True inspiration comes from a deep burning desire to solve a large problem to help the world, your family, your friends, or humanity. There has to be a deeper meaning for inspiration, but for motivation things don’t have to have a deep or large goal. Motivation can come from any desire to achieve a goal. We are all motivated by different things, at different moments in our lives. Anthony Robbins mentions that pain is a better motivator than pleasure, and provides enough proof of his beliefs. I am sure that can be the case for immediate action, but for sustainable long term goals, inspiration and spiritual meaning is where our burning desire has to come from. In our book Marketing and Motivation, we try to provide the tools for Motivation and success laws. But, most importantly, we try to provide real world marketing strategies and techniques to help you promote yourself and your business.
Chapter 2:
Marketing – Branding - Internet Marketing and Search Marketing
“What we call results are beginnings.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In this chapter we cover the basics of marketing, branding, and connect the dots to search marketing. As you read you will notice that all of our chapters are outlined and self-contained, and this one is one of the most important on Marketing.
The 4 P’s of Marketing, and the one that got away
This maybe all you need to know about marketing, well maybe not, but it is a great primer. Most people don’t know the basic’s of marketing, we not only provide you that, but we go further. We might even give you better insight than a marketing MBA. Because we cover the most ignored principal of marketing, the 5th P. Having made millions with my marketing skills and entrepreneurship, I have not only been a student of marketing, but an enthusiast.
A few of my friends/advisers have Stanford and Harvard MBA’s. They all agree on the fact that SEO and Search Marketing are a must for any business wanting to take advantage of the Internet. As you already know, we cover a lot of these topics in our blogs, but something was missing, so we decided to provide a wholistic marketing approach. We take a step back and provide the basics of marketing and go beyond what is taught at all marketing 101 classes.
If some of you were lucky, smart or blessed enough to study marketing in college you certainly know about the 4 P’s of marketing. The basics have not changed within the years, but what goes in them has. I have been talking about the 4 P’s for 7 years now, and the 5th P, which I will tell you in a second. And hopefully you will agree that it is the most important. Marketing is not just about public relations or advertising, as most people assume. It’s a complex world of strategic positioning, product strategy, product development, product management, branding, and public relations and advertising.
Branding, advertising, public relations and sales are really one of the lagging parts, though very important. The most important lessons of marketing came early on for me, from Anthony Robbins, yes Tony, the great motivational speaker. He talked about the VALS research from Stanford University. The VALS research includes psychographics not just demographics, and profiling different types of people, this is where I got the concept of the 5th P, the most important P of marketing.
The 5th P does not stand for “Process” which is being taught at a national university, the U. of Washington in Seattle. I can’t believe that is what they teach there at U. of Washington. U Dub (as they call it here) is a great school, but folks, process is just a process, it’s not the 5th P, process should be applied to everything we do, to repeat it and make it a science. So listed here are the 4 P’s and the 5th will be discussed in detail below, I bet you already have an idea of what it is.
1. Product: if you don’t have a product, you don’t have anything. A product can also be a service, so for sake of simplicity we will bundle them. Marketing starts with promoting, selling, creating, usually all around the product. Yes there are exceptions, such as within corporate marketing departments, which deal with the brand of the company, but similar principles apply.
2. Price: if you can’t make money selling your product, should you sell it? Or go back to the drawing board. Well you know the answer right? Strategic marketing deals with this issue quite heavily, and helps to have a product matrix and differentiations etc.
3. Place: This is where we will sell the product, retail, online, jewelry parties, it’s the sales channel. I think it’s pretty straight forward, keep it simple and think of it as the place where we sell the products.
4. Promotion: this is the world of public relations, advertising, and call to action sales materials, search marketing, etc, etc. For those of you who study marketing you may already know that eMarketing tools is the fastest growing segment of technology. This is from a recent Gartner report, of July 2007 on marketing automation.
Without, any further ado, the drum rolls rolling, the hearts beating, yes the claps, and church bells ringing. Tadaha… It’s People, People, People, how can the marketing geniuses of the MBA’s forget to teach about “People, the 5th P”. Is process more important than people, no silly professors at U. Dumb, the 5th P is for People.
