Imagine you and each of your friends, colleagues, and customers holding buckets of water, each of different sizes.

Every interaction you make with various people generates deposits into your bucket. In the “word-of-mouth” model, social proof doesn't deplete authority (water) from the giver. However, it multiplies authority for everyone.

The adage, “you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with,” plays a big role here. If you're seen as part of a given crowd, people naturally assume you're “birds of a feather.” You build off of their authority just as they build off of yours and everyone benefits.

Your blog is the hub, and the various other sites and social properties are your spokes. This is your “plumbing.”

We're going to use mentions from influential people as stepping stones to get more. Even a retweet from someone of medium influence counts since we can amplify that later (yes, we can spend a Dollar a Day to promote someone else's tweet).

So, if you're quoted in the local paper, let's use that to get into a medium-sized publication. If you speak at one conference, we'll use our checklist steps to speak at more conferences, get more interviews, and so forth.

You're not likely to go from having a personal blog directly to being a keynote speaker, but it's quite easy to move sequentially from one step to the next one.

Consider the “plumbing” analogy, where water = influence = traffic = money.

The field we're in is about driving more volume via more complex sequences, where word-of-mouth marketing = public relations = social media marketing =
content marketing = SEO.

Thus, we refer to our technique as getting more out of what's working in other channels, which we refer to as amplification = increasing yield = conversion optimization = remarketing.

These four points summarize our HOW. This is deeper than cross-channel marketing (crossing from one channel to another), multi-channel marketing (parallel, but separate), or omnichannel marketing (integrated GCT- Goals, Content, Targeting).