Sloane Berrent has a job most people would kill for. She helps design her company’s future. She throws the hot parties. And she even gets to do good by helping her company support causes.

You don’t get jobs like this by reading the help wanted section. Sloane became Director of Business Development at Causecast.org by networking. I asked her to teach us how she did it. Here are a few of her tips.

Try new events - If you want to meet new people, you have to try doing new things. She’s not someone that most people would consider a “geek” but she tried tech events and ended up meeting her future boss at one.

Set an intention - On her way to an event, instead of listening to the radio or talking on the phone, she spends some quiet time setting an intention for the event. It helps her become more aware of opportunities at the event.

Keep a free hand - Events aren’t about the food & drink. If you have food in one hand and a drink in the other, you won’t be able to shake hands with new people.

Find focal points - I love this idea. Sloane told me that when she gets to an event, she looks for focal points like the bar. She then slowly makes her way from one point to the other. That helps her circulate throughout the event and keeps her from standing in one place or being in one conversation for too long.

Get personal - You build connections with people by finding commonality, not by pushing a business agenda. (Tim Ferriss said the same thing in this interview.) So even at business events, Sloane talks about her personal interests.

Invite people - An easy way to stay in touch with people is to invite them to events. Sloane told me that when she first met Ryan, she invited him to a Heal the Bay event. He couldn’t make it to the event, but he made a her a job offer soon after the invitation.

More - This is only a partial list of what we talked about. Listen to the interview for more.

Do you have any networking tips? Tell me in the comments or by email.

“Right click” here to download Sloane’s interview

Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be great and achieve great things. When I interviewed him, John King told me that’s not enough. He’s the co-author of Tribal Leadership, a book that says we have 5 stages of development–and “I’m great” is only stage 3.

Tribal Leadership’s 5 stages:

Stage 1: Life Sucks - In this stage, a person thinks life itself is terrible and nothing can be done about it.

Example: People in in prison

Stage 2: My Life Sucks - In this stage, an employee knows that life can be better, feels frustrated because he can’t get the better life–usually because of a stage 3 boss.

Example: Dilbert.

Stage 3: I’m Great - At this stage, the person feels that he achieved excellence–but also thinks that everyone else is less than great. Stage 3 bosses end up having stage 2 employees.

Example: Donald Trump

Stage 4: We’re Great - People at this stage work together within an organization and put the good of the whole above the individual. They work together against a common outside foe.

Example: Steve Jobs

Stage 5: Life is Great - At this stage, there is no outside foe. Everyone works together for the improvement of mankind.

Example: The Wikipedia project

(You can also download the full audio book of Tribal Leadership from Zappos.)

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I didn’t get what I was looking for from this interview, but I think what I learned is even better.

I called up Kevin Fischer and Ed Weissman because they’re two of the top users of a site that was sending Mixergy a lot of traffic, and I wanted to learn how to get more. The site is Y Combinator’s social news site, Hacker News.

As I talked to them, I felt that they loved Hacker News so much that asking them how I can get traffic from the site would feel dirty. So I switch direction. I asked them questions to learn how you & I can build such passionate communities in our businesses. Here’s what I learned.

Being different

The Hacker News community is a bit different. For example, even though just about every other online community encourages user profile pictures, Hacker News doesn’t allow them. Ed & Kevin didn’t even want their pictures in this post. Paul Graham, Y Combinators’ founder, explains why there are no pictures: “I think it’s better if people make their own portraits with their ideas.”

It seems that communities need to go against convention as a way of attracting members. Seth Godin said it was a key element of communities in his Tribes presentation.

Working alone/together

As more people work independently, talking with peers online seems to be a bigger need. Ed told me something that I’m increasingly hearing from others, “I literally sit from 12-16 hours a day 5-7 a week programming in a cubicle alone…. These people are my peers, so it’s almost like a virtual water cooler.”

Meeting in person

Even though most of their conversations happen online, Ed, Kevin and other Hacker News members have met in person at a Y Combinator event. It seems that in-person meetings help built tighter connections for online communities.

Sanjay Sabnani, who runs some of the biggest online forums, told me that he often brings his online members together for in person events at his house.

Getting Bribes Rewards

Online community organizers talk about their communities as if they were hippie communes where members participate because they only care about a greater good. But in the interviews that I’ve done, I’ve noticed that there’s a good deal of quid pro quo.

At Hacker News, the top members are invited to Y Combinator’s Startup School. AJ Vaynerchuk said he gives people who join the PleaseDress.Me community free tshirts. Ethan Bauley of M90 said that his agency encourages clients to give active members products. And at the Mixergy Viral Forum, Jason Nazar of docstoc did an experiment to show us how giving away a document can grow a Twitter community.

I’m not criticizing any of these tactics. I think we need to understand how communities are really built so we can grow ours intelligently.

Do you have any other ideas for how to grow online communities? Add your ideas in the comments or email them to me.

(And check out Hacker News. I’ve become a huge fan.)

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Mixergy celebrated the growth of Magento last night–their ecommerce platform has been downloaded over 500,000 times. I think these guys are going to do for ecommerce what Wordpress did for blogging.

If you don’t know about them, go see how they’re helping web sites sell.

And if you didn’t make it to this event, here are some pictures to show you what you missed.

What would you do if you built a tremendously successful internet company and sold it?

I interviewed Ryan Scott to find out what he did after he sold Netcreations, the email list management company that he co-founded. (Curious about how Netcreations was built? Listen to this this interview.)