So what do you need to know about People and marketing?
Forget about demographics, focus on psychographics, and let’s get the data to back up our strategy. It’s the art of understanding not only who our customers are, but what they do, and why they do it. The 5th P of marketing is all about people, you need to know everything about your customers, their profile is just a start. You need to know their likes, dislikes, passions, dreams and aspirations. Where are they going today? How much money are they spending on products that you sell, today and tomorrow?
Tieing it all together: Blogs + SEO + Social Networking = Internet Marketing 2.0
B is for Brand, not just blogging, and it’s more important to build a brand than to just SEO. We want to help you be successful, and that is why our tagline at MyTypes.com is “Blogcast your brand!” Branding is everything in marketing, after you have developed a great product. So what is a Brand, and why should you care? If you build your brand the right way, you won’t just SEO for subject matter keywords such as Jewelry, but people will SEO for your brand name, such as for “Blue Nile” for jewelry. How do you develop such a powerful brand name, especially on the Internet?
People will actually SEO for your brand name, as consumers will be searching for your name, to buy your product or service. And, your competitors will SEO for your brand name, no matter how much they try, you will always be #1 on Google for your brand! Right? Being searched for as a keyword that is your “brand name” is when you have really hit it big, and you than will be the target keyword for your category, and that my friend is the success of a brand and you will have arrived. We will show you not only to SEO blogs here, but to be unique, and to always use and reinforce your Brand name.
Now lets get back to What is a brand and brand building. I am not going to give you a text book definition, because I am not going to refresh my memory with a text book. but tell you everything I have learned and simplify the knowledge of over 15 years. The 15 years come from real life Sr. level marketing positions with top companies and successful technology companies. Isn’t that what you want,
real world, real life experience, instead of text book answers? After receiving my business degree is in Management Information Systems, where one of my favorite subjects was marketing, I started a food company, and had billionaires over for dinner at the age of 25 to buy my company. To this day that is still one of my top 10 achievements. I love the Schwan’s family, but The Schwan’s food company, sent me an offer I had to refuse, so I did, I’ll touch on that lesson later, be patient lad, there is a tie-in to the Schwan’s story of turning lemons in to lemonade at the end of the book.
My love and passion for marketing has never left me, I still love advertisements that make me laugh, brands that stand out and make you think, product branding that is genius. Marketing and product marketing are such an amazing and creative field, but require a lot of skill and market research, which I learned at Gartner and working with top Gartner clients such as Microsoft. Strategic Marketing and strategic positioning is not usually thought of as marketing, people usually talk about brand marketing or marketing promotions and advertisements, as marketing. Hence they miss the boat on it completely because they don’t understand the big picture. I say if you build a brand the right way from the strategy level, then brand building and SEO are easy. It’s not just about getting ranked at the top of the search engines, but to actually sell products and make money. Let’s never forget that brand building and SEO should always be about increasing sales.
I read Adweek and other marketing + business literature and blogs as a hobby, and I still love to look at brands with an awe of success and wonder. My experiences have also lead to me to create a few amazing and fun brand names that even Sr. VP’s at companies like Microsoft chuckle at. “It’s all in a name” is what I say. Thanks to Larry C, who’s nanny helped me develop UrbanTango.com, a real estate portal in 2003. That brand is still admired in the Seattle real estate world, and owned by our company MyTypes.com.
I consider my self an Internet Marketing expert, a position which others may not argue with given my background and results in today’s internet marketing strategies. Way back in 1999, I co-founded an Internet Company, Enthusiasm.com which turned in to Enthusiasm Technologies, that sold to a public company for $8.6Million, Metro One Telecom. Soon there after I founded another company that achieved $1million in revenues in it’s first 11months and $3.2m in it’s second year, Netisen Group, Inc. at Netisen.com.
