There is a big chunk of people that are interested in talking about “personal brands” and how you can market yourself as a professional in almost any field to connect with possible customers and your current customers. Personal branding is sort of like when the local car dealer shows up on TV and screams at you while wearing a funny hat and ridding an elephant and when you go to their car lots, you get to see the same yelling, screaming guy sell cars with the funny hat. Not necessarily good, but it creates a “personal brand”.

In the more serious side, personal brands are about creating an identity by which people can recognize you. The most important part of it is to take your original self, think hardly on what makes you unique and accentuate what people say they like about you. If people think you are honest and smart, use it wisely. If people think you are funny and charismatic, that’s your key. Or you may focus in one particular element of your personality, some little quirk that makes you memorable, you can laugh at yourself, be dead serious or just plain weird. The most important part of this is that you are able to project the exact same concept to everyone who meets you, anywhere you showcase yourself, like blogs, websites, social sites’ profiles, business cards and even TV ads. There a zillion tips you can find about personal branding that may or may not help, what matters the most is that when you want to make yourself a brand, you have to know who and what you represent and project it always. This also works for job hunting.

Another way of personal brand is what some major companies are doing now. Their brands are becoming “personal”. First in mind, HP… their new mantra is “the computer is personal… again” and they are going to great lengths to improve their customer care service, as a business, you can even get a personal case manager to help you on whatever needs you have from the first purchase. They are hardly alone, we are very familiar with Steve Jobs, who represents Apple and their toys. We know Mat Cutts who is one of Google’s big faces.

The concept is not new. Traditional advertisement has know for the longest time that if you have a person who represents your brand is a great way to connect with people. It is even better than having a slogan or a logo, that person becomes the brand. The big downside to that is that the person may not always be there. Companies tend to chew and spit employees, and on the other side, employees tend to go to better opportunities.* So, how can you create a “presonal brand” experience?

Social Media gives you the best tools out there for this effect. Using twitter to listen to your clients, having excellent use of email for customer service and promotion, using blogs from employees and the company to promote beliefs, products and services, have a facebook page to let people know of promotions and new products, using LinkedIn for people to connect and know the big guys of the company and even the small guys. Learning to listen as a general rule of thumb works just well.

Internet pushes harder than other marketing media to this point. With TV you mainly show and talk. With Radio you talk. With newspaper you write (which is like talking). With the internet, you HAVE to listen. If you try to use the web to push all your stuff, you will hardly be successful. People don’t come to the web to get hassled by ads. We come to  find information, stay in touch and do business.

To create personal brands, companies only need to learn to listen. Chris Brogan, an excellent blogger and social media expert, says that you have to listen and make it more about others than you to actually shine through. Listen to what your customers say, good or bad, learn from it, show that you are listening and do something about it.

So, some examples of how to listen:

In twitter: Use tools that allow you to tack mentions of your brands and products as well as subject your company is interested in.
In Facebook: Have your page and when people join, invite them to provide feedback, ask them questions, offer discounts or prizes for feedback.
In your website: Promote feedback. Give prizes or enter people into a raffle if they provide feedback or comments. Ask for opinions, have polls on your website.
In general: Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. Take the good and the bad, remove the spam and learn from it. You’ll be a better company for it.

Finally, ’cause I’m a great believer in feedback. Let me know how I’m doing, good or bad and I promise to improve as best as I can.

*I do believe that the more you empower people in your organization and make them feel important, that what they do counts, people will tend to have higher loyalty to your company. By giving them a chance to take ownership of the brand, you give them a chance to be something, to do better and to have a bigger impact, you give people a chance to be someone and part of something they can  believe in. In this idea, giving people a voice to represent your company is not that crazy. They will represent it anyway, whether you like it or not.

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Just as promised, here is part 2 of the 42 strategies to successfully optimize your website. If you had a handful on the previous one, this is the rest of your homework

20. Don’t worry too much about PageRank. PR is good when you have it, but it is not that important when ranking in Google, or Bing or Yahoo. What matters always the most is relevance of your content.

21. Print your website in your business cards, flyers, radio/TV ads, newspaper ads, brochures and everywhere you can think of.