Ryan is now an angel investor and the CEO of Causecast, an interactive community for people and brands that want to leave a positive impact on the world. Here’s some of what I learned about his post-sale journey:

“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”

Isn’t this the part most people dream of: throwing great parties, buying fun toys, hobnobbing with celebrities? Ryan got to enjoy it all. There was a part of him that did that to overcome some lingering insecurities from when he was a nerdy kid.

Eventually, he says, the “Rich and Famous” lifestyle wasn’t for him because most of the people it attracted were either after something or just wanted to be around that environment.

Igniting the entrepreneurial need

After being disenchanted with the easy life, Ryan refocused on what got him started: the need to build something. I think there are two kinds of entrepreneurs: The “wannabes,” who try to build companies so they never have to work again. And the “real” entrepreneurs, who build companies even when they don’t have to work.

If you download my interview with Ryan to learn how to build your own success, notice how many times he repeats that he wants to build something that lasts.

Angel investing

He also started investing in companies like Tesla Motors, Mahalo, and Intent.com.

I asked Ryan how he made his investment decisions. He said he looked for ideas that have legs and can leave an impact on the world.

H also said that he considers the personality and reputation of the entrepreneur behind the company. Will s/he crumble in a crisis? Do people think s/he is a jerk? Is s/he someone Ryan would want to work with? (Peter Pham has more on that.)

The power of celebrities

The “aha moment” that led Ryan to create his newest startup, Causecast, came when he realized that celebrities are powerful attention magnets. They make it easier to draw traffic to a web site. I always forget about the power of celebrities because I’m much more interested in business stars than movie stars, but the rest of the world doesn’t think that way. Ryan realized that there was an opportunity to work with celebrities to pull together a big community that supports causes.

(Thank you Sloane Berrent for putting this interview together.)

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Chiropractor Michael Dorausch is growing his site’s traffic today, election day, by using one of the techniques he told us about when I interviewed him a few months ago, so I’m reposting the interview.

Basically, Michael anticipated that one of the hot search terms on election day would be “what time do the polls close.” So he created this page on his site, listing the opening and closing times for polls across the country.

As he expected, that phrase became a hot search on Google. (Here’s a graph.) That’s why his page kept showing up in people’s search results. (Here’s a screenshot that I took earlier today on Google.)

This is just one technique that Michael taught us in his interview. Download it to hear many others.

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When Bob Dunlap of ClickBank told me that one of his clients made $500,000 last year selling an ebook about how to attract humming birds to your home, I had to interview him.

ClickBank helps you sell digital media (ebooks, audio, etc) online. I asked Bob to teach us how we can earn money by selling online. Here’s some of what I learned. (Download the full interview for much more.)

Go one niche deeper

Many of the people I interviewed on Mixergy have told you to find a niche–target bird-lovers, for example. Bob says go one niche deeper–target humminbird-lovers. ClickBank has found that getting more precisely will help you increase sales. So, instead of selling products that help your customers get fit, for example, show them how to get tighter abs.

Target the news

When gas prices rose, ebooks about how to get better fuel efficiency were hot sellers. When the dollar lost value, digital media on foreign exchange strategies made money. If you want to sell online, bob suggests trying the digital media that you sell to what’s going on in the news. (As Sean Percival explained in his interview, that also helps increase traffic.)

Recycle your content

After looking at Mixergy.com, Bob thought a good product for me to sell might be a compilation of my past interviews. Repackaging your content can be an easy way to start bringing in revenue. Matt Mickiewicz of SitePoint told me that’s how his company starting making money.

Court affiliates

Your site has a limited audience, so your direct revenue is pretty limited too. But if you tap affiliates–people who sell your product and earn a commission on what they sell–you can reach unlimited revenue. Rosalind Resnick told me in her interview that affiliate relationships helped her grow from a small home business to a successful, publicly-traded company.

Do you know others tips for selling digital media online? Add them to the comments.

Right click here to download the interview.

Exclusively for Mixergy.com, Christel Hyden shot video of Seth Godin’s live presentation of the ideas in his new book, Tribes.

You can watch the video on Mixergy, or download the audio of it (below) and listen on your iPod/iPhone/etc.

Since, Godin gives a top-level understanding of how to build your community, a good followup to this presentation is my inteview with Max Alexander about the tactics of creating groups.

For more pictures, join our Facebook page.

We recently did the very first Mixergy Lunch 2.0 in Orange County, CA. Thank you WunderMarx|PR for hosting and bringing the internet community to your office.

If you want to be invited to future Mixergy events, get on our invitation request list.

Within minutes of posting on twitter that Mixergy.com kept crashing, about a dozen people suggested that I drop my current Web hosting company and switch to (MT) Media Temple. Wouldn’t you love to have people champion your brand like that?

To learn how (MT) did it, I interviewed Jason McVearry, the company’s partnership director. Here’s some of what I found out.

The subtle influence

(MT) hosts web sites that internet companies consider authorities. If you look at sites like TechCrunch and Mashable, you’ll see the (MT) logo. In his book Influence, Robert Cialdini said that authority is one of the most powerful persuasion tools because it’s so subtle. Without feeling like they’re being sold, people instinctively follow authority.

In person

I kind of pushed Jason about this point. I wanted to understand why a tech company would spend so much money to fly its people to events. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use online ads to acquire customers? He helped me realize that the reason people bond with (MT) is because they’ve seen them at conferences or had a beer with them at an event.

Sponsor

I saw the (MT) guys at the TechSet party at BlogWorld. Their logo was up on the wall and they were being ushered around like rock stars. Sponsoring events has its privilages.

Bring the brains

Most companies seem to send their sales people to conferences. These are the guys who know how to buy you a beer and smile, but they don’t know squat about the product. Jason told me that his company sends passionate tech people out to events. If you have an issue with your site, they’ll give you some live tech support over a beer.

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