasters to interview people “live” at the conference – generating popular content that would draw members to the site.  This firm might provide a list of suggested questions for these roving reporters to ask.  They could include “What’s your favorite part of the conference so far?”, “Who’s someone you admire here and why?”, “What new insight have you gained here?” or “What advice would you give our members?”

As well, as at IABC’s international conference this year, key figures might be invited, in advance for a scheduled interview at a media station near registration.

Each association would have its own social media site, hosted and managed by this start-up.  Only members of that association could join, provide a profile with tag words, contribute related videos and photos – also tagged for easy searching by other members – and leave comments connected to each others’ images.  To assist in members’ image search, this firm might partner with Pixsy.

As at PerfSpot, the startup would allow advertising – seeking firms that want contact with that member demographic yet that are not the industry-specific sponsors, exhibitors and advertisers that are already involved with the association.
To attract association participation, this start-up could offer a split in the advertising revenue that would grow over time with increased members participation. The start-up could have photo and video contests – with prizes from advertisers – to motivate members to make and contribute photos and videos throughout the year – and thus stay active on the site.
Bottom line:

In this way, the association can offer a new member service while gaining a new profit center that doesn’t cannibalize its current sources of revenue – and does not require an additional staffer to manage. In time, this firm might offer client associations the opportunity to allow non-members to view the images on other members associations’ sites yet not comment nor contribute.

 … even when you have few resources. Or to make your small donation matter more.

Want to launch a campaign to spruce up your nearby park?

Like to share your expertise with others, for the greater good?

Like to track the success of a project you supported?

For your cause or club, like a user-friendly way find the best ways to accomplish more with social media tools?  No matter how small or large your “do good” goal, hear how to accomplish more with less in this interview with micro-philanthropy, social fundraising guru and Social Actions founder, Peter Deitz. “Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part,” says Deitz.  Rather than creating cause campaigns, he’s “aggregating campaigns where people connect around “actionable opportunities. Deitz told Beth Kanter, he’s creating  tools that “will assist in planning and implementing a peer-to-peer social change campaign.

Social actions will recommend platforms to use and best practices for spreading the campaign through social networks. It will also feature an after-action survey covering the tools used and the strategies implemented.This information will feed back into the system that recommends platforms and best practices.”

Like artificial intelligence, he’s creating a system that will get smarter as more people use it – a true Me2We approach.  That’s powerful support for person-to-person fundraising.

Like Micro Credit Enterprises, Social Actions reflect the new model of low-cost, all-virtual operations. His start-up site enables you to invite others to join you in supporting very specific social action.

Every part of his tiny, virtual organization exemplifies how you can leverage free or low-cost social medial tools to launch an active, powerful service. For example, his social network uses the free Ning service.

Fractured Atlas manages the group’s non-profit status. And, via an introduction from AspirationTech, the site’s capacity is being strengthened by a worker-owned and operated technology collective called The Brattleboro Tech Collective.

Funding sprung out of a NetSquared conference.  Perhaps these resources can support you, too, in helping your cause.

Authors’ alert: Try your version of Seth Godin’s newest crowd attractor that rocketed his book to the top ten bestsellers at Amazon.  And the book isn’t even out yet.

Here’s what happened. About two months ago, he offered his fans the chance to be on the cover of his next book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.  Those who were quick to act might (might!) be among the crowd of faces on the book.

Note:  “Quick” evokes “scarcity,” which spurs us to act, according to Influence author, Robert Cialdini.

To further stoke his visibility and his advance sales of the book, yesterday Godin invited community-builders and marketers to  meet each other over at his “private,”  subscriber-based social network site, aka an online book club.  Of course, even these ostensibly key influencers had to provide electronic proof that they’d pre-ordered a copy of the book at Amazon.  That membership requirement certainly cements a SmartPartnership between the author and Amazon.  Also, Seth’s social network site, aka book club was launched off the free provider, Ning.

Some are offended by Seth’s approach.

