Take a look all around. Now take a look at yourself. The world by and large has everything branded and that includes you. Don’t believe it?  Your shoes are probably Nike, your shirt an IZOD, your pants maybe Dockers. Wow, you are a walking billboard. Now look at your car, is it a Chevy, a Ford, a Toyota. Whoever manufactured it, it is branded.  But what about the most important brand of all; your own?

Whether you think so or not we all have our own brand so you may as well make the most of your branding opportunity. ’But I don’t need my own brand, I work for someone else.’ EVERYONE needs to build their own brand regardless of whether you punch a clock or work from home in your pajamas.

Corporate giants have known this for years. Building a brand increases visibility and the likelihood that an even bigger corporate giant will come alone and gobble up a company (at a tidy profit). Maybe Hollywood will want to buy the story for a movie or your favorite author will want to write the book. All this can happen, but first you have to build your own personal brand.

Building your personal brand is just something that needs to be done. Face it, even if you work for someone else you are by and large a ‘free agent.’ Being a free agent in a world that is filled with endless brands is a great opportunity to create, mold, perfect, and sell your own personal brand and the good news is that everyone has this unique opportunity. The better news is that many people are content with their nine to five lives and will never work on their own personal brand, so some of the competition is out of the way right off the bat.

Now the bad news. You need to understand how to build your own personal brand before you can conquer the world. This can be easier said than done and will require a good deal more than a megaphone and a voice. So where do you turn?

Big corporations get the picture. In 1993 when Phillip Morris decided to cut the price of the famous Marlboro branded cigarettes by 40 cents per pack on a Friday, the rest of the market felt a $25 billion decline in packaged goods as a whole on Monday. The consensus; brands are a dying breed.

Where else can you turn? The Internet is filled with all sorts of web sponsors that get the importance of branding. You know them too. Google, Yahoo, NASCAR.com; all branded websites. How branded is JoeSmith.com though?

Because the Internet allows virtually anyone to have an active website, virtually everyone in fact does have a website. Which sites get bookmarked, visited, add to a favorites list, and the like? The ones that are branded the best. A good web brand will tell your visitors that your website will not only offer them what they want once, but in fact over and over again.

Now think about another big tech innovation; e-mail. Here again anyone can have an e-mail address and really these days do you honestly know anyone who doesn’t? Which e-mails do you decide to open and which e-mails you decide to trash is all a matter of branding.

Personal branding, just like any other branding is a building of trust. When your brand becomes bigger and better so too does your reputation. All of the sudden people will want to visit your website and will even send their friends, family, and co-workers your links. All of the sudden people will want to open the e-mails you send and will even forward them along. Once the trust is there, the people know that your brand will offer them an incredible value that they can put their faith in.

Perhaps though the best example of those who know the importance of branding are professional service firms. They almost always follow the same business model; get hired by a client, show up to work for that client, and then figure out how to provide value to that client. They almost never have any tangible assets to speak of and most of them walk around in expensive suits sporting the latest technical gadgets such as an iPhone which they are always using.

Separation comes from the firm or firms that can figure out how to better service clients and have the ability to learn on the fly. All of the sudden as results get better and the name gets better. Last to follow is the reputation and the rest isn’t history. One client recommends you to another and so on and so on.

This is precisely what you must do; figure out how to stand out in a crowd of millions. You have to be nimble and learn things as they come your way. You have to be open to new and innovate ideas and can never get sedentary in your ways. You have to figure out what you can offer someone that no one else can. It is a sometimes long and arduous journey, but if you try hard enough and look long enough you can somehow find, create, mold, and then perfect the most important brand of all; YOUR OWN.

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 Advice for the employer…Advice for the frustrated employee

When you hire someone to work on your search engine optimization (SEO) you expect that professional to be, well, professional. The problem is that many a pro SEOer only takes a handful of classes and or courses on SEO and then goes to work for non SEO corporation. This is not to say that they will not be good at what they do, they just won’t be great…even if they have had past success.

