An effort to optimize and promote those assets to search engine bots can be even more challenging than standard SEO. And yet it can also be far more rewarding. The notion of Digital Asset Optimization came out of TopRank’s efforts in early in 2007 to describe for internet marketing clients what new opportunities there were to enable prospects and customers to pull themselves via search to company content.

The fundamental premise for good SEO or DAO or whatever you want to call optimizing content is that: If it can be searched on, it can be optimzed. “Searchability” implies a digital asset is crawled by a search engine bot or spider and subsequently available for sorting within search results when consumers perform queries. As such, each type of searchable content presents an opportunity for optimization and improved visibility where people are looking.

The idea of organizing a company’s content or digital assets as a more holistic way of engaging in SEO has been around for more than a year.  More signifcant benefits of DAO can be extended beyond content used to attract leads and sales. There are other types of consumer search that can drive or benefit business including customer service related content, job listings and news content. Each has it’s own audience to consider and therefore, a different context for optimizing assets.

If a SEO team ensured that jobs, customer service and news content and digital assets were properly optimized/promoted on top of content selling products/services, couldn’t that nearly triple the benefits of the SEO investment? If not triple, it would certainly be a multiple near that.

For example, journalists searching for subject matter experts or researching past media coverage of a subject company are not looking to “buy” products and services. Yet that is the type of content creation and optimization most companies engage in.

Optimizing a company’s news content and digital assets including press releases, video interviews, podcasts, high res photos, webcasts, white papers and past media coverage should consider the context in which the media (jouranlists, reporters and some bloggers) are searching. Optimizing multiple media formats provides multiple entry points into a company’s news content and therefore, a greater likelihood that a journalist will find and use a particular company in a story they’re doing. 

TopRank conducted a Journalist Use of Search Survey recently and found that 100% of reporters surveyed, use search to do their job. 91% use Google.com. They also use image search and social media search. We’ll be reporting survey results in another blog post within the next week or so.

Another example involves optimizing FAQ and knowledgebase content. How much could a company save if support could be handled by customers searching Google instead of making phone calls to customer support?  Call centers are not cheap - even when you outsource offshore.

Or what about jobs content? Especially with these economic times, there will be plenty of job seekers using search. Why not make sure job listings and corresponding digital assets are optimized and promoted so your best candidates can find them?

Making it easier for search engines to do find, index and sort content will bring benefits to most companies who make the effort to do so in the form of increased sales, recruiting, and news coverage as well as lower customer support costs. That is the real opportunity in 2009 for optimization efforts.

Comments

A pity, then, that social media traffic is so often worthless.

Worthless?

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren’t interested in commercial messages. If they were, then the bid values would closely match those of Google Adwords.

I think the latter is the most likely scenario. Social media traffic isn’t priced higher, because it isn’t translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn’t happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.

Of course, social media traffic isn’t all bad. We’ll look at some ways you can benefit from it. But firstly, let’s compare and contrast some aspects of social media marketing and search marketing, in order to help clarify the value proposition.

1. Traffic Is Not An Asset, Traffic Is A Cost

Traffic only becomes an asset when it translates into something else. When it becomes a bookmark, a sign-up, a link, or helps establish a genuine relationship. It must also result in an increase in revenue. If it doesn’t, then traffic remains an expense.

What is the value of 10,000 Diggers hitting your site to look at, say, a picture of a monkey riding a bicycle? Zero. The trouble is that a lot of marketers are watching the web scorecard - that spike in the visitor stats that shows the number of visits - and using that as a marketing metric. “Hey, I’m popular!”.

Sure, with 10,000 teenagers amused by a picture of a monkey riding a bicycle. But how is that helping boost revenue?

There isn’t a lot of meaning to such a relationship. It is low value.

“This is a truth of the Internet: When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces. 75% of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds.Any site, anywhere, anytime. 75% bounce rate within three seconds. By unfocused, I mean people who visit via Digg or Stumbleupon or even a typical Google search…..”I’m just looking,” is no fun for most retailers. Yet they continue to pay high rent for high-traffic locations, and invest time and money in window displays. Very few retailers lament all the traffic that walks by the front door without ever walking in. A long time ago, they realized that the shoppers with focused intent are far more valuable. Smart retailers work hard to get focused people to walk in the door and to keep the riff raff walking on down the sidewalk.”.

2. Uncontrolled Message

It is difficult to control the message. Released into the wild of social networks, the message can just as easily result in negative effects as positive ones.