Yet, as Ron Hogan at Mediabistro suggests, it is a super quick way for an author to start and grow a book club and boost sales.  Even less famous authors (such as the rest of us) can adapt this approach to entice our kind of readers to buy early, tell others and get to know each other online – thus building an active fan community to buy our future books.

(If politicans and pet stores can start book clubs, why not authors?) Finally, to cover your bases, create a book club page at Mahalo and  Squidoo – and a write up at the still ungainly “steamroller” of an author-credited, wiki service, Knol.

Other than inadvertently becoming part of a scandal, crisis or other notably bad or good news, here’s the most likely method for becoming part of a media story – in a positive way. Get briefed on stories for which reporters, producers or bloggers are seeking input – right now.

For $99 a month, get PR Leads, a daily email of updates, customized for your situation. Dan Janal is diligent and savvy.  He depends on happy referrals to get more business.  Two other popular media matching services are free. Publicist (and sky diver) Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO) email gets delivered to you three times a day. At the top of each email is a summary – one-liners on the kind of sources reporters are seeking. Scan it quickly to see if you’re a match for one of the queries. In just a few months over 10,000 sources signed up, as you can here. Journalists submit their query here.

ProfNet, a venerable fee-based service was upset with this upstart.

The other free service is Getting Ink Requests. It is run by another social media maven, Sally Whittle and a large collective of journalists. You can get queries via a daily email or Twitter or add value to your blog by featuring Getting Ink Requests on it.

As you review your compilation of media queries from HARO, Gettng Ink Requests, PR Leads or ProfNet, look for strong matches. Can you offer tips, insights, information, stories or examples that directly relate to what the media person is seeking? Be brief, specific and to the point.

See, for example, how Peter got HARO to be a part of this New York Times story. If you are off-topic or too self-promotional you’ll get be blacklisted by that media person. Here’s Sandra Beckwith’s tips on how to respond. (Don’t get featured on the Bad Pitch Blog.) 

Kristen King also writes bluntly about the biggest mistakes some people make in responding to queries. Here’s tips for offering what a reporter needs to cover your story.

Also, if you’re paid for your expertise (or you want to be) then help people find you when they want what you know. To raise your visibility and value, you may want to emulate Sally Whittle or Peter Shankman’s community-building model. That is offer a social media-based, free compilations/matching service related to your business.

If so, remember this. While Sally actively encourages people to share the media queries she collects, Peter also allows you to share, yet not online, please. So far Peter is attracting far more queries and members it seems.

Ann Hanley sees Peter’s approach as a healthy sign of our social media future. Erik Sherman describes why Peter should be able to copyright his compilations to preserve the value he creates for himself while facilitating a service that remains free for “us.” That’s the “Me2We” way.

As you can see, taking this “first ever” approach can raise helpful thoughts and competitive concerns among those who are accustomed to having more control. The downside of this free-for-all future is the weakest link.

The weak links are the aforementioned, irritating off-topic responders who spoil it for the rest of us.That’s why some journalists and others are seeking sources among their existing circle of colleagues, as Shel Holtz describes.

Hint: How many media pros are you LinkedIn to?

For stay-at-home entrepreneurs, here’s a proven, three-step plan to make money, as Liz Ryan has proven. The key is sticking to the plan. Here it is:

Step One

Craft a niche expertise and a niche market. Choosing both, you get “Double Niche Leverage“:

1. Subject matter + 2. Kind of people you seek to serve.
Reward: you’ll create coveted niche content and find and attract more people faster. You are better able to become one-of-a-kind and top of mind in your market, a huge leg-up to profitability.

For example, I have a client, Jorge. His wife convinced him to focus on serving the kind of people he best understood and with whom he could establish immediate credibility. Jorge, a family man who’d worked in emergency preparedness for towns, chose Hispanic families. In short, he secured a “Double Niche.”Jorge ….

A. (Niche Expertise):

… became an expert on family safety (how to be safer in your home and car and set up procedures throughout your life to have the peace of mind that you are making your family more safe) ….

