In fact, after his sad demise recently, many were seen talking in hushed tones about the fate of Apple now. Would the company be able to sustain itself or would it again crash in the absence of its captain. That’s the power of personal branding. Whether you are the CEO of a company or an employee in a large organization, if you have a powerful personal brand, it adds immense value to the business you are in.

In the globalized world of today, where almost everything is on the internet, personal branding is both an easy as well as difficult task. It easy because you have plenty of avenues to project yourself as an expert in your field; it is difficult because you can easily be found out there and even slightest of mistakes can ruin the brand called You. Talking of avenues online, here are some important mediums which can make or break your personal brand in this fiercely competitive world.

Importance of Facebook Branding

FaceBook is the new internet, quite literally. With 800 million users and growing, almost everybody with an internet connection is one FaceBook today. Recently, FaceBook has also launched the subscribe feature which lets users subscribe to interesting pages and people without being friends. That means if you are the CEO of a company or at the helm of things, people will definitely check out your page on FaceBook.

It is the leader of an organization which determines the value of brand in the eyes of the customers. Thus, you need to make sure that your FaceBook page projects a positive personal image.

Even if you are not the leader of an organization, your FaceBook page matters a lot. Recent study has suggested that social media is influencing the way HR personnel are hiring the world over. Here are some complete no-no’s when it comes to FaceBook as a medium for your personal branding:

• Keep the pics from that wild night out last night out personal. Make sure only your closest friends get to see such pics. You can always tweak the settings in your FaceBook account.
• Make meaningful updates. In order to come across as a serious individual, don’t just update your status for the heck of it. Keep it interesting and if possible, related to your skills and expertise. For example, if you are a copywriter, you can always post new slogans that you coin every now and then. If you are a techie, posting links to interesting bits of news in the world of technology is a good idea.
• Let the world know about important happenings. It is important to use FaceBook about important happenings in your professional life. It could be success in a project or simply thinking about new ideas to grow your business.

Importance of personal website

While FaceBook is about connecting with the world out there, a personal website is about blowing your own trumpet. A personal website not only ensures that people have a chance to know the real you, it also means better visibility on search engines. Unless you are a Steve Jobs whose life has been an open book, you do need good visibility to create a buzz around your personal brand. A personal website can help you do that.

Importance of Twitter

If you thought people only follow celebs on Twitter, you are wrong. Ever since twitter came on the horizon, the task of discovering new things has become that much easier for people. Twitter users follow all kinds of interesting people- bloggers, experts in various fields and even the sarcastically humorous ones out there. Twitter is the perfect example of what viral marketing is. If you have interesting enough content to share, you can quickly become popular on Twitter Sphere. And if you commit an embarrassing mistake, you can still become popular on Twitter, albeit the wrong way. Need I say more about the importance of Twitter for personal branding?

Twitter also holds fantastic importance for top business honchos out there. People love to know about brands they are part of. Twitter gives CEOs the opportunity to engage their consumers directly and ensure good branding for their organization. A perfect example of the above is the CEO of Mahindra and Mahindra Anand Mahindra. He makes it a point to answer his followers’ questions and keep them updated about the latest happenings. It definitely has had a positive impact on the branding of Mahindra and Mahindra.

Importance of  LinkedIn

LinkedIn is social media for the professional world. Whether you are a freelancer, an executive or a top honcho, trust your business associates, partners and colleagues to glance at your LinkedIn profile at some point or the other. To use LinkedIn as an effective tool for personal branding, make sure you have spent enough time to make a professional looking profile on the site.

Highlight your strengths and make sure your LinkedIn profile is search engine optimized too. And avoid a very common mistake people commit with their LinkedIn profiles- linking it with their Twitter account and tweeting all kinds of stuff.

If you have linked your LinkedIn profile with twitter, make sure you tweet only important stuff which projects a positive image for yourself. If you use Twitter for personal interactions, linking your Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile is never a good idea. It can corrode your personal brand quicker than you think.

Importance of YouTube

Videos are one of the best mediums for viral marketing. The recent online rage Kolavei Di vindicates that point. If you really want your personal brand to go viral, there is no better platform than You Tube. People love to follow YouTube channels that are informative or those with interesting content. As an individual, you can tap the potential of You Tube to give your personal brand the extra mileage.

