Michael Knight is my mortgage adviser (noooo, not that Michael Knight ) and I gave him some advice on how to present and brand himself to stand out from the crowd a bit more.

Michael hasn’t (at the time of writing) been brave enough to implement all my suggestions, but he loved the advice I gave him:

Gordon started off as a mortgage client and has now moved to marketing guru status!! He has a no-nonsense approach to marketing and web design and has really encouraged me to be myself when promoting Barton Mortgage Services.

As he says, “Don’t talk like a lobotomised corporate drone – express your personality!”

From his constructive feedback, I think I’m getting on the right course at last.

I can thoroughly recommend Gordon to anyone who wants to shift their personal perceptions.

Michael Knight, mortgage advisor
www.MichaelKnightMortgages.com

I helped Steve Lucas (one of our therapists from The Nightingale Clinic) with how to write more compelling content for his blog (Counselling Central).  This is what Steve had to say:

If you’re serious about taking your business to the next level I unreservedly recommend talking to Gordon.

Having started my own counselling business some time ago I needed to optimise my marketing to reach a wider audience, and expand on the services I was currently offering. The meetings I had with Gordon were a turning point for me.

Gordon’s engaging, knowledgeable and professional approach gave me greater confidence to finally start making positive changes to my marketing!

He offered me quick win practical solutions for my website development as well as long-term suggestions to consider for my other marketing needs.

Thank you, Gordon!

Steven Lucas, counsellor
www.counsellingcentral.com

photo credit: boite-en-valise

After something of a hiatus in my updates to this website (and my work on Personality Marketing), I’m coming back with a slightly revised focus.

Essentially, I’m going to be talking about, and demonstrating, how to use your personality in your social media marketing.  In particular, I’ll be showing you how to use video and audio to enhance your website, and your online marketing efforts and profile.

But before I get into all that, check out the video below.  It’s been around a while, but it’s well worth watching if you have any doubt at all as to whether you should be getting involved with Facebook, Twitter, and all the other Web 2.0 stuff you keep hearing about.

Let me hear your comments – do you agree with this?  What experience have you had with social media marketing?  What’s your biggest challenge?

Let me know – I’d love to hear from you!

I’ve often bemoaned the lack of personality and imagination in most storefront / shop signage.  However, the following post from illustrates why you should always get a native speaker to double-check your signage:

24 Most Ridiculously Thought Out Storefront Signs

I came across a guy called Andy Wibbels today, author of GO Blog Wild, and think he articulates what I’m talking about in Personality Marketing very well (in fact, damn near word-for-word!).

To quote:

I mean what I say and I say what I mean. It is part of my ‘brand’ but also inherently me. If you don’t like it that is fine: I don’t want your business. I’ve worked for uptight people that hide behind jargon and it is tiring.

I couldn’t agree more!  Not everyone will like a New Year’s resolution kind of post entitled “Five Ways You’ll Fuck Up 2009” but if you do (and I do, for what it’s worth), then you know you’re going to like the guy behind the post.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting everyone start using the f-word all over the place (it gets really boring/annoying really quick) but, as Andy says, in some circumstances, only a really good shot of Anglo-Saxon gets the job done.

After all, last time you dropped something heavy on your foot, hammered your thumb or, for the third time in a week, cracked your head on the sharp corner of a cupboard in the utility room when standing up after putting stuff in the washing machine (can you guess which one applies to me? ), I’m willing to bet you probably didn’t say “Oh dearie me, that hurt a bit….”

But the more general point here is this – are you being authentic in your communications?  If someone reads what you’ve written, can they ‘hear’ your voice?  Or are you censoring yourself for fear of offending some faceless somebody somewhere?

One word – DON’T.  By all means, be polite and don’t be unnecessarily rude or offensive, but BE YOURSELF.

As one of the commenters on Andy’s post about Profanity in Business Blogging says:

“I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not”

Amen!

I came across a post today from Scott Ginsberg (aka That Guy With The Nametag), where he talks about 11 ways to inspire and influence people through imperfection and inadequacy.

Yes, counter-intuitive as it may seem, presenting yourself to the world, including your clients, warts and all, is actually one of the more effective ways to build rapport (as well as being a lot less effort than pretending to be perfect and know all the answers!)