B. (Niche Market):

… to families with at least one child under five years old. Why? Because that’s, the time when parents are most motivated to adopt safety procedures to keep their family safe. Narrowing his niche by child’s age also enabled Jorge to more easily find partners that served the same niche. Partners included parent publications, pediatricians and makers and retailers of products for the five and under set (food, clothing and toys, etc.).

Step Two

Select your information delivery system(s) and profit center(s). Delivery systems may include a goggle or Yahoo! group, online social network, forum, web site, newsletter, wiki, mobile newsletter delivery, teleclasses, ebooks, blog and audio or video podcasts. For profit centers, who will be eager to pay for what and why?

In most cases you have two kinds of income sources:

1. Customers/community members.

2. Sponsors / advertisers.

Give customers/members enough content for them to recognize the value of it, want more and want to be a part of what you offer (yours and others’ expertise)

Step Three

Dedicate yourself to becoming ever more valuable to those in your niche market.The two most efficient ways to do this, I’ve found are to:

1. Continue to provide additional delivery systems and content (ideas and online products) that you create and that other reputable experts who want access to your niche market create for you to offer.

2. Build in rewards for member participation in the community you create in your niche market. Rewards can be positive visibility in the community, prizes as voted by the community, ability to attract clients or make friends. Your business and profits will grow exponentially:

• As you attract more members and they become more active, you become more attractive to sponsor/advertisers who will spend more with you.

• More experts will want to contribute articles and prizes, be interviewed and otherwise be seen in your community, creating more reasons for new pople to join and current members to stay active. Jorge, for example, now has a circle of 50 experts who submit content and respond to questions in his community. The experts benefit from exposure to his large membership and thus help make it ever larger.

He is now growing special interest groups within his community. Thus members find more reasons and ways to stay active. So far, groups include Single Parents, Apartment Living, Geographically Close MeetUps and Expectant Parents.

Each sub-group gets customized content plus ways they can ask questions, trade ideas, vote for best tips (that Jorge turns into a book which, in turn, attracts more people to his community.) This tight-knit community now has valuable places for a few big sponsors to provide special offers and contest prizes.

In this podcast interview you’ll hear how (a mother if five!) Liz Ryan has grown a business with her version of this approach. her Yahoo! group numbers over 25,000 active members. Perhaps you’ll adapt it to design the work and life you want to live. Liz has:

1. a Niche Expertise (workplace and networking issues, especially job search), and

2. a Niche Market (women at work).

This “Double Header” is a natural next step from her experience as a Fortune 500 recruiter and founder and former ceo of WorldWIT, the world’s largest online community for professional women. Hint: choose the niche that enables you to build on your expertise and connections.

She is an early adopter of distribution systems that her kind of community member enjoys using. So far, they include a popular listserve at Yahoo, two blogs, online social network, branded workshop (get them early), widget and web site. These mutually-reinforcing activities burnish her personal brand, enabling her to be quoted and get paid speaking gigs. To generate additional visibility, value and profits – while attracting people to her communities, she is an author, has a local column in Daily Camera and a national column in Business Week, posts articles in many places, partners with bigger firms and is a member of other’s communities including at LinkedIn.

Diane Danielson, Dan McComb and Lara Eve Feltin and Anita Campbell are also growing businesses, using their versions of this profitable business model. Like Liz, they love their community- building work. They are dedicated to making members proud to be a part of their community. Bragging rights abound. They, too, partner in ways that leverage visibility and value of their members and partners.

Want to become the unexpected top-of-mind choice? Take a page from how politics is played now. “If the typical Gore (presidential campaign fundraising) event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks, and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online,” venture capitalist, Mark Gorenberg told Joshua Green. In those big crowds, Obama asks people, “to hold up their cell phone and punch in afive-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign to win their commitment right there on the spot.” While not understood at first, the seismic switch to social network-based fundraising started early. (Thanks Ted Hopton for this update.)

