Personal branding is bogus?

recently I have found some new inspiration. I dunno why but I like it when I communicate with people who get it. When that happens they normally tell me to not stoop down to other people’s levels, even though they may be more visible or successful than me at the moment, and at that time I realise that the answer is not to just go ahead and go with their flow, but be the best me I can be.

My speech on personal branding is a post I have read and he says … well, he says a lot about someone I didn’t even know existed.

But I do now, so I guess personal branding does work, fake or real.

SO here are a few ways to brand which I believe to work:

1) create  a mystery around the person or the brand. Use friends to help. Create confusion, start rumors, hearsay, offbeat stuff and contridictions to have others wonder and pass it on.

2) Visibility, right place right time. Be on pictures with people likely to be passed around.

OK at this point I have to tell you i do not recommend or like 80 percent of what I am posting here, and it’s not advice, but it’s stuff I have seen work a lot of time …

3) talk about people in the public eye where they really get pressed into defending themselves against “What was your name again?”

4) pretend to know something. I mean seriously, you can say the dumbest things, but if you style is fresh, it will piss of the knowledgable, more boring “experts” who will come in to correct you. Kill them with dingyness. Make them look like boring old geeks and tehy will stay around and have the whole following from webgeeks get to know your name. Trust me, the knowledgable will stick around and get your name out. They will try to look cooler thinking YOU are trying to look smart. They will pass it on to others trying to get help proving you wrong while not looking uncool.

There is more I will post lateron. I mean, this is starting to get to me now, I promise I will edit and add more to this post lateron.

I believe that you should brand yourself with whatever style is best for YOU though.

5)  ….

stand for something.

find something within you that you know people like.

I myself for example do not think searchfeature.com is a great name, others do. why? Because it doesn’t get remembered as something that is different and makes people smile. Like that dude who chose user name

cockwaffles on twitter. I mean, I will see someone with that name post in 10 years, and I’m going to remember him. (Thanks E.L., that was a good one).

What happens in life is that creative people are not always good strategists business wise and vice versa. If you manage to be both, you’re in. Have ideas, be a cool person AND be able to put things into action? That’s the key baby!!!

6) Make it look like you have a huge following. Some people have a bunch of fake posts on their forums and blogs. So people will be like “ummm, I don’t know who this is but maybe I should”.

7) be  you. the only you that only you can be. period! The world needs no more copies.

You can be a great fake, but be a unique fake. A funny fake, or annoying fake. Or even better be it the real way.

You can do what you want. But do it. The key is that most people are too afraid to be unique, they want to play it safe, but trust me, they all love the crazy ones who they wished they had the guts to be like.

(by the way, I am now starting to do the less bad ways compared to my first few posts)

make fun of someone who people pay attention to. But not hateful. I know a lot of you love reading matt’s blog. Why not have (ok I keep my ideas for myself at this point and will pass them on to someone who …. stay tuned)

9) combine 2 worlds as they have never been combined. like when you see two people act in a movie together who you would never see in real life together. or rarely. It creates chemistry, builds bridges and allows people to view you in situations they themselves would wonder how they would be able to deal with.

10) go it all the way. Remember: once branded, there is no turning back. so be careful what you want to be known for. Imagine today is the last day on earth. How will you be remembered?

You have 24 hours to get there. So get started …. NOW!

Mike

Blogs I really like

Ever since I have started in SEO, I have experienced what I call link greed. And very protective and often just selfish behaviour. I get seriously pissed when someone is trying to get me to link to them and won’t even offer a link back. Many have linked to me and not even mentioned it, I have found that by accident, and that is something very rewarding, it’s when you just link because you like what you have read.

I have dismissed many of the blog roll requests I have gotten, simply because I looked at the blog, not the PR and asked myself if I would ever come back to read that blog, if it leaves me curious as to what may come soon, and in most cases the answer was no.

So in addition to the many interviews with great bloggers I have had, I will randomly pick some blogs and add them to this post. This will not be SEO Scoop, not the daily blog revue.

I will keep this really simple, and pick something I think you guys should read (if SEO blogs are what you are into).

Internet Marketing Access

I don’t know the owner. By accident I have come across it, the owner dugg or sphunn my post about where SEOs host, and I checked it out and LOVE the style and the topics he chooses.

http://www.internetmarketingaccess.com/2008/10/03/will-google-target-article-directories-next/

This is what people out there should be reading. 9 link bait ideas gives you actually ideas.

I don’t read a lot unless I get attention drawn to me quick. And if you don’t keep it, then I prefer trying to figure something out myself. This blog made me actually read. SEO hosting is a post where he says:

“Domain Name Registration - Do not use the same domain registration company for all of your sites.  That is the first mistake you can make, even though as of this post Google (or any other engine) has not come out and said they compare whois info of each site that is linked to each other.  Instead, you will want to register your domain name’s with various registration companies and use there privacy service.  This way when a whois lookup is done, they will not only see different privacy labels, they will also see the domain names are registered with several different companies.  Another thing as of this post, there is no proof that Google or any other search engine will devalue a website that uses private registration.”

Not sure whether or not this is the case, but it sounds like something worth considering.

Peace.

Google Adsense Placement - Web Devlopment in Reverse

I don’t have much experience in Google Adsense placement other than hearsay from some expert friends.

Not really hearsay, second hand information. Credible info from those who make a great living with Google Adsense checks.

Something I have repeatedly heard is just how well ugly sites work.

Sites people want to leave and instead go to the Google Ads.

I can immediately spot Made for Adsense sites, because they are not built for people to spend a lot of time on them.

One pagers with only adsense links being outbound, blogs “malfuctioning” where none of the top links work and the only ones that do are Adsense Ads looking like they are a part of the site.

