SEO your personal brand 
If you have ever worked with a corporate client or in a corporate environment you would know that brand management is something that is taken extremely seriously. The reason for this is brands are extremely important for companies. A Brand usually connects the dots from advertising to sales. This is because people tend to buy products from companies that they trust and advertising tends to create trust for a brand. Thus when people pass a popular grocer in a shopping center or on a high street their the grocers brand could attract you to visit the store rather then the corner shop. From this perspective companies directly link sales to their brand and the message attached to it.
Now in today’s world and with the emergence of web 2.0 it has become vitally important for us to control our personal brand. Why you may ask? Well you quite often attend conferences and networking session to promote yourself and build up contacts. This is a way of advertising your personal brand. Now in today’s age the online world has become so entwined in our lives that it is almost impossible to separate the two. Now what does that mean for your personal brand? Well in whichever stage of your life you may find yourself, you need to make sure you control what people find when the search for you online. Thus if you search for your name you should find your own web properties. For instance if you search for “Chris Calitz” you will find my personal blog with contact information for me and links to my social presence online ie. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.
Thus I have made sure people find info about me, which I control. This means I can then further advertise myself by simply making changes to the web properties I own. Now Emil gave you a quite detailed explanation of how to setup a Wordpress site but you need to take this a step further. You need to do some SEO on your website to ensure you are the first result in search engines for your branded terms.
Now luckily most of our branded terms are not qualified as very competitive keywords for instance “Chris Calitz” is not a very competitive term so the SEO I needed to do was not that extensive. If you do however have a name such as Richard Branson you might have a problem.
1. Choosing a domain name
Now the first step I would recommend is that you buy a domain name that contains your branded terms. So if your brand online and offline is based on your name try to buy a domain containing your name. For instance John Doe or Joe Bloggs would buy johndoe.com or joebloggs.com. Choosing a domain extension isn’t as important if your brand doesn’t compete with a competitive keyword phrases but if you are competing with Richard Branson you might need to make smart decisions. For instance if you are based in South Africa you could buy the local extension richardbranson.co.za, which is available I checked. This could give you a bit of a head start as you will be able to rank higher in South Africa but this isn’t a guarantee.
2. Finding inexpensive links
Now in SEO links are probably the most important ranking factor at the moment. Thus you need to build some links for your site. Now as this is not a difficult vertical to rank for you will only need a few inexpensive ones. You could search online for a few free directories to submit your site to which should ensure you have enough links. Some examples are www.sabest.co.za, www.dmoz.org, www.ananzi.co.za etc.
3. Deciding on anchor text and description
Now before you submit your sites you need to ensure you have decided on anchor text you want to use. These should be branded terms and should vary. For instance “Chris Calitz” and “chriscalitz”. These will be used for the text of the links you receive and they will be important in determining for which keywords you rank.
4. Lastly have content related to your branded terms
You need to ensure that you at least have a page with content or that your homepage has content where the branded phrases you want to rank for is mentioned.
This should put you well on your way to controlling your online brand. Feel free to leave some questions below and check in tomorrow as we will discuss how PPC could help you market your brand.
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Why use online marketing professionals to do your online marketing.
Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.
This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.
Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.
People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.
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Using SEO to create an online presence for your business
People are now online more often than they where a few years ago. This can probably be attributed to the fact that they can now do so much more then a few years back. People online can now socially share everything from videos to photos and even look at where their friends are right now. This means they have more reason to be online which in turn also makes them savvier Internet users.
People don’t only go online for social reasons though but a lot of time online is also spend either doing research on their next holiday or the next camera they want to purchase. This trend will only increase as users end up spending more and more time online as they discover what all they can do online.
This is why it is vitally important for you to have an website these days even if you are a little guest house located in the middle of nowhere. In all likelihood people still need your service there and your clients will love you if you make it easier for them to find you by having a website.