The fact that a pro SEOer only takes a couple of course before they go off into the wild world of SEO is not by choice, but rather by design. That’s because there are only a limited number of resources available for those interested in SEO to take advantage of and the rest of the learning curve has to come by way of their own steam. Much of SEO is a ‘learn as you go’ process and while that may be alright for some professions it can be very harmful for the SEO profession (For example, the taking over a PPC campaign). An SEO pro who only conducts SEO thoughts and techniques between a certain number of hours per day will not only lack in the results department, but in the passion department as well.

A true SEO pro will be one that is infected with the SEO fever and will know that the only cure for their disease is MORE SEO. Along with anything else they do at their normal job for SEO you will find them at home working on their own side work. Blogs, websites, affiliate programs, social media, you name it. If there is an opportunity to conduct SEO then that is where a real SEO pro should also be. MOONLIGHTING…SEO by day and SEO by night (after the family goes to bed.)

SEO takes years of practice and honestly it is an art that can never be perfected. SEO/SEM, and organic traffic for that matter takes time…not days or weeks…There will always be new and advanced SEO techniques that come out and this will in turn always give the true SEO pro something new to learn. Many of the new advances will come as a direct result of an SEO pro’s experimentation. However, experimentation can go wrong and as Judith Lewis of deCabbit says, ‘Better that they try and fail on a test site than a live site.  Better to get a blog banned than a multi-million pound (or dollar) e-commerce site.’ If your SEO pro is only working on SEO for a normal job then they have no time to experiment and learn the true art of SEO except for work time. The last thing you will want is to have your SEO pro ‘try something new’ on your website and have repercussions brought to your site because the experiment goes haywire.

So how pro is your SEO? If you are not sure you should ask. Your SEO pro should be the one who leaves the office only to go home to work on multiple projects of their own. Your SEO pro should be the one who gets very little sleep and when they do all they dream about is new and innovative ways to conduct SEO. Your SEO pro should have an absolute true passion for the SEO biz.

It’s your website and it’s your business and because of that you need to ensure that your SEO pro is in fact a pro and not just an SEO part timer who walks away at the end of the day only to return to job they really don’t like the next day. While finding the right SEO pro for your website may take a bit of time, in the end it is worth its weight in gold. When you find an SEO pro who lives, breaths, and eats SEO then your website will begin to flourish as a result. Once that happens there is only one thing after that which will ultimately occur; your bank account will begin to get bigger and bigger.

Pareto’s Law – The Definitive Guide to Bigger, Easier Profits After you’ve heard the adage “work smarter, not harder” for the gazillionth time, you probably want to gag. Reading Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, you’ll find it again; this time, swallow the gag reflex and pay attention.

It comes in the form of Pareto’s Law, the 80/20 principle (another teaching point that’s been around the block more times than a new driver in a Mini Cooper). Never mind. You really do need to learn this principle – and put it to use – if you want to boost the bottom line and still have time for a life.

Even just the title of Ferriss’ book should be enough to nudge your imagination. What would you do with a workweek that only lasted four hours or less? If it’s really a possibility – and it is – it’s worth taking another look at something that actually works, and not just looking, but putting it to use.

Here’s how it works: Pareto says you get 80% of your results (good or bad) from 20% of your input (what you do). In business, it can look like this: 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. That means that you’ve got a dead weight factor of 80% among your client base. They’re requiring an inordinate amount of work, and are only producing a small portion of your revenue. Translation: not good.

How do you put this principle to use to boost your profits?

1. Track everything.
First, you’ve got to be able to know which clients are the most profitable. If you’re not keeping track of this info, start. If you’re in an MLM selling health and beauty products, you need to know which clients buy the whole anti-aging line – on the autoship plan, and which buy the occasional mascara, if you call them… after seven attempts to reach them. It works the same way for every business – product- or service-driven, from haircuts to custom-built private jets. That same 20% of your customers are easy. They know what they want. They buy it from you. They’re happy. You’d better know exactly who they are.

2. Know that 20% like you know your own dog.
You want to be able to pick these customers out of a lineup because you know them so well. What makes them such great customers? What trends do you see? How do they like to be contacted? What are you providing that compels them come back for more? How did you find them? Where can you go looking to find more just like them? By taking the time to get to know them, you can learn a lot – it’s time well spent. Essentially, by learning all about these customers, you form a blueprint for your ideal customer. With this blueprint in hand, you take the first step in designing your customer base.

