10 Step Advanced Guide to Blogging Your Personal Brand

December 29, 2008 at 11:42 am | In Personal Branding, SEO, Success Strategies, eBrand, marketing, social media | 12 Comments

Personal Branding

This is the third post in a series about blogging your personal brand. I’ve written a post for beginners and one for intermediate users. Please review those posts before indulging in this one.

1) Host your own blog

Instead of borrowing someone else’s space and redirecting your domain name to that space, you have the ability to install WordPress on your own host. In January, I’ll be switching over to PersonalBrandingBlog.com instead of my PersonalBrandingBlog.wordpress.com because I want to own my blog entirely, have more control over the page elements, make money and turn it into a larger property. Advanced personal branding bloggers should strive to make the switch and not freak out about losing content or subscribers. As long as you are using Feedburner.com for your RSS feeds and have exported your content, you should be all set. The only issue you’ll have is that you will lose “Google juice” to your previous site.

For instructions on how to successfully install WordPress on Godaddy, please go here. If you want to save money on your Godaddy domains and host, please go here and remember to choose “Linux” hosting.

2) Select or design a unique theme

There are literally thousands of WordPress themes across the net built by some savvy professional designers and programmers. You might not have the funds or expertise in order to get a custom blog template made, but there are free themes floating around as well. When you start researching and discovering themes that you enjoy, remember that some themes are geared for specific purposes. For instance, there are “magazine themes” for people who have teams of content contributors, covering various categories. You want to not only select the best looking theme, but one that you can handle using.

If you perform a Google search on “top wordpress themes,” you should have more than enough to choose from.

3) Choose plugins

After selecting a theme, you will want to install a few necessary plugins. They will help enable people to share your content (more traffic and subscribers), as well as make your blog more interactive. Here are my favorite plugins:

  • Akismet is a spam filter that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.
  • Sociable enables small icons from various social bookmarking sites (like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, etc) under the posts on many blogs, so people can share your content freely.
  • Get Recent Comments gets the excerpts of the latest comments on your blog and displays them on your sidebar
  • Popularity Contest is a very useful plugin that lets you automatically highlight your best posts to your readers.
  • Related posts generates a list of related posts based on the text of blog entry.
  • Subscribe To Comments allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
  • Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.

For more plugins, please go to the WordPress main page.

4) Integrate your social networks

As an advanced user, you better be on social networks. Since everything in social media is considered a list, you’ll want to leverage your blogs success to increase the readership of your other properties. This may include your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, SlideShare, Upcoming, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg, Flickr or FriendFeed. There are thousands more, and you should promote only the top 5-10 that you use the most often. If you include too many, people will completely tune them out and if you include too few, it will seem like you aren’t a power user.

Use either text or graphics to promote these profiles. For icons, please go here.

5) Search engine blog optimization

Search engine optimization for your blog is critical for a number of reasons. First, everyone uses search engines to learn about new things. Second, search engine ranking showcases authority. Finally, having individual posts ranking high can help build the brand of your blog. Your goal is to rank number one for your name, as well as your topic. Think about the keywords that reflect your topic and use them throughout your headline, subheadings and body. Use links within your posts to link to other posts you’ve written and try as hard as you can to write good enough content that people will link to it.

There’s also a WordPress plugin called “All in One SEO Pack,” which will help you optimize your posts for search engines. It helps to own a domain name with the keywords you want to rank high for, as well as a blog title that reflects those same keywords.

6) Try a few different types of posts

There are many different types of posts you can have on your blog. Experimenting with a variety of posts keeps people guessing and interested in your blog. You could scrape the blogosphere or a traditional news site for an interesting fact or article, then quote it and respond to it in a post. You could also email a few bloggers, asking them all the same question, such as “what is your prediction for 2009, and formulate a blog post around their answers. You could become the aggregator of news for a specific topic and links your five favorite blog posts of the week. A series of posts around a theme, such as this post, tends to work well too.

7) Allow someone to guest blog

As an advanced blogger, you are given the right and hopefully the authority, to reach out to other bloggers and give them the opportunity to guest post. As your blog becomes more popular, people may just come to you and ask to guest post, but when you are in infancy, you will have to be pro-active. The benefits of a guest post on your blog are that you save time from writing a post, it’s a great way to network with other bloggers and it’s a new voice on your blog.

