The Secret of Personal Branding

, ,

I’ve written a lot about branding for your clients, but do you know that personal branding is just as important to your success as a designer?

You hopefully do, because personal branding is far from a new idea, but social media has made personal branding as available as ever before. It is also a much more competitive field now.

To make yourself a valued brand, follow this collection of tips. They will help you climb above the competition.

  1. Set Goals and Plan Ahead – Before you ever begin to define your brand, you have to think ahead and see where you want to be a few months or even a year or two from now. Are you trying to get a new job, or do you want to stay a freelancer? How do you want to grow your business? Once you know where you want to be, you can layout a plan to help get you there.
  2. Know and Understand Your Brand – The look and feel of your brand is a lot more than just a brand or a couple of social media accounts. You have to keep a consistent image in all mediums at all times. As Jacob Cass from Just Creative puts it, “The fundamental idea and core concept behind having this ‘corporate image’ is that everything you do, everything you own and everything you produce, should reflect the values and aims of your personal brand as a whole.”
  3. Create and Maintain Your Brand – One of the best ways to set yourself apart from the crowd is to have a unique visual identity that is consistent and reflective of your goals. You should also maintain social media accounts in ways that reflect your brand positively. Are you of any value to your followers and friends? Or are you wasting the biggest platforms to promote your brand?

Above all, the secret to personal branding is the same for many things in life. Plan ahead, and follow through. If you put forth a solid, planned image to the public, and follow through with valuable content, people will come to respect your personal brand.

 

/0 Comments

Matt Cutts Says Google Now Reports 100 Percent of Manual Actions

, ,

Have you ever wondered if your site was penalized by Google through automated algorithms or a real human person? Now, you will almost always know because Google reports almost 100 percent of manual penalties.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, described this new policy at Pubcon this year, saying, “We’ve actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site.”

“If there’s some manual action taken by the manual web spam team that means your web site is going to rank directly lower in the search results, we’re telling webmasters about pretty much all of those situations.”

Cutts did clarify that there may be rare instances where this doesn’t occur, but their aim to get to 100-percent.

In June, at SMX Advanced, Cutts gave a figure of 99 percent reporting, but Cutt believes they are currently reporting every instance of manual actions.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has more information about the distinction between manual and algorithmic actions.

 

/0 Comments

3 Easy Email Remarketing Tips You Can Try

, , ,

It is easy to underestimate the power of emails to create conversions. However, sending the right email at the right time can actually increase sales dramatically. If done well, a single automated email can increase sales by 10%.

Here are three email remarketing tactics that can help you start driving conversions you may be missing out on.

1) Educational Email Course – While some customers that come to your site are already aware of how your product will solve their problems, many will not come equipped with a good understanding of the problem or why the solution you offer is important.

An educational email course helps walk your uninformed potential customers from understanding their problem to the checkout. It also helps build your reputation and credibility.

By showing customers why they should trust you as an expert, as well as sharing information, you help consumers progress along the The Buyer’s Journey. Once they get to the point where they are ready to purchase, they will choose to go with the company that was with them from the beginning.

Just don’t overwhelm them with emails. Six to eight emails a month will be able to drive conversion rates up, but an email a day will send potential customers running.

2) A/B Test Your Most Profitable Campaigns – We all know why you should be A/B testing your webpages, but have you thought about testing transactional and remarketing campaigns? Most don’t, but Chris Hexton from Unbounce suggests it is just as important, if not more so.

Choose your most effective email, and begin A/B testing. Change the copy, or maybe the subject line. Maybe even try different addresses to send the email from.

3) Prompt Users to Pay More When the Time is Right – If you have multiple payment tiers or annual pricing, you should really already be doing this. Take a look at your current metrics and see which segment of users are already upgrading, and create an automated email to prompt all who would be included in this group. Now, once you have begun to understand the behavior driving upgrades, find an email that will pre-empt this type of action.

By pre-empting users with a call-to-action, they are likely to respond, especially if you can circle in on users that have been paying monthly for a few months. They will likely want to upgrade to annual payments.

While these suggestions are far from a comprehensive list of solid email remarketing tactics, they are easy and can help rejuvinate your email marketing.

 

/0 Comments

SEO for Siri [Infographic]

, , , , ,

When Siri was announced with the iPhone 4S, it didn’t bring about a revolution in search activity on phones. Most still search by typing keywords into Safari or Chrome. However, gradually, Siri and mobile apps are changing search habits and creating new opportunities for search marketers.

