Entries from September 2009 ↓

Last week, I was talking with a colleague who was telling me some of the challenges she was facing with clients new to the online world.

“They have a really hard time understanding a lot of this search engine stuff.  To them, SEO is Voodoo.”

First, I laughed.  Then, I got angry.  It annoys me when one group of people uses knowledge to confuse or mislead another group rather than to educate.  This is what business owners are experiencing with internet marketing in general, and SEO specifically.  Certain people and companies that know more about SEO than the business owners have led them to believe that SEO is a complex dark art that can only be learned by a select few with years of experience, and who have made livestock sacrifices at the feet of Stan the T-Rex at Google’s campus.  Both parts of that statement are equally false.

So who’s responsible for spreading this confusion around SEO?
There are two main culprits in the misapprehension of SEO.  The first is the major search engines, and yes, I’m going to single out Google.

Google has spent years convincing us all that they’re Not Evil.  I’ve used their products.  I’ve given them a lot of my personal info.  I’ve visited their campus.  I’m fairly convinced that they are Not Evil.  Despite this, whether purposely or not, Google has mysticized their search algorithm.

I am not blind.  I understand the reasons for not publishing their algorithms, but the secrecy and mystique goes beyond that.  I attended a seminar at Google earlier this year where one of the speakers could not make the event, and so someone from their product team came on as a substitute.  The sub was obviously not as prepared as the speaker would have been.  That’s not to say he couldn’t speak intelligently to the topic.  He could.  What he wasn’t prepared for was what he could and could not reveal.  During that speech, a fellow Googler was sitting in the front row with an open laptop and giving thumbs up or down to pieces of information that could and could not be shared with the room.  The end effect of this was to leave everyone in that room feeling like Google is sitting on info so valuable, that it could alter the course of history itself.  It must be magic!

The other culprit, and this one is bigger than even Google, is Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs).  SEOs pitch customers by telling them that the process of optimizing a site for search is so complex and requires so much expertise that the client couldn’t possibly do it herself.  That pisses me off, because quite frankly, it’s bullshit.

Demonstrating expertise in an area is a common way to sell services.  If that expertise is scarce, and you’re one of the few people who possesses it, you can charge a premium.  This is why professionals with highly specialized skill sets get paid a lot of money.  Need open heart surgery?  You need a cardio-thoracic surgeon.  Being sued for millions of dollars?  You need a lawyer.  Did the machinery that runs your factory make a loud bang noise and is now spewing black smoke?  You need an engineer.  Do you want to optimize your website for search?  You need an SEO firm…  or a few books and a willingness to learn.

SEO isn’t Voodoo.  SEO is a skill like any other.  In fact, it’s a skill you can pick up fairly quickly.

If SEO isn’t Voodoo, how does it work?

At their most basic level, all major search engines work the same way.  They match a user’s search query to the content of a website.  How they determine which website is going to be displayed first depends on how well a site answers two questions.  First, how closely does the content match the query?  Second, how important is the website?

The way to nail the first question should be obvious.  Create content that includes the queries that people are searching for.  If you want people to find your site when they search for “dog grooming” make sure your site has dog grooming content on it.

The second question seems like it’s more complex, but really, it isn’t.  To determine how important a site is, Google and everyone else looks at two things above all else: 1) how many other sites link to it?  2) are those other sites important?  So, to nail that portion of the analysis, you need to get other important sites to link to you.

Am I over-simplifying?  Of course, but honestly, if you know this, you’re way ahead of the curve. This information is freely available all over the web. The problem is it’s buried under a ton of less important stuff.  There are a host of other factors that play into ranking, but their impact is minimal as compared to what I just outlined.   SEO follows the 80-20 rule.  80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.  All of the rest of the effort gives you incremental gains at best.

Does that mean I shouldn’t hire someone to SEO my site?

I didn’t say that.  I do believe that some sites don’t need to be SEO’d at all.  For instance, if you run a blog, aside from running a SEO-friendly blog theme, I don’t think you should waste time on SEO.  Instead, focus on creating great content that people will want to link to.  SEO will take care of itself.

In other instances, SEO can be very beneficial.  If you’re a local business with a niche product, SEO can be an excellent source of traffic.