3. Be picky.
When you’re new in business, you’re so grateful to have anyone come through the door that you’ll put up with a lot just in hopes of making a sale. It’s not a good precedent to set for your business, but it happens. The trick is moving away from that as quickly as possible. Given the choice, why would you gather unpleasant, high-maintenance, penny-pinching customers who tax even your best customer service person’s patience? Instead, you could assemble a group of loyal, quality-driven, appreciative clients who value what you provide and make doing business a pleasure. It’s a matter of choosing quality over quantity, at first.

4. Get into cloning.
Well, not really. But you do want to redirect your efforts from how you used to do marketing and sales – anyone with a pulse – to attracting more who fit the blueprint of your ideal customers, and by spending more time and energy on the customers you’ve got who are already ideal. You can find more of these precious gems by asking for referrals, by going where they go and doing what they do, and by doing everything you can to provide exquisite service to them.

5. Systematize it.
You’re probably not in the position to just go willy-nilly firing clients who don’t meet your dream come true blueprint. But you can definitely make sure that your new clients are the ones you choose. Set up a ranking system so you’re able to keep track of your clients and their profiles. Customize your service so you spend the bulk of your resources on the most productive clients – while still providing excellence to your B-list clients.

It’s always possible that today’s 80%-er may become tomorrow’s best client – or they may introduce you to that dream client. Regardless, your goal is to provide excellence to all clients, while actively pursuing the ones that’ll make your life easy and your business boom.

An internet business isn’t something you want to jump into without any training – but with a bare minimum of tech skills, anyone with a computer, internet access, and a hobby or interest can build a business.

Additional Resources on this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

You know that a blog is a wonderful way to keep your name out there and to promote your website and thus your business. What you don’t know is how to get the traffic to your blog flowing and flowing well.

There are many does and don’ts when it comes to blogging but rather than going though the entire list you should focus on the more important factors. The following tidbits of information will help you to not only ensure your blog traffic starts, but will also make sure that your blog traffic explodes:

Use the Right Blog Software: This is of utmost importance. When choosing the blog software you want to use you need to consider how you want your comments page to be, your archiving page layout, categorization, sub-pages, the works. While Wordpress and Blogger often do the trick you may want to custom make your blog. A good source of info in that department is OpenSourceCSM.

Host the Blog on Your Domain: By keeping the blog hosted directly on your own domain you are attracting attention, gathering links, gaining some much needed publicity, and increasing your trust and rankings on the SERPS. By not hosting the blog on your own domain and having it on a different primary site other than your own you are really moving backwards. Yes you will be garnishing attention, just not for yourself as much.

Participate in Other’s Blogs: Whatever your interests are be it personal or business you can rest assured that there are others out there who will share your passions. This also goes for your industry. Take some time and conduct a search or two to find some worthwhile blogs and forums that already exist in your industry and see what they are all talking about. Be sure to leave intelligent comments when you can and if there is an opportunity to name drop for yourself then do so. Just be sure you are not coming off like a salesperson.

Write Tags for Two: When you are writing your title tags you need to remember it is more than just keeping them snappy and witty for those who have subscribed to your blog, or that you hope will in the future, but you have to write them in such a way that the search engines will like them as well. The perfect way to accomplish this is by writing the blog post first and the title tag second. In this way you will be able to scour the post to pick out pertinent keywords and phrases that you can then use in the title tag.

Begin with Silence: When you are looking at your blog or anyone else’s and you see a bunch of posts and most of those posts have a big goose egg under the comments section, what do you think? Dead blog or boring post? Whatever the case may be you may judge the blog by the number of comments as this shows interaction and really how popular the blog is. Well that is going to be what people think about your blog as well. To combat this you can disable the comments at first and wait until you have over 100 RSS subscribers or you are getting about 750 unique visits per day and then open up the lines of communicating. This will ultimately lead you to light, but steady activity in the comment department.