We ended up doing business at Netisen with Microsoft, Safeco, Nordstrom, Premera Blue Cross, Amgen, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Now if you live in Seattle you certainly know about all of these brands. While working with all those brands added credibility to Netisen, it still ended up being sold for pennies on the dollar and us loosing millions. I bring this up as building a great brand can generate millions, but if business not taken care of properly, can destroy a great brand too, such as in a case of Arthur Andersen, Enron and MCI.
Debacles of bad suppliers from China are starting to impact the major toys brands of today, and some very powerful brands are at risk. A whole country China is getting a bad brand due to some bad suppliers. Some might say unreasonably at the fault of the US brand or not enough quality control or regulations at both sides, I say, yes. Remember the issues with Tylenol in the 80’s, and how criminals almost destroyed that great brand? So experiences such as Enron’s have been around, that show us, that a great brand can be lost or destroyed in a matter of months.
So go slowly and be very strategic when SEOing or brand building, and be cautious of your business partners, great brands are developed over years not in a short time. We can all go through a tough period, and your brand will survive if it stands for solid values of ethics, compassion, honesty and respect. Respect is earned not only by doing things right, but also by managing the things that have gone wrong, so brand building and credibility go hand in hand. This is truth of Internet Marketing 2.0, and search engines have unraveled at an accelerating rate.
Getting ranked and high rankings in search engines such as Google can get your brand Quick Credibility with the consumer. Especially as there are millions of web pages out there, and if you are among the top 10, you become a leader, don’t you! Organic SEO and search results actually give you and your brand more credibility and equity than Pay Per Click ads can. Consumers don’t like being sold to, do they, they prefer to buy, but you already knew that! I am very proud of our #1 search result in “Create a blog”, and many top rankings.
Recently, our brand MyTypes.com was recognized by a friend who works for one of the top 10 Internet companies in the world. As I spoke with this in-house SEO expert of a large media company, Real Networks. She has an MBA from a major west coast school, so she is very smart, and said she had seen our site at the top of the search engines, and therefore she thought highly of it. Wow, but that should not be a shock to you folks, Google and other search engines can make your brand a International phenomenon in a matter of days. The key is not just to SEO, but to build your brand with this strategy in mind, make it memorable not top ranked.
Back to us for the moment, we are #1 for “Wordpress SEO” which is why you are here. We are #9 on Google for “Free Blog“, #6 for “Blogging“, and the #8for “SEO“. Wowsa, that high for SEO and we weren’t even targeting it, boy are we good or what?
I am saying these things about results and above paragraph about my/our past success, to not brag or be self promotional, but only to add credibility. I am sure some very smart people, will question the credibility of the messenger, and some times you should. It’s good show results that show evidence of success and knowledge base. You should listen to us, because we have evidence to show that we are one of the top 10 organizations in the world at SEO, Internet Marketing, and Marketing. Some times people will question your credibility and experiences, as they will our’s or anyone else’s who achieves success, especially in the public eye.
In this world of rational reasoning, it’s not just what you know, what school you went to, but what have you done in your field. To me the best thing about being an American, is that we tend to judge people by their actions, not just their degrees, caste system, last name or wealth status or lordship. In India, and other parts of the world, I am afraid it’s not the case, but collectively we can change that.
At the end of the day, I will judge my success on how many people I can help with my skills rather than how many keywords I can get ranked on Google, or how many brands I can think of/or develop. As far as brands are concerned, there is a good list below, and yes I/we do own over 70+ great URL’s. This article is not just about SEO, but rather on the topic of branding, brand building, brand strategy, and most importantly about blogcasting/promoting your brand for eSuccess!
1. What is a Brand? It’s the name of a product or company that captures it’s essence to the audience. Some common and newer examples: Coke: a soft drink, but the bottle of coke; IBM, the personal computer, everything business computers, big blue, big branding, big shoes to fill:-).
2. What is the most important aspect of building a brand? That it be remembered, as well as capture the essence of it’s products value. Google is as you can see, remembered. MySpace is well known, Aveda: a health and beauty brand is remembered and admired as it captures the plant essences. Remember that a brand may get old and tired such as Yahoo, but it’s the fault of it’s management. eBay is not tired, Microsoft is not tired, so time will not make a brand old, it’s the lack of remarkability.