At this point, you need to decide if you want to learn how to SEO yourself or if you want to hire someone.  The advantage to hiring someone is that you don’t need to take the time to learn a new skill and suffer through the pitfalls that come with learning.  This should also be your gauge of who to hire.  Hire the SEO firm that offers you a proven track record of results, and promises to save you time and headaches, while providing a quality service.  Do not hire the SEO firm that tells you that you need to hire them because SEO is just too complicated to be done by anyone other than them.

Whether you decide to SEO yourself, or whether you decide to hire someone to do it for you, all I ask is that you not be scared of search engines.  SEO is not Voodoo.  It’s just misunderstood.

What’s your take?  Have I over-simplified things?  Do you think SEO should be performed by a professional at all costs?  Are you a practitioner of Voodoo and are offended that I compared your religion to SEO?

When you enjoy what you do for a living, you have a hard time disconnecting from it.  You tend to see the world around you through the lens of your “work.”  Last weekend, I unwound by visiting Marché Jean-Talon, a large local farmer’s market, with my better half.  Despite being as disconnected from work as I could be, I still managed to see small business and marketing lessons all around.

Here is the story of my day, and the lessons I learned.

1. Customers are willing to pay more for quality and service

After hunting for parking for fifteen minutes, we eventually found a spot and walked two blocks to the market.  The lack of parking was no coincidence.  The place was packed.  I thought local farmers couldn’t make a living anymore because everyone wants to buy their food cheaper at big box supermarkets imported from some banana republic?  Apparently, these consumers didn’t get the memo.  They were out in droves.

Even someone as inept at gardening and farming as me could quickly tell that the produce on display here was of higher quality than the stuff I had bought earlier that week at the supermarket.  Not only that, at the supermarket, I’m lucky if I can find a clerk who isn’t running away from me.  Here, nearly every person working in one of these stalls had a smile and was pleasantly chatting with a customer. Sure the prices are higher, but I for one am willing to pay a little more for a decent tomato and a human interaction. Judging by the crowd, I’m not alone.

2. You must differentiate yourself

We immersed ourselves in the throng of people and started perusing the aisles.  It wasn’t long before I was overwhelmed with options.  If you’ve ever been to a large farmer’s market, you know that pretty much everyone is selling the same thing.  Sure, different farms sell different things, but there is always at least 3 people selling the same fruit, vegetable or other food, and oftentimes far more.  There must have been ten stalls selling tomatoes.

So, in such a situation, how do you convince people to buy from you?  Price won’t work, because people who are shopping for high quality produce, don’t care about price.  Quality is important, but arguably everyone around has quality products.  You need something to differentiate yourself.

One stall had built a fruit sculpture.  Another stall was actually boiling corn on the spot and selling it with butter and salt.  Another stall was staffed by a woman who had bright red hair that was sticking straight up.  These stalls caught my attention, and they were the ones that had the best chance of getting my business.

3. Free samples work

As we continued to wander around and fill up our bags with fresh produce, I noticed a trend.  Just about every stall I had bought from, had first let me sample their produce before I bought it.  There are two lessons to be learned here.  The first is that if you’re hungry on a Saturday afternoon, and don’t feel like spending any money, you can probably eat your fill off of the free samples at a farmer’s market.  The second is that offering a free sample of a quality product works, as my bags of veggies could attest to.

Many businesses are very scared of this practice, because of the cost of producing free stuff, whether in time, or in money.  The fear is that if the product exists for free, why would anyone buy it?  The internet has aggravated this debate with its easy access to free information, making content publishers cry foul.

Despite this, the fact of the matter is that free works. It works especially well when you give away a small piece for free and then charge for the whole thing.  Don’t be fooled, though.  Samples will only work if the product is good enough to make someone want to pay for it.  The sample is just the mechanism of distributing the knowledge that the product is that good.

4. If everyone else is doing it, and you’re not, you lose

As I came to my realization about the free samples, I began to pay more attention to the stalls that were doing the free thing.  The vast majority of the stalls were doing it.  There were only a small handful that were not.  It’s no coincidence that those stalls were the ones that had the smallest crowds around them.

Sometimes the market (no pun intended) forces you in a certain direction.  Even if there was a time when those farmers could have still sold their produce without giving samples, that time ended when most of the other farmers started doing it.  Follow the market, and don’t get left behind.  You might not always like where it’s going, but you still need to stay on top of it, otherwise, your competitors are going to leave you in the dust.