Check out this sad experience of being dugg, from Kim at Cre8Pc:

“Since I logged off last night around midnight, 12 hours later, over 23,000 people have been to this blog. The reason is that someone dugg about the post I wrote, where I shared a resource I found useful. That post was “dugg” and the incoming traffic this blog is receiving is to that specific blog post I wrote….Diggers complained about everything from the site design of the site I wrote about, to how stupid I was to write about it at all…..Which part of this Digg activity am I supposed to be happy about, now that something I wrote has officially been slaughtered there?”

Kim wasn’t trying to get on Digg as part of a marketing strategy, but it shows how unpredictable the “benefits” of social media exposure can be.

Perhaps this might explain why Digg has been left at the altar a few times? It suggests to me that it might be difficult to extract real commercial value from such environments. Part of the problem is structural. Digg is “free” and “open” and “anonymous”, which leads to a tragedy of the commons.

At the risk of blowing our own horn, part of the reason our SEO community is valuable is because people have to pay for it. People have provided a signal of interest lacking on most broad social networks. There are no questions from a member named MakeEasyMoneyOnlineTodayRightNow asking how to get his adsense earnings up to $1 a day. The price of admission helps protect the community from the tragedy of the commons.

3. Branding Is Often An Excuse For Failed Marketing Campaigns

“It’s a brand spend!”. Marketers say that a lot.

What they often mean is “we can find no no measurable return”.

Return on brand spend is very difficult to measure, and even more difficult to isolate in a channel such as online social media marketing. Did visitors remember our brand? Did it affect their future buying decisions? Was the brand association positive or negative?

Who knows?

If you’re thinking of engaging a social media marketer, and they use brand building as a metric, ask them to explain how they will demonstrate an increased, favorable level of brand awareness. If they mention traffic numbers, ask them how that squares with my first point “Traffic Is Not An Asset, It Is A Cost”.

To my mind, any commercial endeavor must ultimately come back to revenue.

4. Level Of Interaction

What are people doing on social networks?

On the likes of Facebook, they are engaged in social activities. They are catching up with their friends. They are playing games. Marketing messages in this context are about as welcome as an Amway salesperson at a bachelor party.

Consider the context of the message. Search marketing works well because the searcher has already signaled their intent, and that intent may well be commercial. It’s like walking into a shop, and asking to buy a watch. The relationship and interaction is direct and obvious. The context of social media is more like a cocktail party. People are there to socialize, not enter into commercial interactions. They may do so, but the relationship is fuzzy and indirect.

To overcome this obstacle, look for social networks, or network groups, where the users demonstrate clear, commercial intent. Alternatively, have a clear idea of how you’re going to progress “fuzzy indirect” visitors to desired action.

5. Time

Social media marketing is time consuming.

Building your social networks. Responding to “friends”. Is there are measurable return for the time spent? What is the opportunity cost of that time?

For example, compare the time you need to get a commercial message on the front page of Digg, with getting a commercial message on the front page of Google. With Adwords, I can do it in seconds.

With Digg, I’d be unlikely to get a marketing message to the top, unless I’d previously developed relationships with all the right people and/or gamed the system, which, in itself, takes a lot of time. Even then, the marketing message, unless heavily disguised, will likely be despised by a community rabidly opposed to any message with an obvious commercial imperative.

Is this time well spent on either channel? Once again, a cost/benefit analysis, where the benefits are clear and measurable, will provide the answer.

6. Rampant Stupidity & Useless Distractions

I guess no-one ever went broke underestimating human stupidity, but one really has to question the marketing value of these types of approaches:

“The Coca-Cola Company will feature its Sprite brand on a new Facebook Page and will invite users to add an application to their account called “Sprite Sips.” People will be able to create, configure and interact with an animated Sprite Sips character. For consumers in the United States, the experience can be enhanced by entering a PIN code found under the cap of every 20 oz. bottle of Sprite to unlock special features and accessories. The Sprite Sips character provides a means for interacting with friends on Facebook”

Facebook, which distinguished itself by being the anti-MySpace, is now determined to out-MySpace MySpace. It’s a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.

Are people going to then talk about Sprite in a way that would increase the sales of Sprite? Really?

I can barely imagine this would work for a teen audience. Such an approach has no chance with an adult audience. Keep in mind that most people who are heavily active on generalist social network sites are likely to fit in the 15-25 year old range, although there is evidence to suggest this age range might be changing. Look at it this way - how many stories about hip-replacements ever make it top the top of Reddit?

There are a lot of messages that just aren’t going to work on social media. Wrong time, wrong place.

“Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for each other to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.”