3. How do we build a brand? Make it unique, use smart-unique words, design simple logos, hello… think the Nike swoosh. Use colors or be black and white in today world of color, like Crate and Barrel. Add music, do any thing to set it up as a product or companies Unique Selling Proposition, can you think of the music or tune of the Vonage, the Internet phone company, commercials? How about the annoying factor of the HeadOn, HeadOn, HeadOn advertisements on TV?
To make your brand a remarkable brand, make it an emotional grabber, and use it every where, every where, in all of your marketing materials, packaging, website, brochures, keep the colors and words consistent. And than keep it consistent by hammering it over and over again, liven it up every year or so, but not too often, keep it consistent. The main rule of branding, the more different the more it will stand out. In a world of blue, be pink or Orange, well Pink is the new black, as you already knew right?
4. How do we start building a brand? Ask your self these questions, what, where, how, when, and Why and most importantly for Who?
What does my product stand for? What do I want my customers to think of the solution? Is it a soft drink that quenches their thirst, or is it “oh what a feeling? What is the association of the name and the product? When I was first thinking of a name for my first company, a frozen Indian food products, my friend and associate William Mason, helped me learned the best brand building lessons. I had no idea, that his insights would get in my book some day:-). The process is real simple, and and anyone can do it. He asked me some very interesting questions, I can remember my first brand building conversation back in 1992 vividly.
In a matter of minutes we came up with the name, sitting right outside at a cafe in the Minneapolis warehouse district, those were the days before the Target center. Prince, the musician without a name, still had his night club right around the corner. And there we were having a discussion on brand building and the most important factors. I know the exact point, I figured out the art of Branding. Oh by the way, it ended up being called: “Masala, Cuisine of India”. Masala is the name for mixture of spices used in Indian cooking, it is at the heart of every home, restaurant, and it is the essence of everything Indian food. So having a name like Masala is the key, you have to capture the essence at the core of your category, your culture, your industry, your products emotional value to your customers.
The word “Cuisine” means gourmet, so we added that as a positioning statement, we wanted the Indian food to have a sophisticated place in the palate, rather than peasant food it might be considered. We knew that Indian food tends to be popular with the educated and cultural type of people who appreciate it’s complex tastes and smells. Not just some visually non-appealing “poop” style curry, yuk!
The average hamburger eating crowd does not define a connoisseurs of fine gourmet foods. At the same time, the word Gourmet may be too high-end for the average person. Last word “India” was important to say what it was, as it is from the ancient land of Yoga and the Taj Mahal, but isn’t it easier to just say India? But we could have said Curries, or Taj Mahal, Rubies, Turbons, Sacred cow’s etc. etc.
As you can see, words have a lot to do with branding, and you MUST define your product or brand explicitly with your customers in mind. That is why the section of this chapter on the 5P’s of marketing is so important. Just as well as all the blogs and topics in the book are important. To remember the remarkability, we asked and got to the Core of Indian food to come up with a name for the products and the company. You too can do the same, just ask your self the questions asked above. Remember, some times people want the company to be named different than the product, we disagree, the simpler the better. Be remarkable as the #1 name in marketing (Seth
Godin) says, don’t be average, be different, be yourself, I say.
We believe you should pick a name, a catchy name, a small name, an emotional name (brand) that defines your product, that defines your passion, that you LOVE. And keep it simple and use that word for everything in your marketing, your website, your blogs, your conversations. Large companies pay thousands to millions of dollars for brand creation, brand development, brand positioning, brand building, brand promoting, brand everything. If you are a small business person, an entrepreneur or even a large business executive, regardless of who you are if you want to develop a brand from inception to reinforcing, you have to pick a few words to define what you do and hammer that brand name home. It’s really as simple as that.
So pick a catchy name like “Purple Cow” the name of a great marketing book by Seth Godin. Being different is not enough, capturing the essence of your category and is vital to you success. Here are some brand names that I have been associated with and/or have created, and or worked for.