5. Customers value personality

After a couple of grueling (and delicious) hours of shopping, we decided to stop at the crepe stand in the middle of the market.  Crêperie du marché could probably make a lot of money, simply by existing in its current location.  What made it truly special, and something that I don’t mind telling you about, is that they went the extra mile.

I waited in line to order order our crepes, and as I did so, I noticed the gentleman taking the orders wore a striped shirt in the Parisian style.  When I finally began speaking to him, it was plainly obvious from his accent that he clearly was French.  The shirt wasn’t just a gimmick to sell more crepes.  It was who he was.  Unlike the majority of business transactions that I perform on a regular basis, where I’m lucky if the person on the other side even bothers to say hello, and a “How are you?” is an unexpected courtesy, I actually had a conversation with this gentleman.

He told me about the business, how long it had been there, informed me that they would be moving locations for the winter months, but would be staying open for that season for the first time since they opened.  He was genuine, and friendly, and had personality.  Then he handed me a loyalty card, and asked, “Do you come here often?”

“I will now,” I replied.

6. If you’re human, customers forgive ineptitude

We sat down at a bench as we waited for our names to be called out to collect our freshly-made crepes.  The entire process was visible to everyone in the market.  The man who collected the order would write it down on a scrap of paper, and hand it to the guy who would make the crepe or waffle, who would then pass it to the guy who filled it with the right sauce and/or fruit.  The part of me that used to manage operations cringed.  Their workflow process needed some work.

In the fifteen to twenty minutes that we sat there waiting for, and then eating our crepes, the four person staff managed to make at least three or four mistakes on orders.  Despite this, not a single customer got angry.  How is this possible?  Aren’t customers supposed to get enraged whenever a mistake is made?  Not necessarily.  Not if they see your business as people, and not as a machine.  People are fallible.  We make mistakes.  Everyone recognizes this implicitly, and so, when a person – especially a nice person – makes a mistake he is more likely to be forgiven.  When a corporate machine makes a mistake, we get angry, because these corporate machines are supposed to be infallible for the sake of efficiency.  If you’re human, you get a second chance.  If you’re a machine, you get replaced by a better machine.

Business lessons are all around us every day, we just need to keep our eyes open, and we’ll notice what works and what doesn’t.

What lessons have you learned from everyday life?  What other non-traditional sources of learning do you use?

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about words like “obsession” and “passion.” A good part of that is because Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the most obsessive and passionate guys around, is promoting his book, Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have pre-ordered it, and I suggest you do the same. Gary’s an interesting guy, and a case study about how to turn an obsession into a 60-million dollar a year business.

All of this talk about obsession, however, has me asking myself the question whether obsession is truly necessary for success? For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to define obsession as an interest so important that it becomes one of the three most important things in your life. I think that’s a fair definition, because some would go as far as saying that obsession is the single most important thing in your life. I think that’s too limiting, so I’m being a little more generous. Even Gary Vee would have to agree with me that family is more important than anything else, and yet, no one’s going to argue that Gary’s obsessed with wine and with sports.

In my mind the easiest way to answer this question is to make two lists. One of things that I’m obsessed with, and a second of things that I’ve succeeded at. Now, compare the two lists. The simple fact of the matter is that anyone who does this exercise will surely find that she has succeeded at things that she is not obsessed with. I’ve succeeded at many things in life that I’m not obsessed with. In fact, I’ve succeeded at things I didn’t even like.

Obsession is not necessary to succeed.

So what’s the big deal about it, then? Well, let’s say we tweak those lists we made earlier. Keep the list of things you’re obsessed with, but now compare it to a list of things that you’re truly happy doing. I’ll bet anything there’s a much closer correlation. I know in my case there is. Obsession isn’t necessary for success, it’s necessary for happiness.

Whether, you’re a writer, an artist, a businessperson, a stay-at-home dad, or anything else, being obsessed won’t guarantee you succeed at what you do. What it will do is make you happy in doing it. When you’re happy doing something, you’re more likely to work harder at it, and put in the hustle necessary to become successful.

Obsession isn’t necessary for success, but it sure as hell makes it easier and a lot more fun.