Don’t Recycle News or Thoughts: When you are first starting out you need to be more than original with your blog posts. Just because there is a big news story that deals with your industry, it doesn’t mean that you have to be covering it. Remember there will be hundreds, if not thousands of other bloggers who will be covering this very topic and many of them are already well established. Simply covering a news snippet in your own words is not enough. No one will be looking to your blog as a source of the latest news; at least not yet. Stick to all original thoughts and blog posts and wait until you are an authority within your industry before you jump on the bandwagon of news reporting.

Link and Link Again: It is far better to be over nice with your link giving then it is to be considered an under linker, especially in the blogging community. If you do take some thoughts or ideas from another blog be sure to give it honorable mention. Failing to do so will give you a bad reputation as a blogger and will only hurt you in the long run.

Hold off on Advertising: Nobody likes advertising but it has become a way of life online. However, until your blog is well established hold off on the AdSence for crying out loud. If you have no reputation and no following then over advertising will certainly put people off and you risk running off potential subscribers. This is not to say that you can never use AdSence, but you may want to wait just a bit before you do.

Make Your Blog Posts Sexy: Nothing will put a reader to sleep faster than line after line of plain old text. Try breaking up your text a bit with a picture or two. You can also use bullet points, italics, add different fonts, whatever. The point is that you want your blog to be both enjoyable to read and enjoyable to look at. Make the readers enjoy their visit and they will come back again and aging.

Give Them What They Want: Take some time to research what it is that everyone is pondering. What questions are being asked and what answers are being given? You would be surprised at the number of questions that are all over the forum boards that have no solid answers. If you become the authority and a go to place to find answers then you blog will benefit greatly.

Give Them Something Special: People who are into reading blogs love the idea of an open source world. Within your blog you want to give the readers something they would not normally be privy to such as pricing, trade secrets, and even the occasional rumor; so long as it is a harmless one. Just be careful and don’t go overboard. Know your limits before you begin to blog and you will be all set.

Be Consistent: If you want to build a following you need to be consistent with your posting. One post a day is ideal but whatever you start you need to maintain. Being sporadic with your posting will only be viewed by readers as a letdown and you will lose your audience. Perhaps the worst thing to do is to be ultra-consistent for months on end and then go on vacation for two weeks and not post at all. Does this mean that you are chained to your lap top for the entire trip? No, but if you are not going to be posting invite a guest blogger to do so for you while you are away. The end result will be your subscribers getting what they want and you getting a break.

Stick to a Brand: When you set out to create your blog you need to have clear cut goals in place. The first thing you want to accomplish is the building of your brand. If your blog is to be known for a place where readers can find answers to questions they have then don’t break that mold six months into your blogging life. Once you are established it is very hard to change without suffering major repercussions.

Blogging is a great way to get yourself out there but you need to remember it is no longer a secret for Internet gurus only. Everyone it seems is blogging these days both young and old. In order for your blog to make it in the ever filling pool of blogs you have to go about it just right. Using some ingenuity and some tenacity will go a long way in seeing your blog become the blog in the minds of many a reader.

For years it has been hotly debated as to whether or not Google would give brownie points to those who participate in their AdWords campaigns, which is a form of Pay Per Click (PPC). There are many ‘experts’ in the field who will tell you this is not the case and that there has never been an example of PPC adding to the validity or popularity of your organic rankings as the two are not one and the same. Still there has been growing speculation for some time now that Google does indeed give ‘special treatment’ to those who show them advertising dollar love and a recent study conducted by two NYU professors may have just proved the conspiracy theorists point.

According to professors in Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang in a recent study, the presence of organic listings on a search engine such as Google definitely impacts the click-through rates of PPC advertisements and the same is true for the inverse. This was the first experimental study that evaluated the impact of advertising on search engines examining all three levels of participants, which are the consumers, advertisers, and the search engines themselves, in relation to both organic listings and PPC.

If this is indeed true that Google organic listings are without a doubt being influence by PPC then why do you think that is? Google revenue perhaps? When you think about it Goggle is would be very motivated to have websites that advertise with them be at a higher ranking on their search engine. If more visitors find these websites then more visitors will have a chance to see the advertising making them more effective and thus making the website owners more likely to continue to advertise with Google. Once again it looks as though the all mighty dollar may have spoken.

