If you take a look around the blogosphere or even the business world you will realize that you are most likely not alone in your particular area.  For example, there are tons of social media and online marketing blogs out there (but you read this one and that means you kick ass!), there are also plenty of real estate and technology blogs out there as well.  So in a world where you are not alone what can you do to differentiate yourself?  What can you do to be memorable?  What can you do to attract visitors?

One word, personality.

Not too long ago Rohit Bhargava wrote a book called “Personality not Included,” and if you haven’t read this book yet then I recommend that you do so.  To quote Rohit:

“The age of the faceless corporation is over.  In the new business era of the twenty first century, great brands and products must evoke a dynamic personality in order to attract passionate customers.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  Personality it the best way to differentiate yourself (or your blog/business/etc.) from everyone else out there.  You can write about every single that techcrunch does but if you add your own unique twist on the topics then you will still get a loyal following of readers.

Everyone has a personality but not everyone let’s their personality come through in their product/service/writing.  This is a big mistake because your personality is your biggest selling point.  Of course not everyone is going to love your personality but that’s to be expected, nobody is always going to love you regardless of what you do.  However, the people/readers/customers that will be attracted to your personality are going to be your biggest brand evangelists.

Are you letting your personality shine through or are you hiding it?  If so, why?

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It’s important to exercise your brain, I do so by playing chess and occasionally going over a few brain teasers or logic puzzles.  Staying sharp is important in any industry and I have found playing chess or going over logic puzzles has greatly improved my problem solving and creating thinking abilities.

Here are a few logic puzzles I have come across that I really like, let’s see if you can find the answers.

Bulbs

Imagine you are in a room with 3 switches. In an adjacent room there are 3 bulbs (let’s say in lamps which are on a regular table), each switch belongs to one bulb. All are off at the moment. It is impossible to see from one room to another. No help from anybody else is allowed.
How can you find out which switch belongs to which bulb, if you may enter the room with the bulbs only once?

The Man in the Elevator

A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every morning he takes the elevator down to the lobby and leaves the building. In the evening, he gets into the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator - or if it was raining that day - he goes back to his floor directly. Otherwise, he goes to the seventh floor and walks up three flights of stairs to his apartment. How come?

Burning rope

There are two lengths of rope.
Each one can burn in exactly one hour.
They are not necessarily of the same length or width as each other.
They also are not of uniform width (may be wider in middle than on the end), thus burning half of the rope is not necessarily 1/2 hour.

By burning the ropes, how do you measure exactly 45 minutes worth of time?

Count the F’s (only once!)

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

The man with the hat

There are four man standing in front of a firing-squad. Two of them (nr.1 & 3) wear a black hat and two of them (nr.2 & 4) wear a white hat. They are all facing the same direction and between nr.3 and nr.4 stands a brick wall (see picture). So nr.1 can see nr.2 & 3, nr.2 sees nr.3, nr.3 sees only the wall and nr.4 doesn’t see a thing. The men know that there are two white and two black hats.
The commander of the firing-squad is willing to let the men go if one of them can say what color hat he is wearing. The men are not allowed to talk. The only thing they may say is “I’m wearing a white/black hat”. If one of the men knows which hat he is wearing he must tell it and all men will be free.
Which man knows 100% sure what color hat he’s wearing?

Lost

You are lost in a forest. The forest is between two villages. In village A live only liars, they always lie. In village B people always tell the truth. You want to go to village B. Then you see a man from village A or B. You can ask him only one question.
Which question will you ask him to know for sure where village B is ?

Were you able to solve any of them?  What do you do to exercise your mind?  Have any other logic puzzles you want to share?

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(can you identify the image? and no it’s not from Turkey)

PPC

PPC stands or pay-per-click, these are the ads that you see on the side or top of search engines such as Google, they are paid advertisements that you can target toward your audience. You can select to have your ads show up when people type in a particular keyword or phrase, that way you are showing them ads for something that they already want to see. For example if you sell ipods and someone types “ipod nano” into Google; you can make your ads show up for the phrase “ipod nanos.” PPC is a great way to target large groups of people on either a broad or niche level. PPC works on a bidding system therefore you bid against competitors who are seeking to show up for the same terms that you are. It’s easy to lose money in PPC if your visitors aren’t converting. Meaning you pay money for them to click on your site but then they just leave, so you’re paying for ads and not getting a return. That being said, a properly optimized PPC campaign can be very effective, but the overall conversion rates are usually quite low.

SEO

I’m going to put up another post about the multi facets of SEO but for now I will keep it simple. SEO is the process and strategy for ranking well for a particular keyword or phrase. For example if you sell ibm laptops then you probably want to rank well in search engines for terms like “ibm laptops, ibm laptop, ibm notebook, etc.” This is where SEO comes into play in making sure you rank well for your target phrases. Contrary to what people may tell you, SEO is not based on any relationship with Google, if a company calls you and tells you that they can rank you #1 for a term because they have a relationship with Google, they are lying. SEO seeks to understand how a search engines scores, evaluates, and ranks a page (and relevancy) and is actually far more complex then what the so called SEO “experts” say. SEO is an extremely effective and powerful way to get traffic and conversions by showing up for target keyterms. The top 4 spots are usually the most trafficked, so if you sell ibm laptops you want to use SEO to make sure that you show up in the top four spots for your terms. SEO can be used to go after niches or broad topics. Ideally you want to have every page on your site target 1-2 keywords or phrases that way your pages are extremely targeted towards your users. There is no point in having your Policy page show up #1 for “ibm laptops” if people are looking to make a purchase. I’ve been involved in SEO strategy consulting for many years and now work with a team of Technical SEOs to provide SEO strategy to clients from around the world.