A hundred years ago, there weren’t a ton of options for advertising your business.  You could post fliers or you could advertise in the local newspaper.  I suppose you could also have hired a town crier, but I think they had stopped doing that by the early 20th century.  Today, a business has no shortage of options for advertising.   From traditional print media, to broadcast media like radio and television, to internet marketing and everything in between. An advertiser’s biggest dilemma is picking the right medium.

I’m a firm believer that a proper advertising effort needs to be multi-pronged and needs to take advantage of several media.  That’s not where most businesses go wrong.  The idea that you need to diversify your advertising is accepted.  The issue that most businesses face however, is that they don’t differentiate between media and seem to use every media in the exact same way for the exact same purpose.  That’s just crazy.  A bicycle and an airplane are both transportation methods.  They both get you from point A to point B, but beyond that they have entirely different purposes.  You wouldn’t take a plane to get exercise or commute to work, and you wouldn’t ride a bicycle to your business meeting in Beijing (unless you live in Beijing, in which case, you almost certainly are taking your bicycle to your business meeting).  The point is: all advertising media serves the same basic purpose, but beyond that each medium has its strengths and its weaknesses and should be used as such.

This is true in online, just as in traditional media.  Different media work better for different demographics and for different marketing purposes.  If your target demographic is 18-25 year old males, are you going to advertise in Home & Garden?  Of course not. So, why do I frequently see products geared towards that 18-25 year old male demographic advertised on primetime television?  Have they not looked at the numbers?  18-25 year old males don’t watch primetime TV (unless it’s Monday Night Football).

Similarly, if you have a super-niche product, don’t buy a billboard.  Last time I checked, billboards were expensive and their conversion rate was low. How effective can they be for a product that only appeals to 1 in 200 people to begin with?

If your goal is to maximize your return on investment in the short term, use a medium that is going to do that.  In my experience, the best way to accomplish this is to use a pay-for-performance medium.  The best known is pay-per-click advertising on Google, but don’t neglect Yahoo or MSN (Bing!).  Also, aside from pay-per-click search advertising, there are a ton of pay-for-performance options coming about.  Some publishers are offering pay-for-performance video products now, where you have options of paying by the play, or by some form of other conversion.  This kind of advertising is great for short-term ROI maximization.  What it’s not great for is branding.

Far too often, clients will ask me what it would cost to appear first on Google’s search results page under the sponsored links section.  This practice has been popularized by certain agencies that have built an SEO-like price structure around SEM (pay-per-click) advertising and are selling “guaranteed 1st place” positions.  This dubious agency practice aside, using SEM to give yourself position is a bad idea, and is often a case of ego-marketing.  First off, the structure of SEM is based around garnering the most relevant click-throughs possible for the least amount of money.  For various reasons, using the medium to rank first on Google is like using a billboard to market a new fMRI technology.  First off, it’s ridiculously expensive.  Secondly, because it’s an auction format, if you have two players in the same market making the same mistake (and there always are), they’ll blow the roof off the cost of appearing first, and the only winner in that battle is the publisher of the ad.  Third, even Google has determined that you don’t have to be number 1 to convert well.

If you are looking for branding and exposure for your brand, use a different medium that will get a lot of eyeballs for a fixed price.  These pay-for-placement media have been around longer than pay-for-performance media and are still valuable.  Examples include buying ad space on websites or in print media, buying a spot in a directory, either print or online depending on your business, billboards, tv spots during appropriate time slots, etc.

You also see this issue arising a lot in newer media when advertisers haven’t quite figured out how to use the medium yet.  The topical example is advertisers who use Twitter as simply another broadcast advertising form.  These advertisers haven’t had tremendous success and are blaming the media for the short fall.  However, other advertisers, who are using Twitter for permission marketing are having great success in improving their brand image and connecting with their customers.

Bottom line, figure out what each medium is good for, and use it for its purpose.  Don’t ride a bicycle to Beijing.

What are your favourite targeted forms of media?  What do you use them for?

You’ve built a business.  You’ve put in a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, but now your business is built.  You are proud of your business and rightfully so.  Building a business is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do, and you should be proud and want to show off a bit.  But your marketing is not the place to do it.