Scott lists the 11 ways as:

1. Acknowledge and embrace all aspects of who you are. 
2. Probe your darkness. 
3. Recognize and visit your shadow.
4. Be willing to talk about that shadow. 
5. Acknowledge your slips. 
6. Lead with vulnerability.
7. Practice radical honesty. 
8. Practice self-deprecating humor. 
9. Practice self-disclosing weaknesses. 
10. Practice integrating your humanity into your leadership role. 
11. Reduce the distance.

I absolutely agree with him, and it’s a key component of Personality Marketing that I’ve talked about in the past.

People do business with people they know, like and trust, and if you’re not being true to who you are, and how you feel and operate, you’re going to come unstuck eventually.

Don’t try to be all things to all people – be yourself, and be comfortable with your clients being themselves too.

To read the rest of Scott’s excellent article, go to the HELLO! My Name Is Blog.

Today’s message: Don’t be afraid to tell the truth about who you are – vulnerability is strength.

I came across this quote just now, which I completely agree with:

“I can’t give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: Trying to please everybody.” ~Herbert B. Swope

As I’ve said before, trying to please everyone just means kissing your ass goodbye!

Brian Mullan, BAMCOM International Ltd

My Dad asked me for a quick website, as he is retiring from Inmarsat in May 2009, and setting up his own consultancy in maritime safety and security, particularly focussed on satellite communications and international regulatory issues.

You can find his site at Maritime Safety and Security Consultancy – BAMCOM International – Brian Mullan.

(And yeah, I know the link title is a bit long, but I’m trying to help him out with SEO).

Also, I have not yet given the site a ‘personality injection’ - that will come in due course.  The main thing was getting the framework right.

Just a quick post today with a video from Jimmy Vee “The Five Foot High Marketing Guy”, and co-author of Gravitational Marketing.

In this video, Jimmy talks about why “same is lame”, and why you need to find out what’s unique about you and your business.  Check it out!

(You can find the original post on their blog here)

From one short-arse to another….”You tell ‘em Jimmy!!”

If you own, run or are otherwise responsible for, or dependent on, a website, you know you need to be doing search engine optimisation (SEO), right?

Well, there’s a great post today from Hubspot.com entitled “Top 10 Most Egregious SEO Mistakes” (great word, that egregious!).

You can find the whole post by following the link above, but I could rant for hours about points #4 and point #1.

My personal experience of website designers who claim to ‘do’ SEO but don’t have the first bloody clue…

I run several websites, and have had countless web designers spam me with offers to ‘improve’ my website for me.  One particularly memorable offender (because I spoke to them on the phone), was BT (yes, that BT, as in BT Tradespace).

They’d offered to ‘improve’ The Nightingale Clinic website, and he pointed me to an example client site he was very proud of.  It took me all of about 10 seconds to point out to him some huge, glaring errors from an SEO and marketing standpoint (and I wish I could remember the URL or company name). 

Here’s a few quick highlights of the problems (and if you have a web designer touting you for business, listen up, and look for these things)…

The company was a health and beauty clinic in London, offering cellulite reduction using the Endermologie machine (quite well known, to the point potential clients may well search for that specific system).  Here’s what I found:

1. The URL of the website was the name of the company. Ooooookay – sorta justifiable.  Unfortunately, it was some abstract name that meant nothing to anyone except themselves, and had no relevance to the treatments or the machine.
2. The title of every single page was the name of the company – AARGH!  Absolutely THE most important on page SEO factor is have your keywords in your page titles!
3. Nowhere on the site did the key phrases like “cellulite reduction in London” or “endermologie treatment London” or anything similar appear.
4. Lots of the wording was in images or Flash, with no descriptive text so wasn’t indexable
5. The photo was obviously stock imagery, rather than decent quality photos of the clinic and staff, etc.

I could go on, but it was an absolute disaster from an SEO standpoint.

Read that post from Hubspot, and check out their list, and read the comments below the post as well, as there’s some other useful stuff to watch out for there too.

So, next time you get approached by (or ‘interview’) a website design firm that claims to know SEO – check their portfolio. 

Think about what words you would use to find their clients websites, and then try searching for them in Google. 

If they don’t rank anywhere, or if they fall foul of the mistakes in the Hubspot post – RUN, DON’T WALK!

And if you want someone to review your website, or the portfolio of a website designer you’re thinking of working with, call me on 07971 813322 - I’d love to help!