Importance of Personalized e-mails

Almost everyone either has a Yahoo account or a Gmail account these days. Branding, whether personal or otherwise, is about standing out from the rest out there. If you want to come across as a dedicated individual who has the required professionalism, a personalized e-mail address can leave that impact. Getting a personalized e-mail address is easy with Google Apps and it is available for free. A personalized e-mail address ensures you have a unique e-mail address and thus, a high recall value.

Pankaj Pandey’s expertise as an online marketing consultant and his prowess in custom website development has helped him reach the pinnacle of success, helping various web based businesses achieve success along the way.

It is true that the colours, design, logo and photos make an impression on the visitors of your website, but what is most important is the content of your website. The quality of the content on your website is truly a deciding factor for the success of your business, as your website is the first face of your company that a customer sees. And therefore, it is imperative that your website should speak for your company.

Content Is the King

How to make your content interesting to read, increase the hits and make it successful? Here are the secrets

Know your customer

The secret to quality content is to know exactly who is reading it. It is important to know your target audience and your website having exactly what they are looking for. Instead of just plainly inserting the keywords in your pages, make the content an interesting read and also make sure it aesthetically includes the keywords for the SEO. Make it interactive as customers like to have an upper hand on what they choose, and giving the customers the upper hand lets YOU have the upper hand without the customer knowing it.

Keep it short

Remember the KISS formula – Keep it short and simple. When a customer is doing a search in Google, you have only few seconds to make that first impression. So the maximum information you could give in minimum number of words would do the magic. You might have a lot to talk about your company, but knowing what to keep and what to delete is very important. Knowing which sentences would directly end up making the visitor a customer is an important aspect. After all, nobody has the time to go through pages with tonnes of information. It’s a fast paced world, remember?

Regular Updates

Next key is to regularly update your content. It is important to create fresh content regularly. Even if it is a small change, ensure you update the website weekly or even daily. Google loves a regularly updated website. Any content change would be helpful to bring it up in Google search.

Trust the experts

You have put all your time, effort and money in building up your business, but it is always good to leave the job to the people who do it best. There are several free websites available on the web offering free content, but there is nothing like creative and unique content which matches your business. Know that your content writers are experienced and would know exactly which words would boost your business. If good content could boost your business, bad content could kill it double fast. Therefore, choose the writers wisely. After all, a comma and a hyphen could change the whole meaning of a sentence.

A mantra for success- The content of your website is the primary tool you have to win customers, use it wisely.

Given the focus of businesses on building a bigger client base, usually they shy away from saying ‘no’ to the client. Often, they don’t even realize that they are overburdened. It is tempting for businesses to take on the client’s project and hope that it somehow gets done in time. They are blinded by money or the fear of losing valuable customers.

When it is essential to say ‘no’ to client, businesses need to do so in a diplomatic way to avoid jeopardizing long term business relations with the client. Here are some practical ways to do so:

1. Do not respond immediately to a client’s request. Give it some thought, check your work schedule and then come up with a realistic work completion plan, before you take on the project.
2. Respond clearly and politely, so that the client understands that you won’t be able to work on the project. Explain the reasons because of which you will not be able to work on the project. This will help the clients to better understand why you are refusing the project. For example, saying “I wish I could say yes. Unfortunately, because of the current work load, I can’t complete the project effectively and on time. So, I am forced to say no to your project.” sounds better than simply saying “I cannot take this project.” Avoid using negative or offensive expressions, such as ‘It is unreasonable …” or “It is impossible to …”. Use positive language when responding to a client. Saying “We’d love to do this project, however …” is a gentle way of declining the client’s project.
3. Always give alternatives to the client – Keep a waiting list, and let your clients know when you will be free to work on their project. Give them a clear waiting time, such as one week or one month, and an approximate date on which you can begin work on their project.
4. Provide recommendations – In case you do not have the expertise or resources to do the project, let the clients know that they have the wrong person. If possible, recommend other professionals who can do it. Sometimes, a client might be in a hurry or under pressure, and need the services immediately. A recommendation of alternative service providers will not only help the clients but in the long run, it will also strengthen your business relations with them.