7. Difficult To Scale

It is easy to scale up a television campaign. Buy more airtime. It is easy to scale up an Adwords campaign. Increase the number of keyword terms and/or bids. How do you scale up a social media campaign? You can’t re-create viral. Viral is hit and miss. All word of mouth is hit and miss. How many people can you cost-effectively follow on Twitter?

Social media tends to pay dividends in the long-term. Social media, generally speaking, is hard to influence, but by understanding your field well and creating relationships in your niche, you can learn to create the types of content that influencers will pick up on. Like the mavens in The Tipping Point, they will spread your message for you.

Forging such meaningful relationships won’t happen overnight.

Where Social Media Pays Off

Ok, I admit it. This post has been a bit of a rant

It’s not all bad news.

Whilst not a replacement for a marketing strategy, social media can be a viable component of a wider marketing strategy. It can be used to generate buzz. It can be used to attract links. One well placed article can achieve both these ends. If that buzz, and those links, can then be translated into a valuable relationship, and perhaps better Google rankings for commercial keywords, then the social media approach may well pay dividends.

In order to do this, social media must be back-ended with content geared towards establishing a valuable relationship, rather than one-off visits.

Marketing exists for one purpose: to sell stuff. If it doesn’t do that, then it isn’t marketing.

The key to evaluating social media marketing, like with with all media spends, lies in tracking and cost/benefit analysis. If traffic provides you with a measurable return on investment, then the marketing spend is justified. The only traffic worth anything is that which ultimately results in revenue producing interaction.

The problem I find with social media traffic is that so little of it ever does.

Your mileage may vary.

Comments

• Derrick Wheeler

Speakers:

• Ted Ulle, Partner of The MEWS Group
• Robin Liss, Founder and President of Camcorderinfo.com
• Rupali Shah, Organic Search Manager of GroupM

The session was initiated by Ted Ulle who started off by cautioning companies to not follow the process of overloading their sites with irrelevant content. The primary thing to keep in mind is that the business process or workflow must support the SEO process. Your content team should be trained in SEO.

Using some examples he showcased how the final product must be in coherence with the business goal and the the training should be in accordance. The following are some points that you should ensure writing your content:

• Rough out your content at a conceptual level as per your strategy
• In case you are starting a new web site, you should be looking at the CMS, server, back-end, analytics, etc.
• The market strategy should precede the keyword research. Next, you should structure the information architecture (IA). This is extremely important since it ensures that your content gets found well.
• Then come your graphic designers and template building. The idea is to set your business goal and penetrate the process. Each process, team change and decision made should be documented.

There’s no point in chasing trophy keywords. You don’t want to just feature on top of SERPs for particular keywords but get clients. So keywords should be ones those that your target audience is searching for. Keep in mind whether you are following B2B or B2C system.

The relevance of IA is unquestionable. Your content should be held at the right place and not be featuring loosely all over your website. A bad layout can negate the effects of good content. Therefor, you should prevent the same by studying print typography.

The idea is to keep simple and seamless goals, as well as prevent individual from showing off. Individual programmers or content writers showing off can have a bad affect on the overall business. When a problem occurs, don’t be reluctant to fix it.

The session’s second speaker was Robin Liss who stressed on producing high value content. Robin Liss is regarded as one of the experts in the field of quality content and her network of review sites get about a million visitors every month.

Just as a car maker manufactures cars, you manufacture content, and it is just as important for you to ensure efficiency as it is in the former industry. Form your content pipeline that answers the following questions:

• Who takes responsibility for what?
• How much time is needed for a process?
• What steps are essential or absolutely unnecessary?
• What all can you outsource?
• What can you bring in house?

You should first create a draft for your content and then supplement it with multimedia. Before you make your content live, it should go for copy editing, SEO editing and then final editing.

As per your requirement and resources, your pipeline might just be a writer and an editor or even a 6 member team comprising of an editor-in-chief, an editor, a writer, a photographer, a product tester and a copy editor. Some good tools can save a lot of money for you, such as WSIWYG tools (FCK Editor) and Dreamweaver, MT. Other crucial factors can also improve your organization’s efficiency. Chose the right writer for the right task. You can also outsource jobs by finding online copy editors, whom you can pay per words. Remember, even the best writer needs an editor and every single thing should be edited.

Bottlenecks can harm your organization more than anything. It is important to have a consistent pattern to maximize your workflow. Reviews can substantially fasten the entire by spotting the bottlenecks. Her final tip was to ensure that you own rights in the contracts.

Rupali Shah was the third and final speaker of the session and she conveyed some vital information about mobile content. The advent of iPhones and Blackberries has changed things around substantially. It is important to present your enterprise on these devices. Statistics show how iPhones are taking the world by storm. For you this would mean that a presence on the device will give you millions of potential viewers. With technological barriers being solved every passing day, this market is expanding a lot. Have a look at your website on an iPhone or iPhone emulator and check if it looks good and its loading speed.