One secret to Obama’s fundraising success is the “subscription model.” Here’s how. Just as SalesForce.com replaced their formidable, upfront price with a much smaller monthly charge to “subscribers”, Obama’s campaign invites people to MyBarackObama.com to give a small amount at a time, signing up for monthly giving. Also, the Obama campaign encourages supporters to set up their own web page and affinity group, share it most anywhere, then invite their colleagues and friends to donate and see their online personal “thermometer” rise as network kicks in.In short, they lowered the barrier to participate and offered more bragging rights to those who did.

The results? In February, Green reports, “94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 for McCain….” Just that month they raised $25 million – “nearly $2 million a day.” Thus Obama’s huge base of networked individual supporters operate with but not under the professional campaign staff – a power shift in politics. The even bigger power shift? Away from a few big special interests and the usual, rich individual donors and toward the interests of “the many.”

Trying to live up to that high expectation won’t be easy either, but it does change the game of governing.Yes, power and money are flowing towards the groups that go out of their way to involve us “small guys.” Read more on “The Amazing Money Machine” in The Atlantic.

That’s a wake-up call for those who are used to being in charge. Cultivating a community amongst those you seek to serve helps you leapfrog over competing ideas and organizations – even if they have more resources than you.What’s speeding this seismic shift from me to we?

Perhaps three things:

1. Desire for connectedness in an increasingly isolating culture.

2. Preference for greater involvement in decisions that affect our lives.

3. Rapid emergence of free and low-cost social media tools to make “constituency power” the winning option. (Here’s to the power of user-generated networks, done well.)

David Brooks cover another example of this shift. The Conservatives, the British political party that used to be like the U.S. Republican party is winning elections. That’s because, “These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.” Brooks adds, “As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: ‘Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.’”

Now what if the Conservatives took Obama’s social media step to expand their power? What if they launched a site where citizens could create user-generated networks around the issue that most mattered to them? In this case, citizens (not just politicians) could blog about their hot issues and vote online on options that anyone proposes, with the most popular ideas and advocates gaining the most visibility.

Of course this wide-open approach to participatory democracy is fraught with potential problems. Yet whoever sets up the most efficient and popular online places for citizens to organize around their issues will, inevitably pull power towards them. And the organizations that offer us the most efficient, cost-effective way to create value for each other will over-shadow those that are less “us-centered”. That’s what newspapers discovered as the “people first” Craiglist sucks so much of “their” advertising business to the site that offered a better option for us.

Now Craigslist’s foundation is becoming the go-to place for many activist philanthropists and volunteers who want to be engaged in their cause. “Working on the principle originally espoused by Bill Clinton of ‘Seek first to collaborate and then lead’, (foundation director, Darian Rodriguez Heyman), has almost single- handedly assembled more than 150 partner organizations for what will be a Yellow Pages for the social sector and he is just about to head into Beta phase.”

And a national political party has the same goal in providing social media tools to citizens as the CraigsList Foundation does in designing its beta-stage online community. That is to attempt to be, “hyper-local and global at the same time.”

CraigsList Foundation is like the Obama campaign in that it lowers the barriers for participation – thus attracting more people than its competitors. Each organization benefits by become the go-to place that enables like-minded people to find each other, collaborate to become higher-performing together – for the cause that brought them together.

Again, the Me2We approach beats the old-style, top-down rule of management. Perhaps the Conservative Party could get advice from the Craigslist Foundation on how to establish and facilitate user-generated networks? After all, as Laurance Allen noted over at Value News Network, the foundation has “the secret sauce behind Craigslist.org that has made it the bane of the newspaper industry” that, “gives him the ability to scale ‘better, cheaper, faster’ as the Silicon Valley VC’s like to say.”

In light of this shift toward the power of many – and the groups that bring them together, consider these social media options for your organization:

• How can you reach more people with your compelling message, product, service or other offering – offering something they want before asking for something?

• If your organization charges a hefty price, membership fee or other cost upfront, consider offering, instead, a much lower monthly, pay-as-you-go or “subscription model.”

• Would your cause, company or membership-based group benefit from a move towards user-generated networks?

What is the best and worst-case scenario of enabling those you seek to serve to post opinions, comment on and rate the ideas of others, let the most popular ideas and people gain more visibility – and be assured that there’s a transparent process for the group’s best ideas to be implemented?

