The Guru has been trying for the last 6 days to write an article for the
millions of The Guru's readers, but, alas, the Guru has not been able to sit up
except to run to the bathroom to throw up or --- well, you know. The Guru
caught Malaria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria
You may think a thing like that may dampen a Gurus spirit and some lesser
Gurus, maybe so. But I'm just paying my dues. My attitude about India and my
opportunities in it has not changed one iota. This past week, while I've been completely
out of it, we've hired another 11 people and I'm more impressed than ever by
the caliber of people I can finally afford to work with.
I just have to grow up, realize the whole world is not about me and accept
certain realities and limitations. Seizing opportunities is not about thinking
you're so tuff that nothing can stop you. That is self-centric to the max.
Winning is about being able to honestly and effectively evaluate the
environment and then make decisions based on risk/reward data and being able to
accept and learn from your mistakes.
Malaria was my fault. I had medication called Malarone. Since I stayed an extra
month more than I had originally planned I ran out. Instead of dealing with it like
an adult and going to the doctor to get more, I just convinced myself that BOB
could take it. BOB wasn't going to let a little thing like a disease that
afflicts some 300 million people a year get in his way~ I KNEW I was so special
that malaria wouldn't touch me~!
I caught Malaria less than 72 hours after I ran out of Malarone.
I'm actually kind of grateful. Something like Malaria gets you to stop thinking
only of yourself. It makes you think about your wife, your kids, your friends,
all the people counting on you . The experience has changed my life for the
better and I will never forget it. What an incredible gift!
In spite of feeling so nauseous, I've also felt an extreme sense of responsibility
to provide pearls of wisdom to my adoring fans, but we're fresh out of wisdom
here. I can barely muster slobber.
So I thought of an article I had written over two years ago for a good
friend Nick Wilson as he was launching Threadwatch. It is still relevant today,
I don't have to write anything fresh and it's long enough it should keep you
reading for another 2 to 3 days which the doctor says should be enough time to
get the Guru back in the pink! The first time I wrote it, it took me a long
time and a lot of effort but this time just copying and pasting is proving to
be even more of an effort. I hope you enjoy and now the Guru is going to lie
back down.
****************************************
The Massa
Conversion Chronicles
The
Importance of Branding
I'm going to discuss branding. Not as a person holding an MBA would discuss
it. Not even as a student of marketing would discuss it. Rather as a person who
runs a small internet company would discuss it. My intention here is not to
"teach" anyone anything. My intention is only to give you some insight
into how one small business operator sees the particular challenge of how to
compete with the Oracle's, Google's, Nike's and Yahoo's of the world.
Let me state right up front that I don't have a college degree in marketing.
What I do have is the responsibility of paying corporate, payroll and personal
taxes, meeting payroll, being sure I'm in compliance with hundreds of laws and
restrictions, setting budgets and making sure I don't go over them, holding
staff meetings, sales meetings, meetings with accountants, attorneys, bankers,
customers and peers. I have to handle employee training, recruiting and
evaluating. I handle customer relations, public relations and even the far too
few romantic relations with my own wife. The same as many of you reading this
now.
My point is simply that while I realize branding is important and directly
related to conversions, where am I going to find the time to take college
courses to learn what it is, when to use it and how and why? My hope today is
that I am able to de-mystify the concept of branding and show you how I see it
and how I use it with little more than reading a few books and webpages in what
I laughingly refer to as "my spare time". I also hope I can open a
platform for a discussion about branding as it applies to small business
operators and encourage those who really do have those degrees to offer their
input. Those people, we can argue with.
Let me start by offering a couple of sites that I found helpful.
http://webreference.com/new/branding.html
This one is short and to the point. Just keep following the links to the next
section at the bottom of each page and it will cover, VERY basically, the major
points of branding. Great for those on a time budget wanting to spend less time
learning and more time making mistakes faster.
http://www.iconocast.com/Online_Branding.html
This place is pretty good for some real world, offline examples. It illustrates
that branding is about more than just making something recognizable. It also
provides some printed material that makes for pretty good reading.
http://falkow.blogsite.com/public/blog/81786
Finally, this is a pretty good little resource page for the topic of online
branding.
To me, as a small business operator, branding is about establishing the
perception of trust. When you see golden arches, you know exactly what to
expect in what kind of environment. When you see that distinctive check mark on
a pair of shoes, it implies a certain amount of prestige and a perception of a
quality assurance. Fine, we all understand that. What I didn't understand for a
long time was how I would establish that type of perception for my business.
I had read somewhere years ago that the MacDonalds corporation spent
something like $60,000,000 annually on promoting their brand. Well, I knew I
wasn't going to spend that much but what I didn't know was that the less you
can afford to spend on branding, the more you need it.