Of course Google cannot come right out and admit this, nor would they if they wanted to. Organic listings are supposed to only be about SEO and relevance where as anyone can utilize PPC regardless of how SEO-illiterate you are. But just because you spend more money on the advertising side of Google’s AdWords than somebody else, does that meant that you should get top billing in the SERPs? No it does not and for those who spend many months or even years trying to accomplish top rankings the old fashion way it represents an absolute nightmare.

While the evidence is thin at this point in time there are bound to be more than just one set of professors who are curious enough to dig deeper into the on goings of Google and if and when this story is broken, it will be a bombshell. Ghose and Yang plan on releasing a paper titled, ‘Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence,’ but they have yet to say if they will charge for it or not. So in Google’s defense, these professors could just be looking to get rich quick. Then again, they may be on to something big. Even if their story is bogus it is sure to draw a multitude of interest from outside parties looking to find some dirt on the search engine powerhouse.

However, messing with Google is like messing with the Mafia and requires nerves of steel. Because Google is pretty much its own entity they have no one looking over their shoulder and are self-governed so there really are no set of rules that they have to follow that are not their own. To add to that, Google is constantly changing its own ‘rules’ on ranking and SEO requirements and if you decide that you want to cross them then you may not have to sleep with the fishes, but your website’s rankings certainly will.

Only time will tell what the truth is when it comes down to Google and the mystery of the great organic listing influenced by PPC. Just keep in mind though, it is Google, so if they do end up being in the wrong, they simply have to change the rules once again and then they will be in the right. For Google, it is good to be king.

2009 is all but in the books and the New Year is upon us. With the New Year a new decade and comes new sweeping changes for all those that are involved in Internet marketers all across the country. As what seems to be an ongoing theme, the big topic for 2010 will center around search engine giant Google and their latest on goings.The world of SEO and online predictions for the year 2010 are plentiful and there are many articles and blogs abuzz with the ramblings of what is sure to come in this next decade.

Some of the more notable sites that are posting such predictions include SEOmoz.com, BigOakinc.com, and Webmarketinggoup.co.uk just to name a few. While many have their own unique perspective on what can be expected to happen in 2010 they all agree that Google’s new real time search will shake the foundations of Internet marketing.

With that, here are some predictions for the 2010 Internet marketing trends that are likely to come to fruition:

Stay or Go: This whole thing with Goggle now giving the most relevance to real time postings and other such nonsense as opposed to good quality content is sort of laughable. Basically in a nutshell, if you are the latest person to Tweet about a subject you will begin to see your rankings shoot up. This sure has all the makings of abuse doesn’t it? The biggest problem is that Google has not really said what is or isn’t going to be acceptable by the way of abuse. This opens up Pandora’s Box for all sorts of shady characters to come out of the woodworks. With all that some sleazy Internet marketers already do in order to try to gain a leg up on the competition with Google, this seems like a no-brainier that ranking by way of real time posts and the like will lead to SPAM galore. So the real question is will real time ranking stay or goes in 2010? More than likely, unless heavily regulated, it will fade faster than it appeared. Even more likely, Google will reform the current system a few times in 2010 and beyond until it only makes sense for them, but makes even less sense to the rest of the online world.

Tweeting will be Paramount: If you do not have a Twitter account yet, you better go out and get one. If Google’s new approach to ranking stays in full force then you better believe that every Internet marketer out there is going to take full advantage of such services of Twitter. If you do not have a Twitter account and stay active in the Tweeting game then it is an easy prediction that your rankings will fall faster than a lead balloon. You can additionally expect to have other social media websites such as FaceBook and MySpace begin to take a front seat in the world of the search engines. As content that is fresh becomes the stuff of champions (at least in the minds of the SERPs) then it only makes sense that these types of social media sites will see an increase in popularity and by contrast an increase in use. This also makes you wonder what will be the next big marketing social networking website to be formed. 2010 is sure to brining plenty of new social media sites that will try to ride the success of the new real time searching of Google and more than likely one or more will actually make it.