The Alchemy Viral crew gives us an infographic which helps cover everything about searching with Siri and mobile searching in general.

There is one error, which Search Engine Land helps point out. The infographic says Siri draws from social services, but Siri can only help users post things to Twitter or Facebook. It can’t help them get information back from those social sites.

With mobile searching poised to overtake desktop within two years, this infographic can be helpful to anyone interested in mobile searching.

Oh, and the creator of the infographic isn’t bad with spelling. They are just British, hence “optimisation,” instead of the American spelling.

/0 Comments

5 Reasons Not To Use DIY Marketing

, , ,

A do-it-yourself attitude can be great for entrepreneurs  It can save you money, as well as improving your abilities in a multitude of areas.  However, it can hurt you in the area of marketing. John Follis from Small Biz Trends offers some reasons why.

1) You Don’t Know What You Need To Learn – Anyone can read a book or two about marketing practices, but they won’t do you much good compared to those working with qualified teams or consultants. The field of marketing is massive and unless you are qualified, trying to do-it-yourself can hurt you.

2) A Business Owner Can’t Be Objective – You should care about your business. That seems obvious. The issue is, marketing relies on an unbiased perspective. Being able to identify the existing issues before a marketing campaign is essential, and practically impossible for the business owner to do without bias. Don’t take it as an insult to your abilities as a business owner. Steve Jobs faced this issue time-and-again at Apple, but he was wise enough to listen to his team of talented marketers

3) The Best Marketing Doesn’t Come Pre-Made – Every marketing guru tries to push a “sure-fire” system. They all make great sounding claims, and promise unbelievable results. They also ignore the main principle of marketing. Every business is different, and a pre-made system for marketing any business is guaranteed not to be the most effective method. Remember, the ones making money from these systems are the people selling them.

4) Great Marketing Requires Talent – Quality marketing comes from a combination of business expertise and creativity. Many forget the creative side of marketing, and focus on their knowledge of the business, but this leaves them at a disadvantage. Forgetting the creative side of marketing leaves you unable to connect with the audience in a meaningful way.

5) DIY Marketing Won’t Save You Money – This seems backwards doesn’t it? Hiring someone else should obviously cost you more than doing it yourself right? Wrong. You are only thinking about what you are spending, not what you’re getting back from spending. A good marketing campaign will make the money you spent back, plus some. The companies associated with great marketing have been doing it from the very start. Apple became known for their iconic marketing at the same time they were rising as a company. Having someone skilled handling marketing also allows you to invest your time on areas where you will be able to make meaningful improvements to your company.

Doing everything yourself is tempting, but anyone that hopes to succeed using that idea has to know their strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise, you’ll just end up making things worse for yourself.

 

/0 Comments

Possible Ex-Google Employee Offers Insights

, , ,

Andre Weyher worked on Google’s Search Quality/Webspam team for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile. Recently, he spoke with James Norquay, a digital/search marketer from Australia, offering insight that possibly could help search marketers and web marketers understand Google’s SEO strategies.

Since Matt McGee published his initial report on Weyher’s comments on Search Engine Land, Google has released a short statement denying Weyher worked on webspam engineering or algorithms, but Weyher stands by his statements.

According to Weyher, everyone on the search quality team covers a specific “market” and his was content quality and backlink profiles.

Speaking about the Penguin update, Weyher says, “Everyone knew that Penguin would be pointed at links, but I don’t think many people expected the impact to be as large as it turned out to be. At this stage a webmaster is out of his mind to still rely on techniques that were common practice 8 months ago.”

He emphasizes the shift to anchor text ratios, which has been a frequent piece of SEO advice following the Penguin update. His statement could confirm Google’s perspective on anchor text ratios.

If Weyher’s statements are to be believed, they could be a source of great insight into Google’s SEO strategies. However, even if you take Weyher’s words as truth, he would have been just one member of Google’s huge team, which he confirms when he says in his defense of the original interview, “No one within Google knows the entire picture apart from maybe 1 engineer, 1 level under Larry Page.”

 

/0 Comments

Majestic SEO Link Reports Now Updated Almost Hourly

, ,

Majestic SEO are now updating their linkage data to be as recent as within hours or minutes. Majestic SEO is an advanced SEO third party reporting service, and in the the past you had to wait up to 24 hours for link reports to update.