So, branding can be used to target a specific market. The Absolut Vodka
example on the iconocast site is a good example of that. By creating the brand
as they did with the distinctive bottle design and graphics, they were
identifying the product as being made for the young, smart, stylish market.
BUT, that is something you do with branding when you can afford to set aside a
significant amount of money to get the brand out there. I don't know that the
bottle design would have been as effective in a text link without the visual
impact a magazine can add. That is not to say it can't be done by small online
business operators. Patrick Gavin's text brokering service (http://www.text-link-ads.com), comes to
mind. He has positioned himself very well across the SEO cyber tundra and has
captured the lion's share of that market. So, it can be done and it is
scalable.
Even so, with my limited knowledge of what branding was and what it was
worth, coupled with my ultra conservative budgetary restraints, I had to boil
it down even more. In my business, I represent a lot of clients who represent a
wide spectrum of services and products. None of these clients come to me for
branding consulting or services. They come to me for two things. Traffic
generation and conversions. That had little to do with branding I thought and
THAT was my mistake. It had everything to do with branding.
What's the point of writing a title tag if it does not illicit a response
from a human seeing the title in a search engine result or on a webpage?
Placement without clicks is a labor in futility. Traffic without conversion is
the epitome of waste.
A title tag is the first step to online branding. Think about what you are
saying and what you want the person reading the title to do. See it as a sales
proposition more than just keyword stuffing. If you do that, you have started
building a brand and you have done it with no more expense than you would have
had anyway and only a small increase of our worst enemy, time. The thing is
that without branding, conversions are reduced and without conversions,
placements mean little if the client cancels.
Once the purpose of the title is defined there is more that goes into
branding a specific client, product or service. Things like what the website
actually says, the links you provide, where you get links and what they say and
the graphics you display. But with a purpose, (objective could be another word
for purpose), in mind, branding can become second nature and you don't even
have to think about it much and your branding falls into place with little
effort.
Now for some of us, due to the very volume of title tags we are likely to
produce, establishing an objective for each one is not very practical. It is
much more likely that if you plan on generating a lot of pages for a specific
keyword set or theme, you are going to be much more concerned with only the
keyword and not so much with the branding. That is fine and that is what the
majority of us reading this do now. BUT, I can tell you from experience that
increasing conversions is easier, faster and cheaper than generating more
traffic. Naturally it takes both but we all know we are going to generate the
traffic, the purpose of these articles is to reduce your expense and increase
your profit margins by discussing and thinking about it being easier to
increase profit margins by getting more from what you have than simply going
out and trying to get more of what you don't have. Branding is one of the
absolute easiest ways to increase conversions and I believe you'll see why I
feel that way once I show you how I see branding amd how I use it.
Remember, branding is all about perception. For my purposes, the perception
of trust is the most important. So what I most want from someone reading my
title, my anchor text and/or my web page is to accept the validity of the
statement. How do we accomplish that fast and cheap?
By giving them what they expect to see when they made the decision to click
whatever I gave them to click.
There you go. There in one sentence is one small business operator's
definition of online branding. Giving the visitor what they expected to see
when they clicked the link.
Stay consistent. Don't alter your grammar, (this is one reason why making
sure your spelling and grammar is correct is important. No one notices it when
it is but lots of people notice when it isn't), your tone or your personality.
Stay on message and stay in character. If you are speaking to a target
market of women, don't change in the middle of the page to also try to appeal
to men.
Use consistent graphics and navigation. If your interior links are on the
left on one page, don't put them at the bottom on another. If you have a
graphic of a product as a header, don't change the header on another page.
Those kinds of things create doubt in a prospects mind and doubt is the seed of
mistrust.
Most importantly, AVOID THE 3 SECOND BACK BUTTON BOOGIE. You do this by
making sure that they land on a page that lets them know within 3 seconds they
found what they were looking for. I happen to use some custom content
management scripts but it doesn't have to be anything any more sophisticated
than making sure the link text matches the page text the link goes to. If a
click comes from a title that says CANCER CURE, make sure that click does not
go to a page that has an H tag at the top that says AMERICAN DOCTOR LOCATOR. If
a visitor has to read more than 2 or 3 seconds to find what they expected to see
when they clicked the link, that is not branding. That is very likely wasting
their time and yours. If the visitor sees the text match but it is smaller than
other text, it looks like that is not as important as whatever it says that is
bigger. That is NOT what the visitor expected to see when they made the
decision to click your link. See what I mean?
There you go, the over-worked, under-paid mans guide to online branding.
Now, you kids quit pesterin that dog and come on in and get cleaned up for
supper.