Consumers have changed the way they view companies. In the past, consumers had a limited number of choices when purchasing goods and services. Before the web, consumers purchased goods and services from a local company or possibly through a catalog. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that total e-commerce sales for 2009 were $134.9 billion. More and more people are signing on to the web to make purchases. This has provided a significant opportunity for businesses, especially small to medium size businesses. Think about it. If I wanted to buy a bicycle ten years ago I would have went to my local Wal-Mart to make the purchase. That’s not the case today. I can get online and search specifically for the bike I want. It could be that I end up making the purchase from a small bike shop in Minnesota and have it shipped to me. The web has increased the purchasing power of consumers. We now have more choices and are not limited to what our local companies can offer. You are probably thinking what does this have to do with whether or not my company should have a blog? Everything.

It is your responsibility to differentiate yourself from your competition. It is much more difficult to do this today. Not only do you have to compete with your local competition, but you also have to compete with businesses in other cities, states, and even other countries. One way you can differentiate yourself from your competitors is with a blog. Consumers want to feel good about their purchases. I will gladly pay $10, $25, or $50 extra to a business that I feel understands my circumstances and reaches me on a personal level. That is exactly what a blog is…personal. It could be that I chose to purchase my bike from the online company in Minnesota rather than my local Wal-Mart because the company in Minnesota spoke to me in a different way through a blog.

A blog creates a feeling with consumers that they are getting inside knowledge. It helps companies establish relationships with their customers, which by default leads to trust. Do you want to see an increase in online sales or see your website become a tool rather than an expense? Get on a personal level with your consumers.

Another reason you should have a blog is because it keeps your website updated with fresh content. Common sense tells us that people are not going to visit your website repeatedly if they see the same thing each time they visit. However, if your content is changing consistently they will continue to visit your website in order to remain informed. The opportunity to sale your products and services increases greatly with the more visits you have to your website and the longer people remain on your website.

Having a blog opens up so many avenues for companies. Think about the numerous ways you can keep your website visitors engaged through a blog.

1. Inform them of new products and services, or changes to existing products and services.
2. Offer online discounts and promotions to your blog readers.
3. Inform your readers of how your company is doing in relation to its’ goals and objectives.
4. Post articles regarding your company’s involvement in charity (consumers love this).
5. Post information about your employees.

These are just a few of the ways you can utilize a blog to reach out to your website visitors and customers. Do not use a blog to bash your competition. This is one of the cardinal sins of blogging. We, consumers, get really tired of negative publicity. So, keep it positive and be consistent.

If you are still unsure if your company needs a blog you apparently skipped this entire article and went straight to the bottom hoping to find a summary. Well, here is your summary. Yes, you need a blog. If you are on board and are ready to implement a blog then we recommend using WordPress.

About the Author:
Ray Goins is an author and owner of www.stopdev.com. StopDev provides web design and online marketing tips.

you are interested to read this post due to this odd title. this reason of odd title is surprise factor, whenever you got unusual topic you obviously go through and read  till the end of the post.

I am giving a practical example: you are visiting an e-commerce website where all the product listed there with best offers. if you got any odd offer like get 1000$ item in xx$  . you will go and find the details of offer. that offer is meant to surprise the visitor with strange offer.

You can also track open rate of emails with odd title. so you can get more response by sending odd titles in mails.

This surprise factor is major part of online viral marketing. this is a medium to distribute information to other.
if you want to surprise you visitor you need to do something odd. you can notice what viral campaign have odd stuff.
so following are some odd behaviors which you can try and see what response you will get. (note: do at your risk)

• Send  mail to friends with title “ignore this mail not worth reading”
• Tell your friend that you started drinking coconut water instead of beer and you feel amazing etc..

You can adopt similar  viral feature to gain your customer attention.

After my blog post like, how to get success online, how to get customer through website traffic. . .  Now i am tracking this odd title post hits and i will update my report soon.

image copyright: corbis

Its seems that Windows live have very promising feature for blogging and networking.

Following are the feature of Window Live Writer.

• New border treatments (including Instant Photo)
• Crop and tilt photos
• Insert multiple photos
• Toolbar alignment commands enabled for images
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Additional spell checking languages: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (for supported blogs)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Twitter, Digg and Flickr Plug-ins
• Improved blog account setup
• Lightbox and Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Improved category control: adding categories, type-down filtering
• Tabbed view switching
• AutoLink glossary
• Smart quotes/typographic characters
• Word count
• Support for bidirectional languages (like Hebrew and Arabic)
• Tabs for view switching
• Updated look and feel

What to do next? Here are the answers.

Identify keywords

Following are some basic checklist you need to identify first.