The purpose of your marketing strategy, whether it be online or offline, is to attract new customers. Everyday, as both a consumer, and a person who works with businesses, I see people forget that, and instead focus on how awesome they are.  Expounding about how great you, or your company is, is not the same thing as demonstrating to a consumer why he should become a customer.  Focusing your marketing on you is what I call ego-marketing, and it’s more common than you think. You might be doing it yourself and not even realizing it.  Here are four ways you can spot ego-marketing.

Ads that are bigger than they need to be

In today’s evolving world of performance marketing, bigger is not always better.  The key is to look at your return on investment.  Often, smaller, better targeted and more well placed advertising will have a greater ROI than bigger, more expensive advertising.  A small ad in a trade magazine is better than a half-page ad in a mass-market glossy.  The third position for a PPC ad is better than the first.  Most of these things make sense when we evaluate them critically, so why do so many people still do them?  Because it feels better to see your ad in first place, and it feels better to see a big billboard with your brand on it.  It’s ego-stroking.

Copy that focuses on features, and not benefits

This is a cardinal sin of copy writing, but you still see it often because people either write their own copy and don’t realize it, or people hire copy writers and tie their hands.  Business owners will focus on the features of their products, as opposed to the benefits to the customer because they’re looking at it from their own perspective.  As a business owner, when you’ve got a product with cool features, you love to talk about them, because, hey, they’re cool!  Think about when you buy a new TV and your friends come over and you want to show it off to them.  What you talk about are the television’s features: this many hertz, that much resolution, this many millions of colours, etc.  You’re doing that because you’re doing it for your benefit, not for them.  Because you’re showing off your TV.  If the sales guy at the store had sold you the TV the way you bragged about it to your friends, you probably wouldn’t have bought it, though.  Bragging to your friends is fine, bragging to your customers doesn’t work so well.

Excessive use of accolades

I was browsing a website the other day, and as I scrolled down the page, all I saw were awards and achievements.  It got to the point that I got to the end of the page, and not only was I bored, but I also wasn’t sure what the company whose site I was on did exactly.  It’s an extreme example, and the use of accolades in marketing can be helpful to show value and quality, but over-doing it becomes tiresome and boring to your potential customer.  Think of your advertising as a conversation at a cocktail party.  No one wants to hang out with the guy who spends the whole evening talking about all of his achievements.  They want to hang out with the guy who is interesting, intriguing and has something to offer without having to talk about it all night long.

Ads that focus on the business, not the customer

I enjoy learning the history of the companies that I give my business to.  It helps me connect with them, and makes for a more engaging experience than simply me just handing them my money.  However, I only do this for the companies that I know I’ll be giving my money to.  Before I make that decision, I’d much rather hear what the customers of the business have to say than what the business has to say.  So, if your marketing strategy puts a long description and history of the business before customer testimonials, you’re ego-marketing.

How to recover from ego-marketing

The good news is that the best way to stop ego-marketing is to recognize that you’re doing it and stop it.  Pretty easy.

The bad news is that it’s an easy trap to fall back into.  Large companies have it easier because employees are not as invested in the company and in the product, so it’s easier to market it without that pride coming through.  Smaller companies are very closely invested in their business and rightfully so.  As I said in the beginning, they are entitled to be proud.

If you’re concerned about falling back into the trap of ego-marketing, keep in mind that you’re already sold on your own products, so you might not be the most objective person to know what it takes to sell them.  If you want that objectivity, ask others.  Ask you current customers what sold them on your product and focus on that.  Ask complete strangers (whether in the form of market research or just an informal chat) what they would need to hear to purchase your services.  Ask a marketing expert; it’s their job to know what works, and they have the distance necessary to produce convincing marketing.

What do you think?  Am I being too harsh?  Can ego-marketing actually be effective?

At www.adamdistefano.com, I’ll be writing mainly about internet marketing for small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs. I know a thing or two about the topic because it’s what I do for a living. While I’ll continue on with 52 Short Stories, as my passion project, you can think of www.adamdistefano.com as my professional blog.

There is still more to me than writing and marketing, but I have opened up another window into my life. As time goes on, who knows how much I’ll share online? I don’t think I’ll ever get to the point where I’m tweeting what I’m having for breakfast. On the other hand, an online diary of a diet and exercise regimen is plausible.