For Mobile SEO there are many unique criteria, such as valid XHTML code, W3C compliance, linking and site maps. Try to make your site more accessible by giving it an uncluttered look.

The following may help:

• Make the page size small.
• Serve a tailored content.
• Give a simple design that is rich in text.
• Use mobile style sheets in your website
• Use DIV tags instead of tables.
• Optimize your images with ALT tags.
• Image formats should be in GIFs and JPEGs.
• Ensure that your total page weight is not beyond 20kb.
• Limit your colors to 256.
• Limit the scripting in your website. A lot of devices cannot comprehend heavy scripting.
• Avoid too much scrolling options and ensure comfortable navigating options.

Comments

Install Offsite Backups. Losing critical files from your computer can seriously damage your business and your customers’ confidence – and can even lead to lawsuits. When things are busy again, backups may get a lower priority so automating it now is a great idea.

Set up Local Business Profiles. Yahoo and Google Local profiles are used for their regional search engines. If you want to be able to show up properly next to competition on maps and city-wide searches, setting up your profile is critical.

Reserve Social Media Profiles. Sites like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon offer ways to grow online authority. But if your profile has been taken by someone else, it can be a big hassle.

Monitor Your Industry. Free tools such as Google Alerts and RSS make it incredibly easy to listen to the community and competition at a glance. If your industry has bloggers (most do) subscribe to the best and skim them daily.

Set Up Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) Software. Customers love consistent service, but when things are busy, that can be a challenge. Web-based CRM tools are an affordable, simple way to organize requests, proposals, support calls and follow ups.

Create Reusable Templates For Customer Messages. If you send similar notes often, learn to use the template feature of most email programs. This lets you cut down the accumulation of time spent typing the same information again and again.

Update Your Website. Outdated corporate websites look unprofessional and often rate poorly in search engines. Check your site for correct content, broken links, and appearance on web browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Adding a FAQ can reduce service/support calls, and a map can help people find you without calling.

Check Your Media Licenses. Stock photo companies use sophisticated image scanning to seek out unlicensed images on the web, filing immediate infringement often over $5000 per image. Take the time to locate licenses for each image used, even if someone else did the website.

Start A Blog. These widely misunderstood publishing platform that forms the foundation for social media involvement. Unfortunately, they are frequently set up and used incorrectly – so now is a great time to do it right.



Get Involved in Social Media. Authentic and unselfish participation in discussions on social networks has a magical effect on reputation, especially keeping in mind that hundreds may review what you’ve posted. There’s no faster way to grow trust and authority in your market in front of people who matter.

Master Wide Area Access. I’ve been surprised how few businesses are able to connect while out with customers. Now’s a great time to master this.

Participate in Q&A Sites and Forums. Taking the time to answer a couple of questions a week in your industry can grow online authority and trust in a way that costs very little. Examples include LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo! Answers.

Install Website Analytics. It usually takes an hour to set up Google Analytics and start getting insights into a web site visitors’ behavior as well as which marketing mechanisms are working.

Set Up Remote Access. If you travel, having the ability to remotely access your office computers can save a meeting or hours of driving.

Read These New Media Books Groundswell by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, and Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae are examples that can transform thinking and get you ready for the future.

Get SPAM Under Control. A hosted solution such as spamstopshere can save a business thousands of dollars a year in lost productivity for just a few dollars per user per month, and takes just a few hours to set up.

Secure Laptops and Portable Drives. Lost or stolen laptops and “thumbdrives” represent a huge risk that can open your business to huge and even litigation. Securing these data for transport is relatively easy and affordable.

Shore Up Your Content Filtering. Studies show that 25-30% of work computers have illegal or inappropriate files such as pornographic images stored on them, exposing business to potentially disastrous litigation and embarrassment.

Update Your Wireless Network. These are huge productivity helpers but most are set up improperly or use old security standards. This can expose a business invasion by opportunistic hackers or simple bandwidth leeches.

Solicit Customer Ratings. Many regional search engines and city-wide websites have the ability for customers to rate your company. While you never want to “buy” ratings or rate yourself, asking your best customers to give their thoughts can give you a competitive advantage in those searches.

Comments

In the face of such economic times, many small businesses go into panic mode, and let the economists drive their business decisions. Big mistake!

To be honest, it is difficult to remain calm when everyone is shouting stories about economic disaster. But for most business owners - panicking is a recipe for failure.