Social Media

Social media is about building relationships with your visitors or consumers. You don’t want to have people just come to your site and leave. You want to interact with them to find out what they want and what they need. If you build a relationship with your users they will become your best customers and your best brand evangelists. When talking about online marketing a lot of people neglect the social media aspect which is a mistake. The whole marketing industry is based upon relationships, understanding your users, and giving them what they want. You must have the two way interaction with your visitors in order to have a complete and effective online marketing strategy.

This was meant to be a high level overview of three powerful online marketing tools. Just to recap, we have PPC which is targeted advertising, we have SEO which is ranking well in search engines for your desired keyterms or phrases, and we have social media for building relationships with the people that visit your site. Together these three online marketing tools can come together to form a killer online marketing strategy. If you can run an effective advertising campaign through PPC while capturing the audience search for your product or service through SEO while simultaneously building relationships with your visitors, then you will have a very effective online marketing strategy that is sure to yield positive results.

What else would you ad to the mix? Do you have another powerful online marketing tactic or tool that I missed?

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img source

First off let me preface this question by mentioned that I have a very strong background in SEO and this question spawned from many client discussions that I have had.

I ask this question because it is a good way to start thinking about your business as a whole. What does your company do? What drives the most business? Where are you located? What is your market? I know there are all sorts of key phrases that your company probably wants to rank for but for the sake of argument, if you could only pick one phrase to rank for what would it be and why?

I want you to really think about this for a moment. Think about your audience, think about your target market, and think about your geographic location. If you are a Los Angeles based hypnotherapist then why would you want to rank for “hypnotherapy?” If you are a retail shoe store in San Francisco then why would you want to rank for “shoes?” If you sell refurbished Dell Laptops then why would you want to rank for “laptop?” Do these general terms really describe your business or product offering? If so, then e-mail me because you’re probably in some serious trouble.

Now instead of trying to rank for the most general terms in the world why not go after something that’s a bit more geared toward your market? Such as, “hypnotherapy in Los Angeles,” or “San Francisco shoe store,” or “Refurbished Dell laptops?” If you specialize in a particular niche market, either geographically or industrially (or other) then that is what you need to be ranking for. The reality is that you can’t always rank #1 for your desired keyterm or phrase so you need to think of ways that you can still rank well while going after your target audience. You do this by going after more specific terms that pertain to you business.

Here’s a little test for you, go into Google and type in the general term for your business; let’s say “shoes.” Notice, that you get 400,000,000 search results. Now type in something a bit more targeted towards your business, let’s say “San Francisco shoe store.” Now, the search results drop to 939,000. This is your target market; this is what you need to be going after. Before you go out there trying to conquer the world for general terms, put some thought into what it is you really want to rank for, believe me it is going to make a world of difference.

If you want to increase your sales then you need to use a much more targeted approach in your online marketing (and SEO specifically). Just think about consumer behavior in general, when you go out shopping you only buy something if it caters to your tastes, needs, wants, and/or desires. Thus if you are looking for a hypnotherapist in Los Angeles you are much more likely to become a client of someone whose site is showing up #1 for “Los Angeles hypnotherapist” then for “hypnotherapist.”

I hope you find this information useful when trying to determine how to create and implement an online marketing strategy.

Have anything else to add?

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I’m a member of 24 hour fitness in San Francisco; I went to the usual 24 hr locaton that I usually go to, only to find a sign on the door that says they were closed due to a power outage…”damn I really wanted a workout” I thought.  In front of the closed 24 hour fitness were two young ladies that were telling me I could go get a free workout out their gym 1 block down the road.  Of course, I accepted their invitation (a little card they gave me) and went over to their gym called “Crunch.”

I thought this was a very interesting way for “Crunch” to capitalize on the 24hr fitness shutdown.  When I went over to Crunch they had me fill out a little card with some of my basic information; they must have had over 100 24hr fitness customers come in throughout the day.  Now Crunch has all of their information and can try to sell them on their gym.  Of course, I only saw the outage at 24hr fitness today, if it has been going (or will go) on for a few days then Crunch can potentially get hundreds of people to migrate gyms.

This made me think about how large companies could exploit competitor faults.  What if during the Amazon crisis not to long ago (where they were down for a few hours) Ebay issued some sort of radical promotion to all sellers and let them list for free without charging them for photos, bold text, etc?  What if during the few hours that gmail was down a few days ago, Yahoo ran some promotion giving all users a credit on their add network if they signed up for a Yahoo account?  What if the next time twitter is down, Plurk makes a massive PR attempt to migrate people over to their platform?

Now nobody said any of the above things would be easy to do, but the return should be huge.  The best time to get someone to change to another product or service is when their existing one isn’t working.  There are a lot of opportunities to dip into the competitor customer pool but I don’t see much of this going on.  Sure there are price wars, marketing and sales pitches, etc.  But nobody is really taking advantage of timing, and I think that is a huge opportunity that companies are missing out on.  What Crunch did to 24 hour fitness was a great example of how opportune timing can boost your customer base.  Now, with the internet and social media, spreading the word about a new promotion is not that hard.  I think what Crunch did to 24 hr was great and clever strategy.

Have you seen companies use timing (vs competitors) to increase their customer base?  Who?

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