Masala: Cuisine of India
MNDine.com: a Minnesota Restaurant online directory
Gartner: A global IT leader, any IT exec knows this brand
Microsoft: A software company, ask Bill Gates what they do, they are a software company. I helped managed the relationship between Gartner and Microsoft and I love some of the branding that they have created.
UrbanTango.com: A real estate website for Seattle Real Estate that I created and got to the top 10 search result on Yahoo, MSN, Google
XoomPad.com: A real estate websites, and IDX (Home Listings) search website
MyTypes.com: A community of bloggers to create and promote their blogs, what do you do with your blog, Type it right? And, it’s all about the individual’s types, therefore MyTypes.com.
Why did I bring up the not so well known brands that we own? They are not big names, nor does your brand have to super well known by everyone to be successful, it just has to speak to/with your customers. Most importantly please make them catchy names, and being catchy is what we are after, and Brands that last, Brands that have equity, and Brands that make you money. I love to see brands at work, and so should you, it’s all about your work, isn’t it? A great brand usually means more jobs and more success for not just the company but also the community at large. We will address the other questions of When, Where, How and Why and we talk about questions in the last chapter of the book.
Branding Your Blog: Five Questions To Ask Yourself
Branding a blog is not unlike branding a business - you want to design a brand that encapsulates your core characteristics, that makes you stand out from the crowd, and that sums up your philosophy. I’m not talking about pretty logos or a memorable slogan, however. In order to succeed in the age of Web 2.0, your brand/blog must be dynamic, beneficial and/or entertaining - or preferably all three. Today’s readers are savvy, demanding, and fickle, so there has to be substance behind the hype if you want your message to stick.
When you begin your blog, ask yourself these questions:
1. What do I want to say? Try to narrow your message down to a few sentences. Think of it as a blogging mission statement (you can put this on your about page).
2. What do I have to offer? What unique skills and knowledge do you have to share with your readers? How can someone benefit by reading your blog? This can become the basis for your cornerstone content.
3. What is my niche? No one can be all things to all people, so focus on what you can do well. Define your niche so that your blog and brand can be tailored to it (this is also important for SEO purposes, as it helps you to focus on the best possible keywords).
4. Is this sustainable in the long run? Do I have enough to say on this topic to maintain a blog? If you are blogging about your business, (hopefully), you’ll be very passionate about it and have more than enough to say. Remember that creating a successful blog, like a successful brand, requires time and commitment.
5. What sets you apart from the competition? What makes you and your business stand out? Can you describe in a few words? Why should someone read your blog?
As an example, here are the answers for this blog:
1. What do I want to say? In a nutshell, I help bloggers make their blogs better; in particular, I teach to people use blogging to promote their businesses.
2. What do I have to offer? A finely honed writing ability combined with an knowledge of new media and web 2.0 topics, and an awareness of trends in the blogging community. Plus, I’m patient, friendly, and a good teacher.
3. What is my niche? Yes, I’m one of the many who blogs about blogging, but I’m focused on helping small business owners and entrepreneurs create compelling content and maximize the potential of their blogs.
4. Is this sustainable in the long run? Definitely. I clearly have lots to say, and the blogging community is incredibly dynamic and innovative, so there are always new topics to cover and lots of blog fodder. I’ve developed blogs before, so I understand the time commitment. Finally, blogging is something I’m passionate about on a personal level, because starting a blog literally changed my life (ultra quick summary - I was planning on going into a completely different field after I got my B.A., but I started a fashion blog as a hobby, fell in love with the world of blogging and online media, and the rest is history).
5. What sets you apart from the competition? I consider myself a writer as well as a blogger (just because the web is more informal medium than print doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t put my best face, or posts, forward), and I teach people to use their blogs as a means of active communication, connection, and involvement with their readers/markets instead of just a promotional tool. I’m in this to help other people succeed.