The Secret is to Stay Committed, Remain Calm and Spend Smart.

This isn’t the first recession we’ve ever had. There’s been several before it. And more importantly, there have been thousands of businesses that have ridden through the recession storm and come through triumphant on the other side.

If you really want to succeed in an economic downturn, you need to stay focused on business growth, be smart about where you spend your money and keep a cool head.

Focus on Growth: Offense is the best Defence
Don’t start trying to tread water. If you continue to aim for growth, you’re more likely to achieve it.

By applying the brakes on your business goals, you increase the chances of coming up short. Yes, it might take a bit longer to reach your goals in the current market… but you’ll get there eventually.

Spend Smart: Marketing That Generates Results
So where is the best place to spend your marketing $

Leverage Existing Customers:
Are you making the most of your existing customers? The old saying “it’s cheaper to keep a customer than find a new one” is never more important than now.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a ’services’ business or a corner deli, there’s always ways to leverage more sales from your current customers both online and offline.

• Loyalty programs (buy 2 get one free, frequent shopper points etc)
• Encourage return business in transactional emails
• Cross promo in invoices/quotes/paperwork
• Encourage up sells at every opportunity (online and offline)
• Exploit the cheapness of email marketing to stay in touch and “front of mind”
• Referral programs

The Cost Effective Way to Acquire New Customers.
The key is “Pay for Performance” marketing. There’s no safer way to spend your marketing budget.

There’s a range of online “pay for performance” marketing options and here’s just a few of the main choices:

• affiliate programs (”pay per sale”, “pay per lead”, “pay per click”)
• PPC search engine advertising (”pay per click”)
• leads based programs (companies offering guaranteed sales opportunities)

FREE is Good
There’s plenty of free promotional opportunities. Now’s the time to step up your use of these ways to find new business.

• Networking and socializing - self promote at every chance
• Engage in local and industry groups
• Offer to present at relevant conferences/presentations
• Online discussions, forums and blogs
• Free directory listings
• and the list goes on…

Stay Calm: A Clear Mind Makes the Best Business Decisions
Running a business is stressful enough at the best of times, without the added pressure of recession propaganda.

You can’t ignore what’s happening, but remember, you also can’t change it. So focus on the things you can - “your business”.

Now all of the above is sometimes easier said than done. I understand that, we are a business in the same position as everyone else.

But stay focued, calm and prudent and you’ll surely be one of the businesses that people look back on and admire when the next recession hits

If you’ve got some great “results driven” marketing tips that you want to share with our fellow business owners… share them below.

Comments

Four bloggers have all agreed to post their answers to the email question simultaneously, each offering a different perspective, with all responses linked.  They are:

1. Ford Harding, student of selling professional services.
2. Tom Kane, specialist on marketing and selling legal services.
3. Mark Buckshon, prodigious blogger and specialist on marketing and selling design and construction services.
4. Yours Truly

I could make affirmative and negative arguments for email, phone calls and face-to-face meetings depending on the situation. But I think the answer to this question really revolves around the “maintaining and developing relationships.” In the end it all comes down to relationships.

I’ve found that emails, phone calls and face-to-face meetings all can help you start or continue conversations but they won’t do the hard work of building relationships for you. 

My research shows that executive buyers choose the sales person who has been a resource and developed a relationship with them regardless of their timing to buy. 

Average sales people think they are most effective when they talk with someone WHEN they are ready to buy, but top performers seek to build relationships with the right people in the right companies BEFORE they’re ready to buy.

Today’s prospects have a general lack of trust and they simply don’t want to be sold. They are weary of pitches, hype, pushy sales people and manipulative marketing tactics. They are time constrained and too busy to think. So what do they do with most of our sales and marketing messages)? They simply ignore them.

Time and time again it is proven that customers want the salespeople they deal with to understand their business, their needs, and the pressures under which they operate. These people are called trusted advisors. 

For this reason, I think it’s critical to contact and have initial conversations with our future customers that are devoid of sales pitches. Quite literally when we begin a conversation with them, their attitudes and beliefs are being shaped, primed by the information they have already soaked up through various sources. 

Be a resource to them regardless of their timing to buy. Otherwise, they are likely to get information from the internet or uninformed colleagues, trade publications or heaven forbid your competitors.

And I think a perfect way to do this is through lead nurturing. A key aspect of lead nurturing is the ability to provide relevant, valuable education and information to prospects up front. In this way you will be able to position yourself as a trusted advisor and perhaps even a thought leader.

Again, it’s about relationships. The key I think is putting the interests of our current or future customers first. That’s not always easy especially when we’re trying to meet objectives, growth goals etc. But when you do that, you don’t have to sell to people. You’ll start to find they even will come to you first when they are ready.

