Personal Branding in Today's Economy

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is quite simply the future of career development. The global economy exposes us to great new products at affordable prices, but it also exposes companies and firms to great new talent. This is where personal branding comes in.

Personal branding is the process by which individuals differentiate themselves and stand out

from a crowd by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition, whether professional or personal, and then leveraging it

across platforms with a consistent message and image to

achieve a specific goal. This way, individuals enhance their recognition as experts in their field, establish reputation and credibility, advance their careers, and build self-confidence.

How do I get started with Personal Branding?

Questions to answer:

Who needs to know about you?

What need are you best positioned to fill?

What differentiates you from others in your field?

The goal of a personal branding campaign is to create a strong, consistent, and specific association between the individual and the perceived value they offer.

Establish an inventory of core competencies, expertise, demonstrated abilities, and an existing level of recognition.

Personal Branding Consists of:

· Value Proposition

· Differentiation

· Marketability

Social Media Marketing ...How to ??

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How Web Analytics Help.

Web analytics is the study of the behavior of website visitors.

In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.--Wilkipedia.com

We live in the information age and analytics are a great information gathering tool. Unfortuanatly, some people beleive that the more hits you get the more conversions you get. Not necessarily! What is the point of having a million visitors to your website a day yet only 5 people actually decide to purchase your products. You optimize your website for search engines and you run a pay per click campaign. Your daily visitors increase and your website is getting traffic and you think it's the solution to all your problems. No, we still have the pesky little problem of converting that traffic into sales or newsletter sign-ups or whatever type action you want visitors to take. This is where analytics swoop in and save the day.

In order to have your online business succeed, it is vital to understand exactly how your website works and where the weak points are situated. Having a web analytics solution can help you in developing strategies to acquire new visitors, retain existing visitors, understand visitor paths, understand visitor behavior, search terms and the search engines that drive your traffic, pages that are visited most, main exit pages, and maximazation of your profit.

With a Web Analytics solution:

• Monitor where your traffic is coming from (IP Addresses)
• Track unique visitors and how many sessions they have.
• View the path of your visitors (Time spent on each path and the sequence of browsing)
• See what were the top entry pages, top exit pages and how many files they downloaded
• See what pages are giving you referral traffic
• View which search engines are referring traffic, and which search terms are providing traffic.
• You can see the demographics of your visitors.
• Track referrals and affiliates that provide traffic to your site.

Once a complete analysis of the user behavior has been completed, decisions can be made for your marketing strategy. After the in-depth web log analysis is complete, any changes to the website can be made in order to ensure you don't lose visitors who may be interested in your product or service.

Why should I choose Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing?

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very simple concept. It is about producing sales leads. Instead of utilizing advertising dollars to annoy people that have no need of your products or are just not interested. You concentrate on people that are looking for you or the type of products or services you offer to be more precise, inbound marketing vs. direct marketing.

PPC advertising is quickly becoming the advertising choice for small business owners.

Why is it so attractive to small business owners? Well, it's affordability!!!

Imagine advertising on the television and not having to pay for that advertising unless a potential customer sees the advertising and actually picks up the phone and calls your business or even better, they get in their vehicle and actually drive to your store. Well, that is exactly what you get with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. You don't have to pay for the ad until someone actually clicks on the ad or with some PPC programs you are also charged for a certain number of impressions (views), usually after about thousand views you are charged a small fee. With PPC you actually set the price of how much you are willing to pay and then your account is deducted each time your ad is clicked. There is no set price, it is determined by the competition for that particular keyword and several other factors calculated by the PPC provider you are advertising with (Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter, and Yahoo). However, compare the cost of this service with that of a billboard or television and radio. Quite a large savings in cost. PPC may be a cost effective alternative to other traditional forms of advertising, however, it can still be a very expensive investment if not managed carefully. In general, the budget for PPC search engine advertising may be a $100 to $100,000 depending on the number of keywords used. These prices can increase easily as more and more sites bid for the same keyword.

Link Building for Your Website

Link building is an extraordinary way of making your website or blog popular. This process of creating inbound links to your website utilizes: newsletters, directories, search engines, and anything else a crafty marketer can think of. Link building has several advantages. It helps in getting quality traffic from relative sights which increases sales. The higher the quality of incoming links the more valuable search engines will see your website. Link building is a valuable tool in creating awareness, visibility, and the credibility of your website. Through proper link building, your site will obtain wider search engine exposure and help to get your website indexed by search engines. The quickest and simplest way of building links to your website or blog is through the use of directories.

Web directories are collections of web pages that contain similar subjects and contents. Internet users see directories as a valuable source of information. The more directories that your website becomes listed in the better chance that your site will be added to the popular search engine listings: google, yahoo, msn.....etc.

What do you get out of directories?

There are 3 types of traffic that directory listings supply:

1. Click-through traffic-anyone who ends up on the directory page will be able to see your website and information.

2. Indexing your site-once directories find the links to your website, they will begin indexing the pages and bringing you traffic again and again.

3. By increasing your ranking on the search engines themselves when they find the volume of links and references to your website or blog.

Link building is one of the best ways to improve your traffic to your website or blog. The higher the quality of the links to your page the higher page rankings you will achieve in search engines. However complicated or time consuming it may be, building links to your website will help to improve your site traffic.