Quality content.

It doesn’t matter if you’re creating articles, Squidoo lenses, videos or podcasts, your viewers want to be entertained, enlightened, educated and engaged.

How to do personal branding…in video form.

Personal branding and social media post from: Dave Saunders

How to enhance your personal brand online

Now I have  another farewell.

Punkie came to me through a friend.

His original owner passed away and he was ready for a new home. At the time I remember even saying I didn’t want to go to my friend’s house to meet him because I knew we’d be coming home together.

We took to each other instantly and I was so happy to take him home with me. He seemed pretty ok with it too.

Punkie had his peculiarities. I got him with a food and water dish and he wouldn’t eat or drink from anything else. I could leave a plate of food on the coffee table and he wouldn’t touch it. It was either feed him by hand (which I enjoyed doing) or put it in his bowl.

Rides in the car were interesting to say the least. He would dart from one side of the back seat to the other and bark at everything we passed. Eventually I took an idea from the “Dog Whisperer” and took him for a long walk before a trip. That did the trick every time and he’d relax (aka, sleep) in the back.

He loved the car too. If I’d leave the door open while washing the windows, he’d hop right in. Getting him out wasn’t that hard. I’d tell him to get out and he would though I  swear he looked like he was sulking every time.

Anytime was playtime for Punkie too. When I needed a break from working I’d just ask out loud if he wanted to play with his Frisbee and he’d come tearing from around the corner with those thunderous paws of his announcing his approach.

Seriously, I never understood how such a little dog made so much noise walking.

We’ve gone through some rough times together recently and it was always been great knowing that he was there when I’d walk in the door or when I wanted an assurance that someone was there unconditionally.

The neighbors brought the remains over. There’s a big black plastic bag that I don’t want to go near. If I don’t open it, maybe it won’t be him. I don’t want to add a third collar to my collection on the mantle.

Personal branding and social media post from: Dave Saunders

Sometime Change Really Isn’t Any Fun

Seriously, that’s all it takes.

Listen

Ask real questions

BE interested

I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below. What’s on your mind today?

Personal branding and social media post from: Dave Saunders

The Secret to Being More Interesting To Almost Anyone

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Have you ever noticed that when you think of certain product categories you immediately think of a certain brand? Below is a list of product categories. As you glance at each one, what brand name comes to mind?

• Coffee
• Tissue
• Automobile
• Soda
• Pain reliever

Whichever brand you thought of first was part of a carefully planned strategy by each of those brand’s managers. They worked diligently to ensure you thought of their brands first when you thought about their product category.

It is called visibility. The people behind branded products and services use the various strategies I’ve written about in previous blogs to get their products to be first in your mind.

Likewise, as a personal brand, you need a visibility plan that places you first in the minds of your target market people.

Similar to a previous topic I wrote about, Creating a Brand Message, developing a visibility plan is much more involved than a brief blog post can fully convey.

In a nutshell, you can get placed on special projects and task forces at your company, write for your company or industry, speak at industry conferences, lead meetings, get interviewed by the media regarding your industry, and build relationships with people who can connect you to your target market.

Each of these takes a certain amount of preparation or research. Each should get you in front of your target market people and show you in a positive light.

One of the most important things to remember about personal branding is this:

If you don’t brand yourself, someone else will; and it probably won’t be the brand you want!

Don’t let that happen to you.

Brand yourself! (without getting burned)!

**********************

Glory Borgeson is a business coach, author, and speaker.

Do you want some help developing your own personal brand? Glory has created the “Brand Yourself! Coaching Program”. It is a self-paced coaching program you can purchase directly from Borgeson
Consulting. Since it is a self-paced coaching program, it is very affordable – less expensive than traditional coaching by telephone, and you complete it at your own pace.

The “Brand Yourself! Coaching Program” has 10 modules, taking you through each of the essential elements of personal branding.
Check it out on Glory’s website by clicking here.
Or call (630-653-0992)
or e-mail (info@BorgesonConsulting.com) to find out more about it.

Personal branding and social media post from: Dave Saunders

Build Your Personal Brand: Develop a Visibility Plan

In the old days, it was all about managing every last word on your own website to “optimize” your site for the search engines. The problem with this is that SEO is a “cat and mouse game” and Google has a mouse that resembles the Terminator. You can go nuts constantly retuning your site every time Google spins a knob at HQ which causes your #1 ranked page to suddenly become #10.