Comments

In today’s business world, particularly with the proliferation of Web 2.0 resources for marketing and promoting your company/name/product, it’s becoming even more blurry to define what exactly a brand is. One thing that is definable, however, is that if you do have an effective and immediately recognizable brand, your business will be better positioned to succeed over your competitors. So how do you build your brand today?

Build Your Experience

If your brand is defined by who you are and what you offer, then the experience you have is going to be crucial at backing up your brand claims. After all, why should a business entrust you with building their brand if yours isn’t all that impressive? On the flip side, make sure your experience is in the field relevant to the brand you wish yourself or your company to be known for.

Self-Promotion is the Way Forward

Although you may feel that self-promotion is akin to egomania, how else are you going to get your brand known? Sure, if you have a client or two that mentions your services to a professional colleague or business partner, that’s the best kind of promotion you can have. Yet as much as we’d like to think our clients talk about us even in their sleep, that’s not always a realistic view.

Instead, start pushing your name out there. However, make sure you keep on the right side of self-promotion - after all, no-one likes a show-off. Some excellent ways of self-promotion include:

• Setting up your own domain name (especially now that .me is available)
• Have an online as well as offline resume
• Set up a blog to share your views on the topic(s) you wish to be associated with
• Use web applications like MeeID to show short snippets of information about you

The importance of using these types of self-promotion can’t be stated enough. Google makes it incredibly easy for information on companies and individuals to be found - if your brand doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of an online search by a potential client, you may as well kiss goodbye to any chance of success.

Offer Your Expertise

Similar to building your experience, becoming an expert in your niche (and sharing that expertise) is a proven way to build your brand. After all, what could be better than having someone immediately thinking of you as “the go to guy” when it comes to a certain area of help or expertise being needed? Write free articles or white papers; offer to speak at local conferences or meetings; offer to write a regular column in your local newspaper. All of these methods will steadily help identify you as someone to come to, either from a business or professional point of view.

It’s All in the Relationships

Of course, one of the best and most effective methods of building your brand is via your relationships. As I mentioned when speaking about self-promotion, word-of-mouth is still the best form of promotion around. Therefore, the more contacts you have and networks you belong to, the more chance there is of being talked about.

When you meet someone and become contacts with each other, maintain that relationship. Keep in touch and ask how they’re doing, as well as offering tidbits of your latest news and successes. By looking after each relationship, you’re more likely to be recommended to other people than someone who just contacts someone when you need something.

Of course, building your brand is just half the battle. Keeping it is just as difficult - there will always be contemporaries and business competitors after the same target audience as you. This is why it’s so important to continuously strive to improve and strengthen your brand at every opportunity. Look after your contacts; look after your clients; increase your knowledge and never stop learning.

In answer to the original question, your brand is quite simply you. Make sure you look after it.

Comments

The Chic Entrepreneur

Put Your Business in Higher Heels

By: Elizabeth Gordon, Leanna Adams

Published: May 31, 2008
ISBN: 9781934759042
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Robert D. Reed Pub

Any woman can be an entrepreneur. Putting your business in higher heels means making it more successful and making it more attractive to others, write Elizabeth Gordon and Leanna Adams in their powerful women’s business guide book to success The Chic Entrepreneur: Put Your Business in Higher Heels. The authors demonstrate that the feminine approach to building and running a business works precisely because the entrepreneurs are women.

Elizabeth Gordon (photo right) and Leanna Adams recognize that entrepreneurship and operating a business is reaching a series of destinations in a longer journey to success. The book provides the road map to help the chic entrepreneur steer her course safely on that often difficult road. The chic entrepreneur understands that business has risk and reward, and he takes both in stride with style and sass.

In each chapter, the authors compare and contrast different business styles, helping the chic entrepreneur stand out from the crowd. Often going against conventional wisdom, the chic entrepreneur does it her own way, by providing her own unique value, while learning from the successes of others. The authors help guide the chic entrepreneur on her personal pathway to business success.

Elizabeth Gordon and Leanna Adams (photo left) share business ideas that leap from every page, with examples of how providing unique value works for the chic entrepreneur, and how chasing after the crowd will only catch her high heels in a sidewalk grate. From setting up her business plan, to attracting the ideal customers and employees, the authors provide the basics for entrepreneurial prosperity. They take the reader through sales and marketing, cash flow, and the development of business systems without missing a beat.