I personally am not really into this. I will be playing around a little bit in the next few weeks and get an idea on what works best, but since Adsense is not my main income, the last thing I want to do is take people from my sites to another if I think there is a chance that they might hire me for our services.

MySpace still works GREAT for promotion!

You can still use a friend adder, but now whenever a CAPTCHA is required, it won’t let you bypass it.
You will have to enter the numbers and letters each time in order for it to continue.
MySpace has also a 280 friend requests/day limit now and the last time I used the friendadder, I received a warning from them, so I’ve decided to quit using it.
It’s very important that you have a great design like
Rooster’s Country Bar has.
What you need to do to get a lot of friends is first have a catchy profile picture which gets people’s attention when they see you comment on someone’s profile.
So which profiles should you comment on?
Add celebrities which get a huge amount of profile views each day.
Spend an hour adding them and then go to home and on the left hand side in the center you will see “New Friends”.
Click on that and save that url to your favorites since it will not have a link leading there unless new friends have arrived.
Then you go thru the new friends and comment on each of their profiles.
If it allows html, include an image.
Something like

or

but you can also pick a regular picture from your profile.
If it doesn’t accept html (images will be integrated with html), that shows the importance of having a great profile pic.
Write something creative, not just “Thank you for the add!”.
Many will see your comment and friend requests come in immediately.
If you are running an office, pick the guy who keeps talking to the girls and doesn’t do any work.
Put that hamster on the treadmill and he will love it.

I am Mike Dammann and this is my tip of the day!

WordCamp 2008

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend WordCamp 2008. The event was hosted at the University of San Francisco Mission Bay Campus and was just a perfect set up for such an event. There were roughly 450 attendees and 16 well respected presenters. There were two separate tracks for the event; one for the users and one for the developers. I remained in the user track for the entire event even though there were a few speakers in the developer track I wished I could have heard, so perhaps next time.

The schedule itself was fairly fast past and intense yet the flow managed to work well. Below were the topics and list of speakers I heard from.
• The Future of Education and Wordpress – Alan Levine
• SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
• Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
• Andy Skelton - A musical performance
• LOLcats and the Secret of Virality- Ben Huh
• Wordpress & Microformats: Past, Present, Future- Tantek Celik
• Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
• 260 Ways to break Wordpress - Lorelle VanFossen
• Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
• State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
• Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
• Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
• An interview with Om Malik
• Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
• A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
• Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra

Alan Levine kicked off the event speaking about the future of education and WordPress or primarily blogging and education. The most amazing part of his speech was really just hearing how intricately involved the internet is with our education system and that blogs are really becoming a very powerful tool for educators. Edublogs is just one of the sites referenced in which students and/or teachers can manage a blog for projects, curriculum and the likes. Edublog uses Wordpress multi user installations and has had thousands of sign up thus far, truly a promising response.

Stephan Spencer was impressive to hear as he discussed SEO Mistakes that Bloggers Make and ways to easily correct them. A few techniques he mentioned to help improve upon your rankings were to include tag clouds, tag pages, and tag conjunction pages. Stephan mentions that title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engines. He developed a plugin to aid this process and optimize the title tags across your WordPress blog. You can read more and download the SEO Title Tag plugin that Stephan developed here.

Stephan O’Grady of Redmonk.com discussed how open source business models can bring in money and he described several methods in order to make them profitable. You can see his presentation here. Andy Skelton (who is much more than a musician) performed a few songs as well which really allowed for some nice downtime.

Ben Huh of LOLcats.com was by far the most entertaining as he included hilarious photos from a few of his comical sites to really make his topic on the Secret of Virality speak volumes. Once you see one of his sites (ex: LOLcats.com) you would know the type of Viral Marketing capable there. He described virality as people’s willingness to send content to another. Seeming pretty simple, however there are a few rules really that seem to come into play, which basically he described as “not being a dick”. Quality invitation virality is sticky and sustainable which is ultimately what you want versus spammy invites which at some point will only lead to failure.

Tantek Celik, an amazing gentleman whose knowledge really seems endless, spoke about WordPress and Microformats: Past, Present, and Future. Prior to his talk I have to say I was somewhat unfamiliar with the concept of microformats. His presentation gave quick light to the topic and understanding about how valuable being able to utilize and access semantic data is as most site now employ this type of open data format.
He referenced the hCard as an easy method in distributing and gaining contact information of users over the web. Using the hCard, with your contact information already stored, makes signing up for social networking sites, event sites, and more super simple. To learn more about the hCard or create your own hCard check out the hCard creator. In order to best utilize this system Tantek recommends installing Operator for firefox which leverages these microformats.

Lloyd Budd spoke about switching to WordPress painlessly which in all reality these days has been made very simple with several backup plugins along with a few simple redirect pieces to ensure nothing is lost including data, traffic, and comments. Lorelle VanFossen spoke about being able to push WordPress as far as it can go to ensure that it is the most sophisticated open blogging platform available. It was really refreshing to hear her speak with such a passion about doing more with WordPress, to push it and improve its platform among the different browsers, operating systems, and hosting companies. Sam Bauers spoke about hassle-free upgrades which again I feel has really been made simple with the automatic upgrade plugin. In less than 1 minute you can have the newest version of WordPress on your blog.

Matt Mullenweg who was gracious enough to give Search Feature an interview spoke on WordPress’ past and current state. He spoke about the large growth in members of the WordPress community for both .com and .org. He spoke about the number of releases in this past year (approximately one per month) and he spoke about the huge increase in downloads this year as compared to last year which all just proves how much WordPress really means to the community, to its members, and to businesses worldwide. For 2009 he mentioned how important upgrades will be and how the WordPress platform will continue to lead the way towards bigger, better, and stronger growth for those that use it.

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