Now, Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land reports Majestic is pushing updates out nearly hourly, allowing webmasters to see new links to their content more quickly.

This service is only available on the main site explorer reporting engine, but they hope to get it to the API and other reports soon.

 

/0 Comments

Don’t Be Intimidated By Content Marketing

, , ,

As we all know, the way to become popular on the internet is to create high quality content that engages your audience.

It is obvious when looking at the digital landscape, and even more clear if you ever get to have a conversation with any of the people working for the sites gaining popularity right now. Content strategies are always the most important issue to them for growth.

The issue with content marketing is it can be a little intimidating if you are just getting started. The good news is everyone can do it, you just have to start small.

First, you should probably redefine what you think of as content and what you think of as your product.

When trying to create a high quality product for your company to buy, it seems difficult to justify spending much time creating blog posts, but what you need to know is blog posts, webinars, and ebooks are your products as much as whatever you are selling.

Every aspect of your brand or your company that your customers experience is your product, and your content is often the first chance customers get to see your product. That makes it a bit easier to rationalize putting effort into your blog posts. That doesn’t make the feats any less daunting though.

Your company doesn’t have to start big with content marketing, however. Ray Grieselhuber, CEO of Ginzametrics, suggests starting with something small like an email marketing strategy, which allows you to send your audience more information about your products, as well as telling them how they can achieve what they want through your product. Just keeping in touch with your audience frequently with small bits of content is a good start.

From there, you can begin building a blog, offering larger portions of content, then maybe begin creating a webinar. Start with what you can handle, and build larger. You don’t have to leap into the deep end immediately.

The most important part is, of course, not to procrastinate. Just start making things to connect with your audience. Overthinking it will just make it seem harder than it actually is.

 

/0 Comments

Should You Be Using Longtail SEO?

, , ,

Longtail SEO is beginning to become the dominant method for article marketers to be successful in the results pages, as well as strengthening brand visibility and awareness. It is the most effective method for most marketers.

In the past, the problem for many has been deciding whether to invest energy, time and money into marketing a single primary keyword, which might receive a high volume of searches every month, or possibly to focus on a longtail keyphrase. The longtail keyphrase might only get a small amount of search queries every month, but it allows for the business to achieve the top ranking, which receives the most traffic.

Trying to focus on a single keyword puts you at a disadvantage. It may get queried more than your longtail phrase, but it will be such a crowded market, you would be lucky to get on the third page or results. When most traffic goes to the very first result, being on the third page isn’t going to get you many visitors.

Longtail phrases on the other hand put you in a much higher ranking on SERPs for less popular related queries, which will net you more traffic overall. As Justin Arnold, writer for The Mightier Pen, puts it, you have to choose between theoretical popularity, and actual sales traffic.

Choosing a longtail phrase is much too big of a subject to cover here, but the main idea is to think about claiming a corner of the market. People are searching for more specific queries, so marketing a longtail phrase for your specific area of the market puts you in a good place to actually get some sales.

 

/0 Comments

What You Need To Know About Google’s Disavow Links Tool

, , ,

I recently wrote about the release of Google’s Disavow Links tool, but there are some more questions popping up that need answering. So, let’s cover a little bit more about the tool.

First off, the tool does not immediately take effect. This is one of many reasons Google suggests publishers try to remove questionable links first by working with site owners hosting links, or companies that they may have purchased links through.

Instead of disavowing the links immediately, “it can take weeks for that to go into effect,” said Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team at a keynote during the Pubcon conference. Google also has reserved the right to not use submissions if it feels they are questionable.

It is important to be accurate when making your file to submit to Google. Because of the delay in processing the file, it may take another few weeks to “reavow” links you didn’t mean to discount.

Once you have submitted a file to Google, you can download it, change it, and then resubmit.

The tool is mainly designed for site owners affected by the Penguin Update, which was focused on hitting sites that may have purchased links or gained them through spamming. Before, Google ignored bad links, but now they act as a negative mark against the site.

This change prompted fear in some of the SEO industry that site owners would create bad links pointing to their site, or “negative SEO.” This tool helps to ensure that negative SEO is not a worry by allowing you to disavow any of those types of links.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land has even more information about the tool, and Matt Cutts has a 10 minute long video answering questions.

 

/0 Comments