One solution is to have multiple pages which cover a set of keywords in order to provide more than one search result. This requires multiple domains because most of the search engines filter out results if they all come from the same site. Why not build content on other sites (always, always quality content) and point a single link or banner back at your main site? This has been done in the past under the guise “butterfly marketing” where a business owner registers a dozen domains and points content in towards the “money site.”

Doing it with social media properties takes this concept to the next level. If you select the right Web 2.0 sites for your content, you get indexed and rank very quickly. Most of these sites get money from ad displays so as long as you produce QUALITY content, you’re benefiting them with your creations. Finally, these sites allow people to interlink and comment on your content easily which plugs you into the social community.

Here’s an example to get you started.

First, go to WordTracker to find the keywords you need to make any of this possible. They offer a 7 day, fully-functional free trial so there’s no reason not to try this.

When you log into your WordTracker account, you’ll get the initial view.

Click Keyword Universe.

The next sequence is where I do 90% of my work in Wordtracker.

For this example, I entered Vitamin C in the Related Keywords box and clicked Proceed…you’ll have to wait for up to 60 seconds after doing this.

Next, scroll down to see a list of keywords that WordTracker thinks are related to what you entered. For this example, I’m just going to click Vitamin C beside the 1. Over on the right, the display will change to show up to 300 phrases which contain Vitamin C.

Click Click here to add all keywords to your basket and then click Click here for Step 3 at the bottom of the window.

In the next window click Competition Search

In the next window, this is where we get to do some very cool stuff that is very annoying to do without WordTracker.

First, at the top the keywords popup starts with 1-100 selected. We’re going to do competition research for just this first 100 keywords to find out how many searches (on average) happen per day for each keyword compared to the number of other pages there are in Google which already match that phrase.

To do that, click the Google checkbox and the click Proceed.

After a short wait, the screen changes and we can see the first 100 keyword research results. If you wanted to do research for keywords 101-200, you’d change the selection in the popup menu, check the Google box and click proceed. It seems a little tedious and I think WordTracker does this on purpose. If they made this process too fast, Google might be forced to find a way to shut them down.

Ok, what did we find? Check out the very first result.

“Amount of vitamin C in energy drinks” the KEI number is based on a formula that compares searches to the number of competing results. Anything higher than 10 is worth your attention. We’ve found a 400 so that’s really good.

This phrase gets about a dozen searches a day and there are 0 other pages that contain this phrase?

Jackpot

I then went to hubpages.com and build a hub page that provides information about the “Amount of vitamin C in energy drinks”

In two hours, I ended up with 4 pages that ranked for this phrase. Two from Digg, and two from hubpages. This is a short term result. Things will shift around a bit over time, but the point here is that I was able to find a keyword with very low competition and got my own content indexed in a very short period of time. This didn’t require any dirty tricks and it will work for any niche.

In the above screen capture, I searched for the phrase in quotes. This forces Google to return results only if they match the phrase exactly. In my lucky find of a keyword phrase that had 0 other so-called literal matches, that makes it look like I’m the only one who’s showing up in Google. That would be true if I expected other people to search for that phrase in quotes as well…and I don’t.

So what are my results when I remove the quotes? Google will try to find anything that seems to talk about the searched phrase which means a lot more results. In fact, I get over 850,000 suggestions from Google when searching for amount of Vitamin C in energy drinks without the quotes.

Will you look at that? I took this screen shot 2 days after creating the rest of the example and I have the top 2 results of 850,000.

Yahoo was kind enough to give me the #1 slot of 3,170,000 “close matches".”

The new search engine on the block, Bing, gave me the top two out of 1,740,000 results.

I used hubpages in this example and there are plenty of other sites which can be used as well, including your own blog. This isn’t something you do once, but rather it should be a regular process of building content around your niche that is speaking to the things people are actually entering into the search engines.

Building quality content on the Internet is a long-lasting strategy for building a steady flow of traffic to your website. I know a lot more about SEO than what I’m demonstrating here and I used none of that knowledge to make the above example work. In a more competitive space, it would take a little more effort to get results like these, but if you are constantly building new properties and monitoring keyword trends in WordTracker, you will be found and you will receive a steady stream of website traffic, new leads, new sales and mo’ money. It takes effort so either build the habit of doing it yourself, or get someone else to do it for you.

Personal branding and social media post from: Dave Saunders

Using Authority Sites To Quickly Dominate a Keyword Phrase In the Search Engines