Now that I have hopefully convinced you to go get your business a website you can’t stop there. You need to make sure you create an online presence for your website. Now there are a few ways to do this, which work the best when done together, but I will only discuss SEO.
Most users make use of search engines to find what they are looking for be it by typing in what they are looking for in the address bar and their default search engine answering them or them visiting a search engine like Google and searching for it there. SEO is the process of ensuring when visitor search for something that relates to your website that they will find you as an option to fulfil their need.
Thus SEO creates a presence online by offering your company, as an option to fulfil your visitors needs. Now you can’t be everywhere at the same time in real life neither can your website thus it’s important that you ensure you create your online presence with this in mind. You need to target users that are actually looking for your services and not everything related to your company or products. For this reason it is vitally important to ensure you create the right online presence with SEO.
Now to evaluate if you have created the right online presence is not that easy it will take constant monitoring and understanding of what users are actually doing on your website. Examples would be that if you see that you have a high bounce rate your visitors aren’t finding your content relevant to what they where searching for or your online presence is targeting the wrong users. My best advice for this would be to constantly monitor it and make deductions based on your evaluations of what is happening on your website.
I want to end by rehashing the fact that SEO only forms part of a strategy to create an online presence. You will need to make sure you cover all aspects as the way people are finding what they need is changing as the internet changes so make sure your business stays up to date.
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How to create effective long and short term online presence.
If you have a business today, it is very important to have a website where people can view your services and products and also find out a bit more about your company but that website means nothing if people can’t find your it or if they don’t know what your URL is.
That is why effective online marketing is vitally important. It is essential to have a strong online presence and not be just another needle in the proverbial haystack.
The two main ways to create an online presence is through Pay Per Click advertising and through Search Engine Optimisation. Both of these methods work very well but each one has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
SEO
SEO is where the website is optimized to perform beter for certain keywords on the Search Engine Result Pages. It involves fixing the code of the website and optimising the content for the desired keywords. With SEO your goals are more long term, as it takes time for your pages and changes to your pages to be indexed by the search engines as well as getting a good rank for your keywords.
PPC
Pay Per Click is a type of advertising that is used on websites and search engines. You set up an ad that will display when certain criteria is met and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It works on a bidding system, you compete against other advertisers for the top spot. The placement of your ad all depends on what you are willing to spend per click as well as the relevance of your ad and content to the specific keyword you are bidding on. PPC is a lot more flexible than SEO because you can start and modify campaigns in a couple of minutes. You can see results instantly, so it is good to get a PPC campaign going while you are busy optimizing your site to perform beter organically.
The rest of the week these services will be discussed in more detail, so do come back to find out more.
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Reaching your online marketing goals…
2010 has started off with a bang and we are already in the second month of the year. Are you well on your way to reaching your goals that you have set out in January?
Well if you are at all like me then you are probably not as well on your way as you would have liked to be by now. I have been struggling to reach all the goals that I have set for myself in the past. Now this could be attributed to me setting up quite an extended list of goals or the more likely reason is because I don’t set up a plan of how to reach them.
Defining your goals consists of much more than just writing down what you want to achieve. You need to set out what exactly you would like to achieve and the steps needed to accomplish those goals. I recently started implementing project management techniques such as divide and conquer to break down my goals into smaller more manageable tasks. By doing this it has allowed me to clearly define the steps I need to take to reach my goals.
This principle shouldn’t only apply to yourself but also to your business. You need to define goals that you wish to reach with your online marketing this year. These could include online brand awareness, stimulating the conversations with your customers, increasing website traffic and direct sales.
If one of your online marketing goals were to improve brand awareness then how would you achieve this? Well social media is definitely the hot topic in 2010 for businesses, so you might want to look at how you could leverage this to increase brand awareness. Investigate what you would like to achieve this year and set out a plan to reach these.
Planning your goals is only the start, as you will need to measure the results by monitoring. In the blog posts to follow we will discuss using Google Analytics and other technologies to monitor your efforts. So please visit our site this week to keep up to date or follow our twitter account.
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