22. Give something for free. Free is always good. People tell other people about free stuff. People normally go online for free stuff.

23. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It’s free, relevant and localized when using your keywords.

24. Do NOT EVER, EVER use frames.

25. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It takes time, but it’s worth it.

26. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, et al.

Image via Wikipedia

27. Comment on Flickr photos. Also, create your Flickr account and upload images and photos of your business and products. Use keywords related to those products to mark and tag them. It works best if you have an idea that actually is worth looking at, rather than just creating random pictures and uploading them with keywords.

28. On your Contact Page ask people if they would accept receiving your newsletter.

29. Send out a newsletter. A well thought, well planned, well designed email newsletter. Don’t become SPAM and learn the laws of email marketing to avoid any issues. And please, use a real email marketing service to track and measure your campaign and deliver your emails as opposed to using Outlook or other email clients.

30. Go to seminars for Website owners. You will learn a lot. If you find a free seminar, even better!

31. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment, with a link back to your site of course. Ensure the comment is really adequate to the article. Submitting random comments of “great article!”, “Just wanted to say hi” and such, in most blogs, will hardly get your comment published as these are usually caught as spam.

32. YouTube, Google Video, Viddler and other video sharing sites as well, are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign. You will not always get viral, but if you optimize the video properly, it will rank high in Search Engines and bring lots of traffic of interested prospects to your site.

33. Create a Yahoo Group in the niche where your business and products sit. Remember to manage and update it.

34. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add “As Seen on TV” to your site. Also consider getting seals of quality, recognition or at least the BBB to create trust in your company.

35. Avoid proprietary technologies like Java, Flash and Active X.

36. Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.

37. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it’s not manufacturer specific – eg. mp3 as opposed to wma or avi versus wmv.

38. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.

39. Utilize user friendly page names and URLs – most tools come with some way to fix this.

40. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a “Skip Intro” link. Preferably keep Flash to a minimum, as in most cases is unnecessary and people get annoyed.

41. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desperate for stories.

42. By maintaining a very useful blog and other related activities, become a leading authority on your chosen subject.

Hope this SEO strategies help you obtain success online.

Good luck!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

To my dear readers, sorry about being out for a while. Really, I’m sorry.

We had tons of news over this time. Tiger Woods became a prime time mess, a marketing disaster of major proportions and a big comics’ tool. There was a so called bombing attempt on Xmas in the US and flying has become every travelers’ biggest nightmare. Oprah is retiring… in a couple of years and to her own channel (is it really retiring?). The Sci Fi channel became Sy-Fy and even though everyone blasted their marketing department for that, the Sy-Fy channel has reported and claimed success… interesting stuff.

In the online marketing world we’ve had even more news than that. Google applied for a license to buy and sell energy, launched the first “superphone” the Google Nexus One, changed the URL display guidelines and got some feathers ruffled with some over the moon charges for canceling the Nexus One contract with T-Mobile. China has become an international mess with Google and things keep getting worse (now after Google apparently got hacked by Chinese hackers). Bing still lags in functionality and even Chris Brogan has begun a quest to try Bing or die in 30 days.

I have tried Bing, I still give it a chance every now and then, but frankly, even though it has some nice features, the results (the main reason for a search engine to exist) are at best, buggy. Most of Bing’s results are either obvious or completely off the mark. Chris Brogan, a well known blogger, social media expert and internet marketer found out that when typing his name in the search, Chris Brown (you know who) showed up. THAT is buggy as a simple comparison of word by word should give the crawler the obvious results, everything related to the people with the same name. The same test with my name yields equally disappointing results. Now, getting indexed by Bing (regular business sites or any kind of site) is quite the adventure. There is an extremely long and useless thread in Bing about this particular issue.

Anywho, getting back to the original subject, there have been many news and many changes. I kept myself off the predictions bus but here are my two cents:

• The world will continue the great migration online
• Cellphones (smartphones, superphones) will be much more important
• Big growth in mobile marketing or mobile-friendly marketing
• The world economies will continue to be a mess, but will probably get better
• Bing will continue to struggle until everybody realizes its just Live with a different name and more images
• Google will continue its path towards world domination
• China and Google will continue on bad terms
• Brasil will be a dominant team in the world cup (if they don’t win it again)
• Canada will be big on the Winter Olympics (specially the hockey teams)
• Yahoo will continue in its nice quiet little place… or maybe not?

