Empire Avenue is a social stock market game that yields real business benefits. People (and businesses) buy and sell “stock” in other people and businesses, and those stocks pay dividends based on the social media activity of the person or business. It’s great for several reasons: first of all, it encourages people to be really, truly active and engaged in their other social media channels, not just in the game. As a result, the people who play it become more influential in social media.

Of course, there’s the benefit of social interaction with the other players, but the real payoff comes in missions, in which you can use the in-game currency (“Eaves”) as a reward for social actions — likes, tweets, comments, YouTube views, and so on. It does require some initial investment, but there’s a model of significantly increasing returns. Social media moguls like Chris Pirillo, Kim Garst and Chris Voss are using it to boost their social activity. It’s also become popular with several network marketing leaders, including Art Jonak, Randy Gage, Eric Worre and Orrin Woodward, just to name a few. I’ve been using Empire Avenue for both myself and my clients for about a year-and-a-half, and it’s one of my best, if not particularly well-kept, secrets.

I’m always looking for ways to optimize my Empire Avenue strategy, and this week I had a major breakthrough, based entirely on a shift in buying strategy. My investing strategy that I’ve worked out is to invest in a mix of stocks based on 3 main criteria:

1. High-yield
2. Promising newcomers (because you can buy them cheap)
3. Buying back stocks of those who have invested in me (encourages them to hold your stock)

This week, I tried something different:  I invested in stocks I didn’t previously own, and that hadn’t invested in me, based primarily on two factors only:  their average shares held and that they’ve been recently active on Empire Avenue.

The results?

My account:

Client 1:

Client 2:

To be clear — this was based on my normal daily buying volume, not a big spend saved up over several days. I also didn’t ask for them to reciprocate — they just did automatically.

You’ll notice that in the last one, the impact isn’t as dramatic — as you can see, though, it also had a significantly higher growth trajectory already.

If you want to give it a try, I use insideEAv for my portfolio management. Once you’re registered, you can use this query as a start. You should just need to set how much you want to invest and run the buy. If you try it, let me know your results.

P.S. – I’m not going to completely drop my other buying strategies, because they all serve their purpose, but I will be allocating a lot more of my funds to this strategy.

One of the biggest challenges as you expand your online influence is how to manage your attention. If you follow people back on Twitter, for example, pretty soon you’re trying to drink from a firehose.

ifttt to the rescue!

In this post I show how to auto-curate Twitter lists of a) people who engage with you publicly via @ messages or retweets, and b) people who participate in a particular hashtag chat.

It’s a great way to help focus your attention and support on like-minded people who are willing to support and interact with you.

A few weeks ago, I did a post about Wikipedia’s fundraising ads, entitled Jimmy Wales, Serial Killer?, which got retweeted by a few people. Well, thanks to that, Klout decided that “Wales” and “Serial Killer” were topics I was influential about (sorry, didn’t get a “before” snapshot). Now, they weren’t among my top 3, which were “Social Media”, “Internet Marketing” and “SEO”, but it was in my top 15.

I decided to have a little fun with it, so I posted on Twitter and Facebook, and sent out a shareholder mail on Empire Avenue, asking people to give me +K in “Wales” and “Serial Killer”. Within 5 minutes:

Awesome!

I think, though, I may have overdone it, because within an hour:

LOL! Oh well… makes for a great blog post. I wonder what kind of perks that’ll trigger for them to send me?

Feel free to +K me in Social Media and help me get back to normal. Or not.