I don’t think many entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the true power of leverage as much as they should be. You can leverage attention, technology, the influencers in your niche, existing communities, other people’s knowledge, affiliates, customer data, by taking advantage of what they’ve already accomplished (a large following, loyalty)

Leverage Attention

People used to read newspapers. Then they watched a lot of TV. Then they went online and searched. Now they spend hours on social networking sites. That’s where you need to be because that’s where your customers are.

Leverage the Technology

There’s an incredible amount of technology that you can use to help get exposure for your business. Facebook fan pages (to build a community and interact), Wordpress blogs/websites (to create websites, receive comments on your blog posts), Twitter (to post links to useful content, engage with your customers), Ustream.tv (to do live video streaming), YouTube (to post videos educating your customers), etc. There’s never been a better time to build your brand and get awareness of your company.

Leverage the Influencers

Other bloggers have spent years building a large and loyal following. Can you leverage that following and also provide value to the other blogger? For example, offer the blogger a commission on sales of your product if he interviews you via audio/video and records it, or sends emails to his followers, tweets about it, etc. I see this all the time on teleseminars and blogtalkradio.

Leverage Existing Communities

There are many forums, Facebook fan pages, groups, Linked In groups, and so on where your customers are hanging out. Other people have built these groups and managed to get a large following of engaged people talking about your niche. Go there and be helpful to these people.

Leverage Affiliates/Joint Ventures

There are many affiliates who sell other people’s products online. They’ve learned how to sell, how to create landing pages, how to create Google ads, how to build an email list and so on. Why not leverage those affiliates for your own products/services? You could post your product on Clickbank or create your own affiliate program. Partner with someone who can do more marketing or create the content split the work and the profits/risk.

Leverage Customer Data

You can leverage the information that sites like Facebook and Google have acquired over the years. And yes you can still benefit from advertising. Some of the newer technologies can target what people are searching for (Google Adwords) or Facebook ads can target people with specific interests, ages, geographical locations and so. You can also see what people are buying by checking top selling Amazon, Ebay products.

Leverage is about taking advantage of existing communities, influencers and technology to make faster progress than you can by yourself.

If you can think of other categories not mentioned above please post them in the comments.