Branding at the individual, small or even medium level is a difficult
endeavor. However, there are little excuses for inadequacies these days
as Google makes it more difficult to rank with content marketing that
isn’t “brand friendly” – that is, tactics that are one-off gray or
black hat link building techniques.
Today, we must function as brands, and the reality is that although
we imagine companies like Kellogg’s and SeaWorld as the behemoths of
brand marketing – companies with lackluster websites but still the
ability to generate links eight times quicker than us – we are very
capable of reflecting a similar identity online due to benefits of
miniature scale we can create for ourselves through the proper marketing
channels that brands often experience and build on offline.
Link Building with Momentum in Mind
We’ve left behind the term “link building” and must instead focus on
identities like “link development” through content marketing. If we
build our businesses and link development competencies with the idea
that we must build scale, we’ll be a lot more successful with our
efforts because we will develop competencies.
What does this mean?
No more one off guest posting for links. Yes I am guest posting here,
but I am doing so with the intention of building authority and
referrals, and actually, the link matters little to me because I don’t
do much
SEO for my own blog.
Hopefully some of you follow my blog or follow me on Twitter, which will
create an audience that will multiply my future efforts online.
If I simply blog for a link, that effort is reduced. If you want to
create scale (as you should), you’ll do similar. Yes, the link is
valuable, and you should aim for a combinatory effect with your guest
posting, but your sole intention should never be the link itself. In the
new world of content marketing, it’s no longer a valid excuse.
Creating A Snowball Promotion Strategy
Many brands have the benefit of content that serves itself, and only
need to release it into the wild to see the benefits it can create
online. Us small peons don’t, right? Well, the reality is that we do. We
can’t ever be Kellogg’s or SeaWorld, but we can have the “publish”
button that sites like SEOmoz enjoy – when thousands of eyeballs view
their content all at once.
This comes from deliberate, long practice of developing audience
through mechanisms like guest posting in the target markets our audience
operates in. Constantly releasing great content online and then
creating introductory “sticky” promotion elements will create the brand
mechanisms others enjoy. What are these introductory sticky elements?
- Twitter accounts – getting potential customers to follow us
- Facebook accounts – getting potential customers to like us
- YouTube accounts – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
- RSS feeds – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
- E-mail marketing – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
I say “introductory” because these allow you to remarket to your
consumers for free – and are a few steps to the secondary, more powerful
sticky element, SEO. If we guest post or do
PPC advertising, if we
never capture audience intent through one or more of these sticky
elements, we lose the potential to scale, because our cost per
acquisition continually rises.
This creates a negative brand efficiency if they do not, as
customers, follow/like/subscribe to content they enjoy – as such an
engagement is an introductory buy-in to your brand identity.
So this means your job, as a marketer, is not to initially think
about how you might get thousands of sales, but how you will create the
snowball promotion effect every time you release something online.
Because if you do not generate that snowball, even if you create a viral
sale effect, it will eventually become nothing.
Brands have that snowball effect – which is why every Apple event is
covered and talked about once one word is leaked out – and why Six Flags
can immediately touch thousands of eyeballs on their brand when a press
release is opened up. They built it, but they had it bad compared us –
they didn’t have the benefit of online, free promotion mechanisms to do
it. They had to do it through high cost per acquisition activities like
billboard, display and television advertising.
Build the brand snowball by:
- Leveraging the maximum amount calls to action to social accounts on
your sidebar, after blog posts, and occasionally, within blog posts,
without appearing spammy
- Most often releasing content to interested markets asymmetrical to
your own, such that they might have interest in future relevant content
of yours
- Promoting content through all social channels relevant to your own
and not to channels where there isn’t much application (such as
Pinterest for Daily Blog Tips)
- Creating memorable and brand-identifiable social accounts that are
easy to type in, easy to find, and match the company sales mission
across all available properties
Creating A Brand Effect in SERP Results
As you build those accounts, you will begin to effect a real change
in the search results, depending on your vertical. For example, SEOmoz, a
now established “brand” in SEO, has the benefit not just of ranking
well that being a brand provides, but also getting a higher clickthrough
rate because of it.
It is likely a higher clickthrough rate is a positive signal to
Google to actually rank you higher, which then gets you even more clicks
– and more links, and so it goes. But that’s not where it stops to
create a “snowball effect”. Obviously, hopefully you’ve now established
some search result rankings, and some sales. From here, build on that
efficiency and “snowball effect” by multiplying effort.
Do this by:
- Signing up customers immediately for e-mail newsletters such that
they can serve as content promoters even if they can no longer be upsold
- Immediately leverage a secondary call to action such as “follow us
on Twitter/like us on Facebook!” after they’ve completed a conversion
event
- Creating content that is good enough to be talked about through word
of mouth, bringing new customers back to your website to then be pulled
into future promotion efforts through social and email campaigns
- Using rel=author where applicable to create brand identity/quick
identification when potential customers use your services online
Hopefully posts like this can help push you to start creating your
own mini-brand online. SEO isn’t dead, but I believe winning a
competitive vertical by sustaining a business on one-off linking
strategies truly is.
![A History of Social Media [Infographic]](http://netdna.copyblogger.com/images/history_of_social_media.jpg "A History of Social Media [Infographic]")
Hello
Friends, it seems apart from being expert in their job Google engineers
also have the ability to foresee the future this am saying because
while developing Google+, they also developed an 
