Personal Branding

and why they do business with you. Once you understand the value relationship that you provide, you can then begin to define messages that describe that relationship. This messaging effectively becomes your brand. Without defining an effective and consistent brand message, the process of branding is virtually impossible.

Once you have your brand messaging in place, the key is to maintain it in a consistent format for all of your materials and promotional efforts. Your website or blog, press releases, articles that you write and anything else that you use to promote your brand identity in the marketplace must be meticulously consistent, focusing on the same brand message. If you fail to do this, or if your message is ambiguous, people will not understand your brand and will not be able respond to it. The ultimate objective of personal branding is to build brand loyalty so that your customers keep coming back to you.

There are millions and millions of people with millions and millions of websites promoting millions and millions of products. Clearly it is information overload, as every one of these Internet marketers is constantly putting out messages, promotions, and information describing a product, trying to entice potential buyers.

In the days before the Internet, marketers relied on printed matter and material to deliver their messages and to promote their products. Since a printed piece is permanent, much time and effort went into the development of the copy for the piece, in terms of ensuring that it was focused polishing it, and making sure that it provided significant value. This is because the cost of developing a printed piece was so high. Because it was permanent, if there were mistakes or if the piece was ineffective, it would be a waste of money.

Since the Internet operates at the speed of light, the permanence of information is no longer a problem from a production standpoint. If something is wrong, it can be quickly and easily changed. However after information is published on the Internet, it becomes permanent. Once you put information out there, it is almost impossible to take it back.

But the biggest problem is that the Internet is instantaneous, and people tend to just put words there, instead of defining a message and placing solid content there. In the world of the Internet, content is king. Content is valuable information that somebody wants to invest their time to consume. If the content is not valuable, they have no reason to spend their time to read it. If you put information on the Internet that is not rich in content value, you're wasting your time because nobody will read and react to what you put there.

The key then is to ensure that that the content in all of your Internet marketing efforts is solid, weighted with value, and focused so that it provides significant value to anyone who takes the time to read it. Furthermore, as your content becomes widely read and distributed on the Internet, people will begin to seek your information out because of its value. You've now begun the process of building a brand for your content. Without good content however, your brand becomes meaningless.

There is of course one other thing to consider. Good content by definition requires outstanding writing. If you're not a good writer, realize this deficiency, and seek professional help to create professional content. If the content is poorly written, ambiguous, or unclear, it will not be seen as valuable, and will therefore not help to develop your brand.

Many people however fail to optimize the value of their blog because they don't use it correctly. The blog is not your personal journal or diary although that is what the term blog implies. The word blog of course is derived from the two words-web log. Many bloggers wax whimsical in their blogs, expressing their personal feelings and observations about life in general. This is fun if you have a lot of time on your hands, but the fact of matter is there are so many blogs out there that it is impossible for anybody to read even a fraction of them. For that reason, unless your blog contains specific value to a specific group of people, nobody will read it.

A blog is an important component of thought leadership. Thought leadership is where you demonstrate your mastery of a topic or a skill, through your words, thoughts and ideas. Effective blogging is an excellent way to promote your thought leadership concerning a specific topic, particularly if it's business related. If you are disseminating valuable new information that people are eager to digest, they will read your blog religiously.

For that reason, the blog should be devoted to your specific niche, and your specific expertise within that niche. Framing your blog entries around current events certainly make sense, but the critical assessment of a blog entry should be the value that a reader derives from reading it. There's a standard transaction that occurs every time somebody reads your blog. They are giving you their valuable time in return for your valuable information. If you're not providing them with information that has value, there's no point for them to read the blog.

Blog entries need to be made on a regular basis. Many people start a blog only to realize it's a tremendous effort to maintain it, and it falls by the wayside. Unless blog entries are made on virtually a daily or weekly basis, it loses its relevance, and your readers start to go elsewhere. Maintaining a blog in a current status and providing highly relevant and compelling information on a regular basis, is not that easy. This is why you see so many blogs that are useless. If you do not have the time or the skills to write well and to write on a timely basis, it might be worth your while to hire professional writer to maintain your blog for you.

Marketing on the Internet is a whole new ballgame, with new strategies and tactics being developed and deployed daily. With the advent of Web 2.0, marketing across the Internet is becoming a more complex and sophisticated process. Web 2.0 incorporates rich media, social networking, and a number of other new strategies and technologies all designed to help the Internet marketer be more effective.

Despite all this new technology however, unless you are firmly rooted in the principles of solid advertising and marketing, your efforts will largely be unsuccessful. This is because the Internet provides a rich medium for marketing, but the classic principles still apply. Classic marketing theory extends as far back as the early 1900s, but really came into its own in the 60s when David Ogilvy published Ogilvy on Advertising.

Arguably the biggest take away from Ogilvy's book was the concept of the Big Idea. The Big Idea is exactly what it says-the core message of your advertising effort. Without a big idea, advertising tends to ramble and become both disjointed and unfocused, completely losing its effect. Even for the best copywriters in the world, the process of coming up with a big idea is typically the hardest part of creating a successful advertising campaign.

Before you begin to do any marketing or advertising, spend some time and define what your Big Idea is. What are you trying to accomplish? What do you want the customer to do when they read your advertising? What action you want them to take and what do you want them to think about your offering? The Big Idea is not easy to come up with but it is an essential element of your advertising and marketing efforts. Without defining your Big Idea, you risk wasting tremendous dollars, time and energy on your marketing efforts.

To be an effective Internet marketer, you need to understand the current technologies that define the field today. However you also need to have a solid base in traditional advertising techniques and theory. Spend some time and do some research to find the concepts the old masters developed, and apply them to the new world of the Internet. Doing so will put you head and shoulders above the competition who typically do not take this important step.

Originally conceived as a project by two Stanford PhD candidates, the Google search engine was first designed to crawl across websites, and identify links back to other websites. The theory was that finding common links back to websites would help identify which websites have the richest content. By the way, this is a fairly recent phenomenon-the original project was conceived in team 1996, and Google itself was incorporated in 1998.

Today Google searches account for 70% of all Internet searches, with approximately 200,000,000 people per month searching about 70 times each. In order to feed these searches, and to make them relevant, the Google monster is continuously devouring all new content on the web. Google uses extremely sophisticated algorithms, to parse content to search the websites and to make judgments on the value of the content from its ongoing efforts to devour everything that it can find.

In the early days of Internet marketing, it was very common to promote websites using standard tactics, advertising either on TV, in direct mail or in magazines, driving people to the websites. Although this tactic is still in use today, the cost of deploying electronic or printed advertising can become cost prohibitive, and can severely limit the marketer's ability to promote the websites.

A much more efficient method of generating web traffic is through feeding the Google monster by producing a steady stream of articles and press releases about your business and about yourself. The articles and press releases should be available on your websites, and should also be pushed out into various services and media across the Internet, so that more people find them. If you're content is very well written, they will become interested in your perspective, and will find their way back to your websites. Furthermore by attaching the articles and press releases to your websites itself, the Google monster will continue continuously parse it for content, and improve your ranking in the search engines.

The key of course in doing this, is to make sure that your content is exceptionally well-written. If you're not a very good writer, think about hiring a professional copywriter to write this material for you. If your articles and press releases are shoddy or shabby in any way, you'll actually be doing yourself more harm than good, because your brand will become associated with inferior quality as well.