For me, the power of the book was its practical step by step approach to entrepreneurship, combined with real world examples to back up the concepts. Each chapter is well summarized, and has bonus tips sprinkled through each chapter to stimulate more creative thinking and idea development. At the same time, the authors help motivate the chic entrepreneur, to take the steps necessary, to create her own successful business venture. The book combines realism and optimism, in just the right recipe, for entrepreneurial success.

I highly recommend The Chic Entrepreneur: Put Your Business in Higher Heels by Elizabeth Gordon with Leanna Addams, to any women who are serious about starting their own business. The book guides the chic entrepreneur, as she wears higher heels than her competition, and sets herself apart in the market with style and panache.

Read The Chic Entrepreneur: Put Your Business in Higher Heels by Elizabeth Gordon with Leanna Addams, for a guide to being the successful and chic entrepreneur you always dreamed possible. Any woman can be a chic entrepreneur and the sky is the limit to her success and achievement.

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On affliliate marketing, Rae states:

I see those who “get” the challenges coming up getting pretty damn sophisticated at what they do, myself included. I see those who refuse to evolve watching their checks get smaller and smaller as more time passes. I definitely see the opportunities for people who understand affiliate marketing in addition to audience development and SEO growing, even if I don’t see the number of people taking them (or who have the skills to take them) doing so.

I invite you to get to know her in Smart, Driven and Air Guitar Ready, Sugarrae, view the videos and if you’re a member, take the interview for a Sphinn.

One of the reasons Rae stands out is she speaks her mind. She, like me and many of us, may at some point say something that others disagree with. I’m becoming more and more convinced that online communication is an art form, or at least, something to be taken seriously if you want to be understood the way you intended.

This article, Putting our Hot Heads Together, by Carolyn Wood, discusses forums and blog communities and how to discuss or debate and still be civil. It’s one of the smartest articles I’ve seen on this topic. As she says, it’s more than understanding and applying basic netiquette. It’s understanding when private should remain remain private. We can ignore trolls, grumps and “people who’ve got some sort of wedgie problem goin’ on”. She writes:

Even when we disagree with the author, we don’t need to take the directly opposing view-even if the author is cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Like taco drive-ins and 401K programs, arguments in online magazines offer more than two choices. We can go for the prize behind Door Number Three: the Great Idea or small suggestion that actually moves the conversation forward, that clarifies or sharpens the points in the article and suggests an even better way-one that transcends two bitterly different views. It’s here, at the juncture of opposing opinions and a third alternative, or a fourth, that we may come closer to a truth that improves one corner of the web.

A List Apart, always a premier source of intelligent, thought provoking articles, has also released Deafness and the User Experience (Discussion at Cre8asiteforums in our Usability Forum here.)

To provide better user experiences for the Deaf, we need to stop thinking of deafness as simply the inverse of hearing-we need to understand deafness from both a cultural and linguistic perspective. Moreover, to enhance the online user experience for the deaf, we must understand how deafness influences web accessibility.

Don’t forget - The Survey For People Who Make Web Sites, which closes August 26.

With online reputation management topics being hot, this may be of interest. Blogger sued for $20 million for calling a business a “scam”.

The legal rights of bloggers are murky. What rights belong to Leslie and bloggers like her who express opinions and review products and businesses on the web? What does the First Amendment mean to bloggers and do bloggers need protection beyond the rights protected by the US Constitution?

And finally, when you Tweet, it could end up on some news site somewhere.

My 5 seconds of fame.

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Recently Trevor Claiborne of the Inside AdWords crew at Google informed us all that the Keyword Tool is now Updated With Search Volume Data. He illustrated this with the image shown below:

If you are not familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, it would be worth your while to check out. This latest change provides for free what many expensive keyword tracking services had been providing. It’s no surprise that AdWords professionals, such as Xurxo Vidal, Bloom Search Services, are enamored by this new Search Volume Data service.

As Tamar Weinberg of Search Engine Roundtable pointed out, some other experts are questioning its usefulness. Michael VanDeMar believes that the tool is useless for SEO, even though it shows exact numbers. Certainly the source of the numbers needs to be considered carefully. It may not provide an exact indication of the clicks your own particular AdWords campaign might produce. However for comparative purposes the figures would seem to be useful and clearly Google itself is the best source for Google click data.

The other advantage of the data is that you can download the figures into an Excel spreadsheet. Previously for all results, an indication of the search volume was presented as small histogram bars and only a rough visual comparison was possible. These quantitative results allow more intensive analysis, which is why it can provide a reality check for your business strategy. To explain this requires a short background review of Internet marketing.