That is as far as my crystal ball (or Liquid Crystal Display screen) allows me to see. There is something very certain about it, that no matter what, I’ll continue to write about it all and probably, hopefully, just maybe, someone will care and eventually read my stuff and find it at least entertaining.

On a side note, Search Engine Optimization is going to get much more complicated with all the changes Google and Bing are implementing. The content will continue to be king and writers will continue to prosper in this online jungle, or as I like to call it, this Online Wild West. Has anyone checked out the Tweets on Google searches? Pretty cool right?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

This is part two of the little odyssey that could from some time back.

So, to whoever was or may be interested, the person removed the article after some heckling and nagging. Didn’t respond to any message or email, but simply removed the offending article, which was good, right? Unfortunately, other blogs have shown up. Nice! Now, the question is, is it worth it to chase all this copying? Guess not.

From now on, let people copy my stuff, at least it means my words are worth copying (even if it is just to do content stuffing!).

Have you noticed those “blogs” that only have copies of many posts from many websites for the sole purpose of creating an insurmountable amount of articles in their sites? Apparently, it helps their SEO efforts as having so many articles over a particular subject makes their blogs an “authority”. Now, if this were true, we should see a bunch of them on the first pages of Google, or at least their business sites (which is what they are really trying to promote).

Another strategy out there, is creating as many posts and articles as possible about 1 single subject but with as little meat as possible, mainly full of the same concept just “rolled over” and with some minor word changing (using synonyms and other tricks). These “blogs” do seem to work well, of course, the blog itself is pretty much garbage, but at least some results can be seen. Is this considered White Hat or Black Hat SEO? I can’t decide myself. I would call them black just because they are not really doing something honest (which is provide information to the public), but then again, they could be white just because they are creating so called original content every time (at least not copying it from others) and creating an enourmous database of the same stuff. What do you, my 3 or 4 readers think?

Ma Cualli Ohtli

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

As soon as Bing came out and announced it, Google was not far behind. We last heard that Google was in the talks with Twitter and they have apparently closed the deal.

Currently, if you do any google search, you will find that for some results Twitter twits are already showing in the SERPs. More will be coming soon. Real time results is what the buzz is all about these days. Exposure will become much more sensitive and businesses need to keep learning as fast as the market evolves. Speaking of which, Google Wave is coming too and that has some people talking about revolutionizing the way we email and do internet in many ways (and a healthy dose of detractors, of course).

Getting back to Twitter in Google, this was mentioned in Google’s blog yesterday. See the blog post here: Google Blog.

Bing has been showing some improvements recently in regards to market share and seems to still be working out a deal with Yahoo. The marketshare war is still very hot, in spite of what most of us believed. Bing keeps kicking back, will this be it for Microsoft? Is this Microsoft’s retaliation for Google’s intrusion into the OS markets with Android and Chrome OS?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

The search engine battle is still pretty much at a standstill. Google, as everyone knows, is still number one. Yahoo is still trailing in second and Bing… well, let’s just say its not aLive.

Since Microsoft’s big launch of Bing, many people gave it a chance, but, as many frustrated users and webmasters can testify, it still has a lot of bugs to fix. For sure it gives good results for very important and known information, but beyond that, it has serious crawling issues as it is not indexing sites properly (or as far as most webmasters can tell by following Bing’s own instructions).

The so called “decision engine” has a lot of decisions to make if it wants to get some notice in the search engine game.

Here the graphs:

Is it me, or there is a slight breeze coming from the gap between Bing and the other search engines?

This was the scene before Live.com became Bing.com... this is when MS execs began banging their heads against the wall.

Things are still all good and well with Google, so much that Matt Cutts (if you don’t know this guy, check out his blog for details) released an article inviting ONLY Yahoo search engineers to work at Google. As you read the article, notice the lack of invitation for Bing engineers.The article is here.

Do let me know what you think here below at the comments or email me. If you have any question, subject suggestion or else, comment or email.
Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.