Consider starting with a free online social network builder such as Ning.

• How could you collaborate with complementary organizations to share expertise (content, creation of social media tools, co-sponsor events or services, co-create something, etc. – or set up online support for your “customers” to collaborate)?

When a Seattle couple, self-described indie professionals, couldn’t find the kind of low-key business get-togethers they enjoyed, they decided to host some. 50 events later they’d founded an online community. Members can volunteer to host the kind of comfy, relevant face-to-face gatherings and seminars in which they most wanted to participate.

It’s now called Biznik. In the delicate, ongoing art of managing a lively, sometimes out-spoken community, they walk the tightrope in hewing to their decidedly non-corporate motto, “Business Networking That Doesn’t Suck”. Indies can join, meet and talk with each other online for free or choose from a two-tier, monthly membership level to host or attend gatherings (some like to meet while walking their dogs, others over after-dinner drinks) and to get more deeply involved online.

The more you contribute (writing articles, responding to queries, offering podcasts, teaching a seminar, etc.) the more visibility you earn on the site.Most gatherings are small (20 people or so) and the founders like that because participants are getting better acquainted and able to discuss ways to help each other.

As evident in our interviews with Anita Campbell, Diane Danielson, Dan and his wife, Lara Eve Feltin, are experimenting as they go with their business model. They, too, are trying out ways to attract and keep locally-based, mutually-reinforcing, close-knit, niche-serving and profitable communities where members meet online and off, sell to and serve each other and get special offers from the companies that pay for access to the niche.

In this podcast interview, learn from Dan McComb the “go slow to go fast” methods that are attracting active, paying, active members.

Become a top-of-mind expert in your market by following small business trends guru, Anita Campbell’s successful formula for success. Yes, she’s worked hard to reach the place where others seek to emulate her. A key was her approach to getting “custom sponsorships. She also has a plan in mind that helped her set priorities, each day and over time. Designing my life, my day, my choice of what to do next is often difficult. Too often I avoid doing “first things first” so Anita’s approach has helped me.

Here’s a bare bones summary of her business model.

1. Choose a niche, then

2. Multiply the ways you involve others in helping your kind of “customers,” then

3. Host profitable places where they – and other experts – can share ideas and resources. One example: Anita recruits volunteer moderators who benefit from having links to their site from her busy forum. She’s discovered that, “There was more power in hearing from multiple voices.” Suggest Anita, “One of the paths to creating a vibrant community and in the process increasing your own visibility, is to highlight others and their knowledge. That’s been the secret behind my radio show. And it’s increasingly the direction in my main site, smallbiztrends.com.”

Here are four more tips from Anita:

1. What’s a formula for collaborating with others online?“

Several models for multi-author blogs and sites on the Internet today: anyone/anything goes; hand-selected choices; and a few options in between.”

2. How can you benefit from the “power of us” in hosting podcasts?

“The obvious model is to interview others. The trick is having a format and sticking with it. And letting the guests talk. But keeping it informational, not advertorial.”

3. Is having guest authors on your blog really “collaboration”?

“Yes. Think of the product of the collaboration as an “online community.” It’s not the same as having an article submission site such as EzineArticles.com. On Small Business Trends, it’s about welcoming others as conversation leaders. It’s as if we are creating a central place where the reader knows he or she can go to find solid information, from real-life entrepreneurs and those who deal daily with entrepreneurs. We’re all stronger (as “we” than “me.”)

4. Has a group collaboration led to more opportunities?“

Absolutely! It’s more opportunities for all. More for guest contributors, because it gives them more of a platform for their ideas than many can get on their own. Quite a number have gotten clients, big media interviews, traffic to their websites and other visibility as a result of being a leading voice in the “Small Business Trends community.” More for me as the editor, too, because it makes the site a go-to source of reliable information.

To get concrete ideas about how to become sought-after, make money – and enjoy your work with others along the way, listen to the interview with this modest, generous trendsetter.