R.I.P. Yahoo: Okay so Yahoo isn’t going to totally die, but they are going to be absorbed for the lack of a better word by Bing. This will lead to a two search engine world. What will probably be seen once the meshing of Yahoo and Bing takes place is a 75 percent market share by King Google and the other 25 percent going to the newly formed entity of Yahoo and Bing. This should be good news for the new entity as Google has clearly established it dominance in the search engine game and subsequently left the two little guys to fight and scrap for whatever searches were left over. Now that the two lowly guys are forming one less lowly guy they can begin the arduous task of trying to wrestle away some of Google’s market share. Because they no longer have to bicker with each other for the scraps of Google they can focus on new and innovative ideas that will hopefully for them lead to more searches.

As the Waters Grow, so too do the Piranhas: With all the changes going on the world of SEO and Internet marketing as a whole you can bet that businesses online marketing budgets will go up exponentially. But as the number of dollars being spent goes up so too will the number of shysters and rip off artist internet marketing companies. 2010 will bring with it the most amounts of swindlers that have ever been seen and in order to protect yourself you need to be sure that you are going to go with an Internet marketing company that can be trusted and that has been around the block a time or two. But more than that you will have to be sure to go with an Internet marketer that has both an open and innovative mind. If you go with an Internet marketer who is stuck in his ways you will simply be throwing your hard earned dollar out the window. Find someone who is not afraid to conform and even experiment when it comes to getting your website known.

Searches will Become Sticky: Bing and Yahoo have really been stepping up this approach and Google is hotly in pursuit. As people conduct searches all of the big boys will aim to answer their queries within the search engine itself instead of sending the visitor off to a random site. This means that even though the search amount may in fact go up on the search engines, the amount of visitors to specific websites may go down. Why does a web surfer need to go to a third party site when Goggle answers all their questions as soon as the search results come back? This represents great news for the search engines but not so great news for the rest of the online community. To that effect it will be more important than ever to perform a PPC campaign that will see your advertisement in the top pages of the SERPs. If the web surfer is getting all the info needed from the search engine result itself you will still have an opportunity to catch their attention and perhaps inspire and impulse click.

Conversion Rate Optimization gets its Due: Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is drastically underestimated when it comes to your return on investment, or ROI. However, using software that utilizes CRO will ultimately help you to determine through testing what will eventually build you a better ROI. This type of information is proving itself invaluable and as the New Year approaches, so too will the notoriety of this technology.

Building Brand Imaging is Vital: With the advent of personalized searches it will now be even harder for new companies to unseat the kings of the SERPs. Because people will now have website suggested for them by the search engines in accordance to their surfing habits, 2010 will represent the year of brand imaging. If your brand image is not clearly spelled out then you may miss out on many or all of the suggested search opportunities that the search engines will be dolling out. While this will not directly affect SEO it sure will affect the way that people need to approach building and branding their good names. It has always been true that if nobody knows who you are then nobody will find you and that statement now carries with it a lot more weight. Now in order to be found you have to have your image clearly spelled out otherwise even the best looking website with all the SEO bells and whistles will be rendered obsolete.

Non-Conformists will Parish: The bottom line is Google is a demi-god and does what it wants. Internet marketing is s tricky game, no doubt, but it is one where you can ill afford to stay stagnant. If you decide that you will not do what Google wants then you can rest assured that your placement on the SERPs will suffer greatly. However, if you are one of the few who can not only conform, but also reform your way of thinking then you will be in for a pleasant 2010 and beyond.Nobody has a crystal ball but there are some predictions that are just easier to make then others. Probably the easiest prediction to make with regards to 2010 is that the world of SEO and Internet marketing will change forever and will never again be what it was in the past. That said, another no-brainer prediction is that those who follow the pied piper that is Google will be lead to the SERPs promise land and those that do not will be lead astray.Like it or not, Google is the dominant factor when it comes to being found online and if you can’t play by their rules, then you probably can’t play in the wonderful world of online recognition. Ultimately the search engine monster is going to do what is best for its bottom line as that is what capitalism is all about, but that doesn’t mean that your website can’t continue to prosper in 2010. You simply need to be sure that you convert your old way of thinking to Google’s new way of thinking or you need to have someone to help to do so. One thing is for sure; 2010 will certainly be an interesting year online.