The web is becoming a platform for broadcasting your life to the world (or lifecasting). It’s a great thing that audiences get to see more of the writers, artists and creators behind the works they enjoy. It makes for a more intimate experience. But how much is too much? Should a web persona be the full three dimensional representation of who we are, or should it still be a facade?

What do you think? Or would you rather not say?

I thought it would be appropriate for the first post on my self-branded blog to be about branding.  I like to try to be clever like that.

Branding is not a new concept.  In fact, it’s probably one of the oldest concepts in marketing.  The internet, however, has created a branding revolution. It used to be that if you told me to think of a brand, I’d think of Coca-Cola or Marlboro (two of the most highly valued brands in the world), and a handful of others.  Now, when I think of brands I think not only of the big boys, but I think of everything as a brand.  Where branding used to only be for major corporations, now it’s become just as important for the individual.  That’s right, your name is a brand, hence this site.

In order to underscore the renewed importance of branding across the spectrum, I’m going to split branding into two artificial categories: business and personal.  I call these categories artificial, because as you’ll see, the internet is causing the two areas to spill over into each other in a big way.

Business Branding

If you’re a business owner, you need to know what is going to make customers pick you.  What good or service can you provide that your competitor can’t?  If you’re lucky enough to have a completely unique product, congratulations, you don’t have any competition…  yet.  If you’re like most business owners, and you’re competing with other business for customers, then you know you need to have an edge.

It used to be that you could compete on price, speed and quality.  I have bad news, though.  Price and speed?  You can’t compete on those anymore.  Even if you can make something cheaper and faster than someone else, in two months, China will do it even cheaper, and even faster, and ship it to Wal-Mart to add a convenient distribution method.  Two months after that, China will be outsourcing to Vietnam, to cut its own costs and production time.  Competing on price and speed is a race to the bottom that small and medium-sized business owners should avoid altogether.

What’s left then?  Quality.  Quality of your product and quality of your service.  Quality is what keeps customers coming back.  Quality is what generates word of mouth.  Customers will pay more for quality. Here’s the catch, though, customers associate quality with a brand.  No one walks into a shop picked at random and assumes quality.  If, however, people recognize your brand, they assume there’s quality tied to it.

Most people who buy an iPod over any other MP3 player are buying it for the brand.  They buy that brand because they assume it’s of a higher quality.  Is it?  That’s debatable.  I’ve tried multiple portable music players.  I’ve liked some of them just as much, if not more than Apple’s iPod, and yet, I own an iPod.  I don’t know for a fact that the product is better, and yet I still bought it for the brand.  The great thing about building a brand is that if you can convince people that your product is better, it doesn’t actually have to be better (but it does need to be at least comparable).

Having a recognizable brand and a quality product also creates brand loyalty.  That’s the customer who keeps coming back.  Customers who keep coming back are the best kind, because instead of doing all the work of attracting new customers every time, you attract them once, and then they keep coming back on their own.  But if you want repeat customers, and brand loyalty, you need to make sure you build the reputation of your brand, and then that you protect that reputation.

Personal Branding

Personal branding is either a relatively new concept, or an old one that simply exploded with the help of the social web.  Either way, it’s become a reality, and it’s one everyone needs to begin to embrace as soon as possible.

The concept behind personal branding is no different than that behind business branding.  Job markets are increasingly competitive, not just with the higher number of people completing higher education domestically, but also with the huge influx of talent coming from overseas.  In a hyper-competitive market, you need a way to stand out, and the way to do this is to build your personal brand.  You can equate your personal brand to your reputation, and in today’s world, reputation is currency.

Dan Schawbel is the self-proclaimed Personal Branding expert for Generation Y, and also a great example of what personal branding can do.  As a personal branding expert, you can imagine that Dan has done quite a bit to build his personal brand, and as such, has created a ubiquitous presence on the web.  A couple of weeks ago, Dan followed me on Twitter (if he weren’t following tens of thousands of people, I would be honoured).  I’m still relatively new on Twitter, and have a small network, so I actually check the profiles of anyone that follows me before I decide whether or not I follow back.  Annoying twitter-talk aside, my point is that if I hadn’t recognized Dan’s name from some other source that I’d read about him, I’m not sure I would have followed him back.  But, because I did recognize his name – his personal brand – I followed him, started receiving his tweets, took a look at his blog, and now I’m writing about him on mine.  All that because I recognized the guy’s name from something I’d read a while ago.  Maybe he is an expert on personal branding after all!