8 ) Interview your favorite blogger

I’ve interviewed close to 100 people on this blog. It’s the single best networking tactic I’ve used in my entire life. I couldn’t have done it until I was a more advanced blogger though because I needed a promise of value to other people. You’ll want to interview people who are more successful than you are or that can provide some knowledge in an area where you aren’t an expert. You can do the interviews by either phone, through email or in-person (video). It’s really up to you and depends on your schedules.

9) Get ranked

A great way to gain visibility for your blog is to get ranked. There are a number of different sites that rank blogs out there, such as the AdAge Power 150, the Junta 42, the Viral Garden’s Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs, the 2009 Bloggers Choice Awards, and the Big List of SEO Blogs. There are tons more, but these are the ones I’m most familiar with in the blogosphere. The purpose of submitting your blog to these lists is that you get added visibility and there’s an opportunity cost if your site isn’t on them.

10) Form content partnerships

If you don’t have partnerships with other websites, you are really missing out because your content will be isolated in one specific area. Every time I post, it ends up in Reuters, Hoovers, Chicago Sun-Times, Forbes, Brazen Careerist, CollegeRecruiter.com, HRM Today, Social Media Today, Marcom Professional, Sign-on San Diego, The Examiner, and Packets Online. Obviously forming these relationships took a long time, but they give my blog more credibility and my posts more movement. Just like submitting byline articles to magazines, you want to start small and work your way up. Research your topic area to find websites that might want to syndicate your blog and reach out to them accordingly.

How to Master Search Engines for Personal Branding Prosperity

October 29, 2008 at 11:23 pm | In Book Reviews, Interview, Personal Branding, SEO, Success Strategies, social media | 3 Comments

Today, I spoke with Mike Moran, who is a SEO/SEM expert, author, speaker and employee.  As many of you know, through my posts on Google being the centerpiece for your personal brand, this topic is extremely important.  In the interview, we go over some basic fundamentals, key terms, and strategies for success, so that you rank high for your name and maintain it.  In the age of Google, if you don’t show up for your name, someone else can.  It’s time to learn more about marketing your personal brand in bits and bytes, with the goal of showing up first!

A lot of people don’t know the difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). What are your definitions and how do they differ?

I call SEO the techniques you use to influence organic (natural) search rankings, while SEM covers both organic and paid search. To me, any company with a Web site should be working on SEO. If you are spending time and money to create and maintain your site, why wouldn’t you make the effort for more people to see what you did? Paid search is a different matter–many companies can return more than they spend with paid search, but many others can’t.

In our book, Bill Hunt and I show search marketers how to place a monetary value on each visitor that search brings the their Web sites, so that they can tell whether the money spent on paid search brings a return worth the investment.

How can you use social media to impact search results?

Organic search results depends on strong content–content that appeals to search engines and searchers alike. Social media depends on content that customers find so compelling that they pass it along to others. You can see how creating interesting or entertaining content that meets a need of your customer is the key to both search marketing and social media, so they reinforce each other.

What’s more, the use of good search marketing techniques helps searchers find your social media, and social media techniques pass along your content to others, so that they link to you. Those links then improve your search results. If you’re doing it right, search marketing and social media should reinforce each other. That’s why we added a new chapter in the second edition around social media.

Does Google own our personal brands? Should we even care about Ask.com and Yahoo! anymore?

I don’t think anyone owns brands anymore. The Internet has, more than ever, forced everyone to rethink how they are portrayed in public, whether you are talking about personal brands or a bottle of Coca-Cola. But it’s far more than Google.

All social media platforms give people a place to provide opinions on people, brands, or anything else–the public owns your brand and you can merely engage in conversation to influence that perception. And certainly you should care about search engines beyond Google–Google isn’t #1 in every country, and even in countries like the U.S., where it is #1, it has just 70% of the market. Who among us can afford to ignore 30% of our potential audience?

What are 5 tips to having a successful SEM campaign (paid/natural search) for individuals or companies?