1. Find your competitor and their keywords.
2. Focusing on generic keywords that gain an enormous number of searches, but which also have an enormous amount of competition is usually not worth it unless the keyword is highly likely to provide you with converting traffic, and unless you have a very big marketing budget. Identify your main keywords. i.e.; your product is soap, your target area is Ghana, if you are targeting pet soap you competition is too high. You can modify your keyword like, Pet soap Ghana, Herbal Pet soap Ghana etc.
3. Do a research or read research on your industry.
4. Research on popular keywords. A luxury second hand car dealer, for example, may only want to include the words ‘pre-owned automobiles’ on their web site, and not ‘used cars’. The fact that thousands of people are searching for a used car, and very few are searching for a preowned automobile needs to be communicated. You can use following keywords tool to research on keywords.
   • Yahoo Panama Keyword Tool
   • Google Keyword Tool, traffic estimator, Webmaster Tools; Google Suggest and Google Trends
   • MSN Keyword Forecast
   • Hitwise
   • WordTracker
   • Keyword Discovery
   • WordStream

Wow! I got the keywords for my business what to do next?

Where to use Keywords?

Following are useful tips for using your keywords smartly.

• Use keyword in your website url.
• Title tags
• meta tags
• anchor texts in incoming links
• heading
• Smartly use keywords on your contents.
• Tag your blog article with your keywords.

Due to copyright claim post is republished. I am not a professional writer so excuse for my language error.

Only having an amazing look website is not sufficient. Selling your product or service on your amazing website is admirable. We can get a website in a day but getting a customer through website will take lots of efforts.

Following are some basic step for success online.

How to get customer through web site traffic

Normally people think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. But getting traffic to your site takes hard work and conscientiousness and is not accomplished suddenly. Think about it this way – how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don’t tell them? read previous article How to get customer through web site traffic

Show off

You need to show what you are selling you are expert in that field. Create a blog. Write articles on your services; educate visitor about your services, participate in forum activity. Join a relevant forum and answer the question of forum members include your website link in your signature. Above are some basic steps for how to show you are expert in your field.

Landing page customization

This is a very important step in which many online businesses have a tendency to forget. A landing page normally called home page is basically a page on your website which visitors go to first before getting to the meat of your product.

You are basically trying to pump up what you’re selling as much as you can before they get to it. This not only will increase sales but will also make sure people are reading what you have to say.

Wring pages should be focused around the keywords in which you are targeting for your specific position. For example, if you want to promote product X on you website highlight product X through your article, banner and it should be focused. Rather than highlight product Y. keep a separate landing page for product Y. don’t confuse your visitor.

Capturing visitor data

You can capture visitor data through following process.

• Product update information newsletter
• Newsletter on your article
• Signup for Promotional offers
• Survey and feedback

If you capture lots of visitor data you can covert that visitor to your customer.

Analysis visitor trends for optimizing your site.

You can use Google analytic to analyze customer trend on your website. You can check in which page customer stay long. Where visitors are exiting your website? What are there geographical locations?

Stability

You need to work on this process regularly if you want to succeed. These basic steps give you output after lots of effort when you give.

Thanks for reading this article you can subscribe my blog for updates through RSS and mails.Follow my blog with bloglovin´

following are the detail of Google connect.

Google Friend Connect means more people engaging more deeply with your website — and with each other

• Enrich your site
  Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
• Attract more visitors
  Your users can easily invite friends from social networks and contact lists to visit and join your site.
• No programming whatsoever
  Just copy and paste a few snippets of code into your site, and Friend Connect does the rest.

With Google Friend Connect, visitors to your site or blog can:

• Sign in with their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account.
• Interact with other visitors by making friends, sharing media, posting comments, playing games, and more.
• Invite friends from other social networks and contact lists to join your site or blog.

Visit Goggle friend: http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/intro

Update: I have removed this plug-ins due to some error and non compatibility with my design. i will ad this feature in my website soon

• Fast and clean admin panel.
• As a SEO expert i need full control of of content. I found managing content through MODx is amazing.
• maxiGallary advanced gallery plugin.
• Better real url control.
• Generate cms output in xml, xhtml, json(javascript) so we can use this cms for flash website too.
• Featured frontend content editing.
• very easy to setup.
• and more…

I amazed that i completed first website in MODx in 6 hour with all content and real url setup. i spend 4 day to understand templating of typo3 first website.

I am planning to teach my web design techniques in bhubaneswar. contact me for detail.