The Importance of being yourself
Marketing on the Internet is a very competitive arena and unless you are selling something unique you may find difficulties, so what you need is something that sets you apart from your competitors and the best way to do this is to brand yourself, because you are unique
How do you go about branding yourself, well before you start open up Google and do some of the following searches:
- Who is your name
- enter your telephone number
- enter a nickname
- do an image search on you name
- enter you email address
You may be surprised with some of the results but what you will learn is that
the internet is a vast repository of information and what you need to do is to
start making it work for you
You may be asking, why should you brand yourself and the answer is fairly
simple given the choice would you buy from someone you know or a stranger?
What you aiming to do is build trust with you customers, so that they know
who you are and what you are about
Build you Own Presence
The best way to start is to build your own website or blog. A Blog is easier for the less technical, Howe ever nothing beats a dotcom. The first page should have a photograph and all you contact information, telephone numbers, emails, Skype and MSN id's etc. you may have been told do not put email address's because of spam but with modern spam tools it is not a problem. Telephones are similar perhaps you may need to use an answering machine or a free phone which takes messages. You just want to ensure that your customers can contact you. Provide some information on your background, interests and family you that people can get to know you. Put links from your site to your
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Advertising Yourself
Whenever possible you are going to put your name in keywords, now this might sound a little vain and I will be honest I was loathe to do it, but look to the future when you will be able to do a who is and the first few pages of results are about you. A potential customer will realise that you are a real person and not a fly by night hiding behind false names and email address
Ensure that every email that goes out has your contact details including a link to your personal site. When submitting press release, writing blogs, submitted articles or posting in forums use your name.
Consider using your own name as log on id's in affiliate sites rather than a
nickname and if you have access to the metatags for keywords and content add your name and even your telephone number if you wish.
Building Links
Some people share names with famous people so have difficulty in even getting onto the first page of search results, there are two ways around the problem, one is change you name use an initial or else add a tag of some kind. The second method involves getting links coming into your site as the more links the higher up you will rank in the results. One way to get links is to go into popular forums and blogs and place comments remembering to have your site name in the comment.
You own site can also be expanded to provide addition information about your
business and it is sometimes better to have a page about your business on you own website than to link directly to an affiliate site. If you change the direction or type of business you will still have a website with a number oflinks, without requiring starting again from scratch
Ongoing work
All websites need to be continually promoted to rank well and so it is important that even your own personal website is kept up to date and has changing comment. You can achieve this by adding an RSS feed. From a blog aboutyour main business
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If you wish to learn more you are welcome to a recorded presentation *The Importance of personal branding by David Ogden. http://davidogden.org/training/importance_of_personal_branding/personal_branding_statement.htm
David Ogden Internet Marketing
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