I just have to rave about how good Apple’s customer is every now and then, plus I found the PERFECT case for my iPhone 4!
Branding
You may remember that this past summer I had the opportunity to meet Shoemoney. He was a pretty cool guy in person, and based on our discussions before and after the fact I have a lot of respect for the hustle he puts in trying to deliver cool services that are actually useful for the affiliate marketing vertical. He has proven his ability to leverage search engines to his benefit in both advertising and rankings. So if you are trying to get your site to rank, a good question to ask might be “What Would Shoemoney Do?”.
Understanding SEO
Most people who are just starting out with a website assume that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is some kind of witchcraft because they have heard the horror stories of people paying “experts” that simply regurgitate search engine theory yet have nothing to show for it. SEO is no different than anything else in life, if you follow the models which have a proven track record you are much more likely to succeed. Put simply, SEO is the ability to generate relevant content that humans care about and that Google can read in order to see its relevance. If you design your website for humans, with a few refinements you can totally dominate your keywords.
Having the right tools
Building a house without a hammer or nails is incredibly difficult. With no blueprints you are back in the stone ages just kind of piling things together hoping for good results with a sturdy foundation to continue building on. I can promise you that the people who are serious about building something valuable around a keyword are using the right tools to plan and build their “online house” for Google & Bing. Shoemoney recently released a cool tool that is really just a (cheaper!) spin-off of his Shoemoney Tools that not only gives people information on how they compare to their competition for keywords, but gives them the building blocks to rank more competitively and start producing real results.
The new tools name is even a spin off of Free Credit Report by calling it FreeSEOReport.com. Wait – free? Shoe is confident enough that you are going to love the new service that he allows you to generate your first report for free to keep, brand, and tweak for your needs. No bones about it though, this tool was designed to make money and costs money for any additional reports but he has pretty flexible/generous terms for people looking at unique implementations.
The Experience
Using Free SEO Report was actually pretty darn easy, just as the website says it was pretty much just 3 steps:
1. Enter the URL of the website you want data for
2. Enter the keyword you want ranking analytics around
3. Give it your e-mail and submit
The amazing thing for this report, is that even though it runs a series of queries against Google, scrapes data from your closest competitors to generate a truly custom PDF report with suggestions and feedback in ~ 4 minutes is pretty impressive. When was the last time your SEO guy got back to you with mountains of accurate and actionable data in 4 minutes? Exactly.
Cost: Free for the first report, then either $10/report or $19.95/month for unlimited reports
So next time you are thinking about ways to improve your traffic, boost your rankings in Google just go on over to http://freeseoreport.com for a very cost effective way to make an actionable difference for your website.
So as you may (or if new, may not) have noticed I have done quite a bit of housecleaning around the blog. What used to be a rounded blue and orange template heavy with added graphics and other extras is now a clean and spartan white design that tries to focus on the key aspects of this blog that people seem to enjoy.
“Why switch it up? The other blogging format seemed just fine?”
I felt that I owed the (2 actual) readers I have a better reading experience that was easier to navigate, more pleasing to look at, and offered a much improved commenting platform. I understand that new visitors are going to likely be annoyed by the lightbox pop-up added to the site, but it needs to be understood that in order for this blog to exist in its current form (minimal advertising) it is important to build an strong communication channel through the 7-week course.
What do you think of the new design? The code is supposed to be clean and SEO friendly out of the box and it has given me a chance to learn some CSS and PHP, although it has also reaffirmed that I will never be a coding professional myself, and instead will hire out the right people to make sure it is done right and done in a timely manner.
Interviews are daunting, and quite frankly they suck. With the economy how it is, what is a potential employee supposed to do in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of the applicants? In a word: Personal Brand.
People like @Garyvee have been promoting personal brands as a way to get to the next level, but what about if you can’t afford to jump right into the lush lifestyle of a talent agency representing you with speaking deals, book gigs and other lavish luxuries that people in that caliber are enjoying from their personal brand? What if, as crazy as it sounds you need to “take the deal” as Seth Godin says and go for a ‘regular’ job to earn more money?
All Hail the Personal Brand
While some employers may be timid about hiring an up and coming personality that is building their brand, the smart employers also know that the value you can bring to the table far exceeds the risk of losing you to bigger and better things. How will they know this? Because someone who is working on building their personal brand through blogs, social media, forums and other forms of communication really understands what is going on in the technology, marketing, communication, pr etc.
Personal brands are a great way to showcase your creativity, enthusiasm for whatever category you want to work in and give a potential employer some insight into who you ARE as opposed to just what you can DO. Personalities are equally as important as abilities to many employers, how are you building your brand?
We all know that the notion of a brand is enticing, and that people are willing to pay more for a Coke simply because it says “Coke” on the side and not just a random house brand. We also know that when Coke brings out a new product, if we liked the original we are much more likely to try the new product.. emotionally we are tempted to dive head first into products, services, locations etc we wouldn’t have otherwise because of how a brand makes us feel.
What does a brand mean when it is a person though? Does a celebrity have brand value that is nearly instantaneous? The answer is HELL YES they do. For an example look at the Twitter account started by LeBron James.. in a short 2 hour period after sending his first tweet that simply announced he was on Twitter.. he has a staggering 127,225 followers (and counting!!). So what is this brand equity worth? Well if you read this article you might believe that each follower is worth $6.19; and that value multiplied by his follower base adds up to nearly $800,000 in only 2 HOURS.
According to Ad Age, each person who ‘Likes’ a Facebook page is worth $3.60/year which is probably pretty fair if you were comparing the cost of traditional media to the reach of social media. If you think that this size of audience simply can’t be worth this much money, keep in mind that Jeremy Schoemaker (@shoemoney) had roughly 90k followers and PROFITED $50k in about 7 months time on Twitter.. the value is real and so are the paychecks.
How are you building your brand and finding your audience? It is likely worth much more than you think right now.