So How Do You Start Building Your Brand?

The hardest part in any process like this one is getting started, and so I’ll tell you how to get it off the ground and then you can run with it in any direction you like.  After all, it’s your brand.

1. Start by creating an online presence
If you don’t already have an online presence, create one.  It can be as elaborate as an interactive website, or a blog, or as simple as a bio page.  Whatever you choose to do, create a space for yourself on the web, because that’s where the attention is turning to.

2. Own your domain
You’ll notice that this site is www.adamdistefano.com.  I could have named it any number of things more creative, but that would defeat the purpose.  When someone looks for me, I want to make sure they find me, and not someone else.  In that respect, owning your domain is as much defense as it is offense.  There is nothing more damaging to a brand than having someone else using it and ruining its reputation.

3. Monitor Google results for your brand
Googling your brand might seem like an exercise in vanity, but it’ll give you an idea of what people are seeing when they look for you.

Uisng myself as an example, a search for my name on Google shows that on average five of the top 10 results are actually me (searching on google.com and google.ca with quotes and without).

More important than just the quantity of results, however, is the quality of the results.  Most of the results that aren’t me on Google are fine because they are obviously other people with the same name, but they’re not damaging to my personal brand.  However, some could be.  I used to write regularly for askmen.com and those articles are now indexed on Google.  I have no issue with that.  Since then, various international websites have scraped the content from askmen.com and repurposed it for their own use.  Normally, I would have no issue with that, either.  Additional exposure is a good thing.  In this instance, they even kept my name attached to the articles (something that is not always done when websites scrape content for their own use).  The issue arises when you look at the context of the article.  For whatever reason, many of these sites chose not to copy the articles, but instead to summarize them.  Unfortunately, the summaries were poorly done, using bad grammar and simply badly written.  To make matters worse, nothing in the summary indicates that this is a summary of an altogether different piece, and instead, it simply looks like something I wrote.  As a freelance writer, you can imagine that this is not good for my brand.

The lesson here is to make sure you keep an eye out for your brand to make sure it’s not being misrepresented.  Apart from just Googling your brand repeatedly, you can also set-up Google Alerts, which are a handy way to be notified anytime something you’re trying to watch is mentioned on the web.

4. Make sure you appear in major eyeball areas
Aside from having a site, and ensuring that you’re well represented on Google, make sure that you appear in other major eyeball areas.  If you’re a restaurant, make sure you’re listed on Yelp.  If you’re a local business, make sure you’re listed in the major business directories (such as YellowPages.ca).  If you’re a Doctor, make sure you’re in medical directories.  Go to where people are looking for you, and make sure your brand is there. After all, what’s the point of building a brand, if no one ever sees it?

5. Social Networks
Social media and social media marketing have turned into a gargantuan topic.  Tons of books have been written on the topic (Trust Agents is my personal favourite).  Love them or hate them, they are making a splash.  The topic’s too big to cover in a bullet point in a blog post.  Instead, I recommend that you sign up to a few social networks and fill out the basic profile. Even if you choose not to participate, stake a piece of real estate.  More often than not, the top six results on a personal name search on Google are from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  That’s something to keep in mind if you still refuse to sign up for those services.

If you follow the above five steps, you’ll have created a footprint for your brand online.  From there you can grow it any number of ways, but the best way to do it, is to provide quality products and quality service.  If you do that, the foundation you’ve laid will grow nicely.

Additional resources:

• Seth Godin: Seth is a guru on just about all topics marketing and business, but he has some particularly good stuff to say about the importance of a business’ reputation and brand.
• Dan Schawbel:  Even if you’re not a Gen-Yer, you might still be able to learn something from Dan.  You might feel turned off at first by the self-promotional nature of a lot his stuff, but after you get used to it, you’ll start to see a lot of value.
• Susan Lewis: Susan took personal branding to a new level when she decided to use social media and her personal brand to hire a boss.  That’s right, when she finished her MBA, she didn’t apply to jobs.  She had THEM apply to HER.

What do you think about branding?  Is it overrated?  Should we stop paying attention to brands?  If you just conduct good business, will your brand build itself?