Challenging Business Realities

An increasing number of businesses are realizing that the Internet is the primary way many prospects and clients will be communicating with them. Of course the Internet has a major weakness. That is because the Internet is a really, really crowded scene. It’s hardly surprising to hear that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, is working on tags to help find online information.

At the same time the Internet has a major strength. That is because the Internet is a really, really crowded scene. That means that for any product or service, however specialized, there will be a very large number of prospects who are active on the Internet. Since the Internet is a superb way of communicating, which is independent of geography, this gives great opportunities in Internet marketing.

Given that the Internet has changed the way the business world functions, clearly a business strategy must make sense in this modern reality. As Michael Porter has said,”Of course strategy is hard - it’s about making tough choices.” In other words you must decide what you will do and what you will not do.

The best reality check for your business strategy would really be provided by the views of those prospects you are aiming to persuade to become customers. One indicator of the prospects needs is how they go looking for solutions. What keywords might they use in searching for solutions? The Adwords Keyword Tool provides such data. Of course it is mixed in with keyword data for non-prospects who happened to be looking for somewhat related products or information. Nevertheless the Tool can help in confirming or rejecting a particular strategy.

Doing The Reality Check

The following is very much a Big Picture approach and cannot be pushed to the nth degree. It only confirms that a particular strategy has the necessary characteristics to allow success. It does not go beyond that to check that it has sufficient characteristics to actually be successful. However by applying the check, it may give insights into how a strategy can be tuned to improve the chances of success.

Step 1 - Determine the characteristics of your most typical preferred prospect and their needs.

Step 2 - Determine the most likely keyword phrase that would be included in a Google search for a solution.

Step 3 - Use the Keyword Tool on that phrase in the following way. Insert the words of the phrase on a single line without quotes and allow synonyms to be included. What the Tool does is to explore the concept that is behind that keyword phrase and show you what closely related keyword searches are being done.

Step 4 - Download CSV files of the two lists of keywords developed by the Tool into Excel spreadsheets. The data should be combined into one spreadsheet of adjacent rows. Sort the rows based on the values in the 4th column in descending order. The fourth column contains the annual monthly average searches for the particular keyword or keyword phrase. Sometimes you will find a large number of closely similar keyword phrases that have high search rates measured in the tens of thousands. This may either mean trouble or opportunity. In other cases, very many fewer keyword phrases are listed. Provided the search rates are measured in the thousands, then you likely are looking at a potentially interesting strategic niche.

Step 5 - After comparing a number of different businesses and the key words that might be appropriate, one can develop a sense of what this analysis suggests for the corresponding strategy.

Step 6 - (optional in some cases) Repeat the analysis with the keyword phrase in quotes to produce a tighter comparison of what may be competition.

Possible Outcomes From The Reality Check

This approach is very much a work in progress. Accordingly it is not yet possible to produce a taxonomy of all the different patterns and what they may imply for a given strategy. The following represent examples of what we have seen in practice. Repeating the cycle and refining the ideas is often beneficial. Readers who try out this approach are encouraged to add their own experiences in the comments.

Case A - A Strategy Lost In The General Noise
Findings - The words with high search numbers clearly represented much more than just searches by the prospect niche. Clearly there would be many other online properties that such searches were accessing. A website focused on the keyword phrase would probably never stand out in this very crowded space.

Case B - Too Much Competition
Findings - There is only minimal information on the advertising competition for certain phrases (a scale from 0 to 100%). Nevertheless, if many of the keyword phrases have 100% competition, then clearly this is a market with a large number of competitors who are willing to spend money on PPC advertising. This undoubtedly translates into equal competition in organic search as well. Using that keyword phrase to define your target prospect may well be very weak strategy.

Case C - Prospects Don’t Use That Keyword Phrase
Findings - One analysis showed that surprisingly there were no searches at all for the assumed best keyword phrase. Prospects were likely using some synonyms that did have high search results. The strategy was refined using one of these alternate phrases.

Case D - Several Keyword Phrases All Somewhat Strong
Findings - In this case, a number of alternate keyword phrases had somewhat comparable search rates. The advertising competition for some of these was strong whereas for others there was little competition. One of the alternates with little competition was selected to define the ideal prospect and therefore the best approach.

A Robust Strategy - Focus, Focus, Focus

The common thread that often runs through these strategy check cases is that focusing on a tightly defined niche is often the best policy. The overall measure that counts is the size of the niche multiplied by the small percentage who will convert into purchasers. The advantage here is that by targeting a tighter niche, it is more likely that the prospect will be aware of the company and more likely that they will find that what the company offers is attractive. Given the crowded Internet, even what might be thought of as a micro-niche can be preferred. This will be more fully explored in an upcoming SMM Newsletter.

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