  • 1) Know what searchers are looking for. If you don’t know what words people search for when they should find you, you can’t do much else with the rest of these tips. Whether for organic or paid, you start by understanding the language of the searcher.
  • 2) See where you stand. Understand the conversation going on out there, through reputation monitoring tools, Google Alert, current search rankings, and other methods. If you don’t know where you are now, you won’t know whether what you are doing is making things better or worse.
  • 3) Know how to keep score. It’s not enough to get high search rankings–you need to know your purpose for getting high rankings. Is it to further your career? Get a job? Sell more product? Get more customer leads? You need to know how you’ll track your success. Once you know that, you’re ready to try some things to see how they work. With paid search, especially, you must know what the return is for what you invest–that’s the only way you know your paid search tactics are profitable.
  • 4) Make sure you are in the game. For organic search, your content must be in the search index. For paid search, you must have your ads running–not just in Google but in every major search engine. If the search engines don’t have your content, then you’ll never be found.
  • 5) Make sure your content is worth finding. Ensure that your content appeals to both search engines and searchers. Yes, optimize your organic search titles and content so that it is found, and make sure your ad copy is well-crafted to garner clicks from searchers, but remember that you have a larger goal, too. Don’t stop with search success, but instead test that you are selling more or generating more leads or getting called for more interviews. What those searchers do after they find you is just as important as finding you in the first place.

What are some tactics you recommend to ranking high for your name and subject matter on Google?

All tactics flow from your strategy to make yourself an expert. If you are clear on what you want to be found for, then you should do everything around creating content that the right people will be looking for. Write a blog, do podcasts, videos and anything else that you can. Write articles for your own Web site, but for other sites, too, always with a link back to yours. Attract a following of people and the search engines will notice. Use social media or any other tactics you want, but most of all, do the things that mark you as an expert. If you don’t think you’re an expert on anything, that’s the place to start.

Don’t be afraid to narrow your expertise if necessary. When I first started working in search marketing, I emphasized that I was an expert on search marketing for large companies, based on my IBM experience. Later, people didn’t need to modify my expertise as pertaining only to large companies, but it was helpful to get attention for a more limited expertise at the start. And don’t worry that it might take awhile—if you keep at it, you’ll find your place in the sun.

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Mike Moran is an expert in Internet marketing, search technology, Web personalization, and Web metrics. Mike’s previous appearances include Search Engine Strategies, ad:tech, DM Days, the Internet Strategy Forum Summit, and the Enterprise Search Summit.Mike is the co-author of the best-selling 2005 book Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (along with fellow search marketing expert Bill Hunt), which is now in its Second Edition (2008).

Mike is a freelance consultant and public speaker who also serves as Chief Strategist for Converseon, a leading digital media marketing agency based in New York City. Prior to this position, Mike spent 30 years at IBM, rising to Distinguished Engineer, an executive-level technical position.

Paid Advertising For Your Personal Brand Using Google, Facebook and Blogs

September 8, 2008 at 11:08 am | In Career Development, Personal Branding, Positioning, Recruitment, SEO, Success Strategies | 6 Comments

I’ve been seeing a lot of personal branding creativity out there lately. People have started to experiment with using Google AdWords and Facebook Social Ads, as a way of advertising their personal brand. I think it’s not only creative, but since most people have never thought of using these strategies, they stand out BIG TIME. Yet again, this proves that we must act like our own company’s, which sometimes means we have to pay the price.

The good news is that advertising on Google and Facebook is quite cheap and you have complete control how much you spend per day, week and month. Today, I want to go over how to effectively use Google and Facebook to advertise your brand (not by building a profile or ranking high in natural search) and then pitch you a way to advertise on blogs! You become a passive candidate when using all 3 mediums.

Remember that this is a two-way street, meaning that employers and applicants can use both strategies to their own advantage.

1) Google AdWords

Google AdWords is Google’s advertising platform, which offers CPC (cost-per-click) and CPI (cost-per-impression) pricing for advertisements on Google and partner sites. Some of their partner sites are newspapers, radio and TV now.

Before running your advertisement, you need a landing page. If you have a website or blog, then use the resume page within it to display through advertising. This works beautifully because recruiters can see that single resume page and notice all the other pages/options on your website, to getting a better sense of your brand.

Creating your ad

  • 1) Title. When you create your ad, label yourself as a specialist, expert or guru on the title tag. You might want to state the fact that it’s your resume first.
  • 2) Description. In the next two description tags, pull out your biggest achievements in 6 words or less and list your personal brand statement or a few descriptors.
  • 3) URL. For your URL, don’t use the URL for your resume page.  Instead use yourname.com for personal branding purposes. Although in the example above (picture), I use www.yourname.com, I think you should drop the “www.” completely because people get the point.