Make Contact with blogs and search marketing
Traditional marketing is not dead, but the new media of the Internet is not a pipe dream any more either. The biggest most powerful way to contact your customers is not via email, it’s not the web 2.0 social media marketing. If we were to keep it simple and stupid, it would be the Google effect. But, wait Live Search from Microsoft got a big leg up this week. Live signed deals with Digg.com and Facebook.com two of the top 5 leaders in the Social media giants of the internet, and maybe Microsoft will re-emerge as it always does. So the way to connect with blogs and search marketing will help you with all search engines, not just google, but for now we know Google loves blogs.
The new world of marketing has changed the most due to Google and other search engines. Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing or Internet Marketing in that order are subset of each other. Because Google is the first to give the small business a chance by it’s Adwords product, it really has taken the world by storm. What Adwords does is makes it easier for small business to buy keywords to market it’s products, to anyone looking for information on those products. And contextual ads being mapped to search results makes everyone happy, as they find the most relevant products and services, right when they are looking to purchase them.
Why and How you say does this work? When a consumer is looking for information, and a search engine provides the info, regardless if it is an Advertisement or just organic search results, they help by providing the right information at the right time. People don’t want non-relevant advertisements crammed down their throat, but if it is relevant and contextual, they are likely to buy and or click on that ad, and that is what makes Adword by Google work. As we know, people prefer to look for information when we want to learn something or buy something to make our decision, we are all treasure hunters and want to find stuff that we want.
And because Google made the search results better, it therefore created this huge world of Search Marketing via it’s Adwords program. Search Marketing as we call it includes the Organic Search Results as well as Adwords which is often called the pay-per-click advertisement. In fact, according to SEMPO.org the industry size for organic results alone is suppose to be a $7.8Billion dollars by the end of 2007. We are not a member of Sempo, but we support it’s mission. SEMPO Mission: SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it.
So how do you have eSuccess in search marketing results? This is easy if you have millions to advertise, but to get Organic or Natural search results without Ads is much harder, and there fore the subject of this book. Any millionaire or big company can learn to optimize it’s Search Engine Marketing campaigns for ads, and get immediate results. But for small businesses, that is usually not the option. But by reading the most technical and easy to use information in this book you can learn the secrets and rank high for free, if you blog often with our insights.
Always remember, that Search Engines want to provide the best contextual related results to consumers. They will always target news related websites first, and blogs are considered news. Blogs are considered news, because, well you already know this, right? Each blog post has a time stamp on it, and people are blogging about different topics and becoming journalists. But for a blog to be found as a search result, it has to be written with the proper keywords, but, how do you write unless you know the targeted keywords. Well, that is easy you have to go back to the Search engines and start with Search Marketing and learn the tools they provide to help you.
So it’s a full circle, search engines provide that information in their keyword analysis tools, and in Google’s case you have to learn it via it’s Google Adwords tool. Which is the most important, but one of the many tools required for your eSuccess via Search marketing. The tool sets as a whole are referred to SEM and SEO tools. This is what the professionals use, and you as a small business can learn these too, especially for free by setting up an account for yourself. We recommend doing this for Yahoo and MSN too, but start with Google first.
We are a commercial site, and actually built our on SEO Tools last year. I have been studying search marketing and SEO since 2003, and have been blogging since the same time, so we will help you narrow your choices to the best tools. But if you want to spend your time learning about the best tools, we recommend reading “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies” by Peter Kent. He provides the best reviews of all of the tools. This book is not just about SEO, but the whole picture of marketing in the new era of Internet marketing.
Why do we recommend blogging, even though people don’t always know what to write or blog about. Because, the secret that is easy to get over looked. Blogging is the best way to SEO and search market for your products and services. So this makes Blogging the best SEO tool on the market. Think of blogging as the Public relations of the new generation, and blogs are synonymous as news. So the more you blog, the more you will be in the news, it’s really that connection that makes it especial. And, to do it right, you have to blog often, and with the proper keywords. If you read my blogs on MyTypes.com/vipin, you will see how I write with all of my target keywords, linked to the proper site? That type of anchor text linking to a domain is what you need the most to be ranked in Google. The next chapter will fill in the gaps of specifics of what and how.
May 24th, 2008
the reality of doing