It’s keyword selection time. My friend Jim Stroud, the HR Evolution Columnist for Personal Branding Magazine, says to use Overture to find popular keywords. You should be very specific with your keywords, such that you narrow the focus on the type of job you want to be recruited for, rather than a general position. Think of an industry or an open position you might have seen recently and build it around that.

If you’re a recruiter, then please see Jim Stroud’s blog post on how to use Google AdWords to source candidates.

2) Facebook Social Ads

 

Willy Franzen inspired this entire post after he tweeted me that he wrote a post on a Facebook Social Ad experiment for job seekers. He has the results of his experiment, which doesn’t quite yet prove the success of this campaign, so I wait to hear back from him, hopefully in a subsequent blog post.

Facebook Social Ads allow businesses and individuals to advertise using Facebook’s news feed or left rail (will change to 2 ad spots on the right when the new interface swaps over). This program works similar to Google’s but you can use a picture and it’s more “word-of-mouth friendly” because ads travel through the news feed of friends.

Creating your ad

  • 1) Title. What is the ad for? The title is the most important piece of your ad because it has the most “text” emphasis. I would say “I want to work for <insert company name>” or “Resume for <insert position type>.” Try and be as specific as you can.
  • 2) Picture. Just like your Facebook picture, don’t use a picture that you wouldn’t want shown to your future employer. I would go for a professional yet personal picture.
  • 3) Description. Don’t write your resume, but instead give the viewer a quick description of who you are, what you do and what job you want in 25 words.

Once you create your ad, either link it to your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile or blog/website. These ads are all about targeted a specific group that would care about your resume or hiring you for that matter. When you select your target audience, keep your major in mind, as well as the company and location.

2) Blog Ads

Aside from promoting Jim and Willy’s ideas, I had to add something to this conversation. I believe advertising your brand on blogs is another strategy for promoting your brand. I’m going to use Nick O’Neill’s blog to explain what a blog ad could look like. Please note that I edited a screen shot of his blog to get the point across.

Just like with Google and Facebook, when advertising on a blog, you get what you pay for. The blogs with the most traffic and subscribers will charge the most but you may get the highest return if you’ve targeted correctly. In the example below, Matt Steinberg is a Facebook App Developer advertising on the #1 unofficial Facebook blog with a link to his resume. This is perfectly targeted and effective (I think Nick would agree).

I would use the same strategies as you did with Facebook and Google. Use your professional picture, maybe a graphic from your professional portfolio and of course you want to point out that the recruiter will get your resume if they click the ad.

 

So why pay for advertising?

Well for one thing it shows that you are VERY serious about getting a job and it also is evidence that you have some web knowledge. Let me know if you try any of these and please report back.

How Small Business Owners Can Grow Their Online Empire

July 23, 2008 at 11:29 am | In Career Development, Personal Branding, Reputation Management, SEO, Success Strategies, authors corner, eBrand, social media | 5 Comments

On July 8th, I presented to the Next Level Executives group at the Marriott Hotel in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Before I gave my keynote, John Bates, a recruiting and career management veteran, explained the general concept of personal branding and how it related to building a business through referrals. Also, he noted the significance of taking a niche and explaining how you must stand for something. John brands himself as the “Job-Guy,” which means he is the go-to person for helping people with their job search and career path. He explained how his cartoon character reflected his brand and that of the people he served (he nailed it).

Mike Langford, who also has his own cartoon character on Facebook (if he listened to my presentation, which he did, he set an alert for his name and will be reading this). He recaps the entire event on his blog. Catie Foertsch was generous enough to digitally record the entire event, so kudos to her.

Event video


Subscribe to my podcast series
View the entire 30 minute presentation on Viddler

PowerPoint slides

Quick reflection

The main message I was trying to convey to the audience was that you have to protect your personal eBrand right now. There is no waiting, no biting on your finger nails and no praying to G-D. Right now you need to secure your brand by taking the necessary steps in order to control your Google results by joining social networks, registering your domain and starting a blog. It was my attention to scare the audience at times, but also explain the opportunities in this web 2.0 landscape. I believe, now more than ever, anyone can have an impact.

I hope you enjoy the presentation and if you want me at your next event, send me a note.

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