ChrisKilber.com

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Tag Archives: Blogging

Recipe For Successful Branding

January 26th, 2010

We all know that blogging and other marketing campaigns can really help us build up the buzz behind our brand. We know our goals are also similar in that we want to get people talking and spreading the story about our products and services. But it is going to take more than just blogging and marketing to make this kind of effort pay off. There are three main ingredients that help build and establish our number one goal for personal branding, Trust! We want to establish the kind of trust that will create a positive reaction in our clients and customers. The products and services that we offer need to have:

Quality
While branding builds the recognition for your product, that product or service must have superior quality needed to evoke strong positive emotions in your customers. Your brand cannot gain positive brand recognition if your products and services are don’t offer the kind of quality needed to elicit strong trust in your customers and clients.

Excellent Service
We recognize that customer service is everything in business and know it has been for a long time. When building a strong personal brand, customer service can increase word-of-mouth advertising. So this, in turn, boosts referrals and helps your brand to grow even that much more. Even in businesses that have no product or service that is sold directly, like blogging for a living, remember that customer service still is extremely important. The bottom line is that people will trust the authority of your blog if the posts are written with authority and integrity. A way that you can also build authority and integrity is with timely and well thought out responses to comments from the readers of your blog.

Value
And finally comes value. Value is a growing buzz word with customers and clients these days. If your product or service comes at a price, you have to make sure your buyers get the value they are after. Value should not mean cheap. It should mean quality for the price point. Even the information that you provide for free should have tremendous value. The information you share and provide needs to be accurate, informative, or entertaining. You want your readers to feel like they have gained some insight and have not wasted their time by visiting and reading. If they like the value, whether it is for free or purchasing a product and service from you, they will visit and buy from you once again.

Personal branding builds on all these important and key ingredients in a successful business and puts them in a package that your customers and clients can readily identify with. When you offer rock solid service, impressive quality and value, your products and services will begin to speak loudly. So later down the line when you have new products or services, they will be much more likely to have strong footing in the marketplace solely because of the brand you have built. This personal branding thus enables you to build on your previous successes and allows you to grow your customer and client base. Once this strong personal brand it set up, launching new offerings will become much more effective.

If you’ve found this post helpfull, can you please share it with your Facebook and Twitter followers.

New Media Business Opps

December 23rd, 2009

newmediaChris Brogan has a simple but powerful message to small business people, in this case a Realtor.

It is simple in that all he is saying is if I were a Realtor I would:

  • I’d write a blog about the location where I was selling.
  • I’d take tons of pictures and post them on the blog.
  • I’d shoot walking tour videos all the time with a Flip camera and post them.
  • I’d shoot interview videos with people from my community.
  • I’d host meetups and tweetups for local residents, inviting people who are house hunting.
  • I’d find various niche communities (developers, stonemasons, parents) and start community platforms for them on Ning.
  • I’d empower as many local businesses onto the Net as I could, and help them get successful.
  • I’d encourage as many people in my community to join Twitter as possible, and I’d bundle them into a list.

    • Great Advise Chris!

    So if your reading this right now, if I were a gambling man, I would bet that you are also an entrepreneur or are contemplating being one. I’ll guess you also know about Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and other Internet sites useful to business.

    There is one thing I can almost guarantee, is there are local businesses that for one reason or another recognize that social media is viable for expansion of their businesses. In fact, it can be much much more effective than printed advertising. In some cases they may already have some type of local networking going on right now and all that would be required is to plug in the social media portion. But they may not know exactly how to implement it.

    What I’m driving at is it could be YOU that shows your local businesses how to go about doing this. Show and teach them about attraction marketing. Show them that VALUE means a lot to people. Teach them that Personal Branding will separate them from their competition. Teach them how to blog, how to set up newsletters, how to tweet, how to set up a Business Fan page. You see if they already have an advertising budget, all you have to do is say, “How would you like to learn how to cut your advertising budget almost in half and eventually double your business.” Make sure you have a business plan to be able to present to them, make it a fair price, and you will get customers. You can make money on the training and coaching, on potential products related to internet business, and the business model will not be much different from business to business. So once you get it under your belt, it will be easy! So for 2010, what say you? How many businesses will you help?

    48 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

    October 21st, 2009

    pluginsDown below I have the forty eight or so plugins that I use on this blog. I have a little blurb about what they do. Because wordpress is so customizable and most of the themes are different, there may be reasons to include one that are missing here and reasons I have some others don’t. But for the most part these are essential. I am almost positive there are new one’s out there that I should have but these have been serving me well. Feel free to suggest others.

    Akismet
    Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

    All in One SEO Pack
    Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.   As a fan of SEO, I think it’s like putting together a three dimensional puzzle, I like this plugin and it is one of the mainstays of SEO for wordpress.  Of special interest is the “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page:” option.  The plugin even has it’s own forum if you’d like to learn more.

    (http://semperfiwebdesign.com/forum/)

    CommentLuv
    Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

    Comment Relish
    Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘Thank You’ message to users when they first comment on your site.

    Contact Form with Captcha
    Simple Contact Form with Captcha Enabled

    Custom Field Redirect
    This plugin will do a 301 redirect on any page where you set the “redirect” key in a custom field. The value you set will be the URL to where the plugin will redirect you.  In the dashboard when you create a post you have the ability to enter a custom field.  If you create a “redirect” key is will go to the location designated.

    Dewplayer
    Insert Dewplayer (Flash Mp3 Player) in posts & comments.  There are a lot mp3 players.  This happens to be the one I’m currently using.

    Disable Revisions
    Disable revision functions in WordPress and delete all entries of revisions in database. It is extremely important to back up your database before install this plugin.  I always hate when there ends up being 8 revisions of the same post.  This should be a custom option built into wordpress to begin with.

    Exclude Pages from Navigation
    Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

    Facebook Sharecount
    The Facebook Sharecount plugin shows the number of shares on Facebook your posts get and allows users to share it themselves.

    FeedBurner FeedSmith
    Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

    FeedBurner Widget
    Adds a sidebar widget to easy customize and display your FeedBurner subscribers stats RSS button.

    Get Recent Comments
    Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

    Make sure you configure this plugin after activation.

    Google Friend Connect Integration
    Easily integrate Google Friend Connect with WordPress. To get started, please enter your Google Friend Connect Site Id number in the GFC Integration admin page and choose whether to turn on the social bar or not. You can add Google Friend Connect gadgets to your sidebars by visiting the widgets page.  For help and support see the official Google Friend Connect integration for WordPress page.

    Google XML Sitemaps
    This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

    Homepage Excerpts
    Homepage Excerpts are great when your theme doesn’t provide this functionality.

    LinkWithin
    Displays recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog.  This is at the bottom of all my single posts.  It provides nice pictures you see below.

    MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
    Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.  The reasoning behind this is your blog will ping technorati and many other ping services.  If you edit your blog, let’s say a typo or misspelling or indentation etc, every time you hit publish you are pinging the services.  You may be banned and didn’t even know it. When this goes, so does your SEO.  Visit plugin site

    One Click Plugin Updater
    Upgrade plugins with a single click, install new plugins or themes from an URL or by uploading a file, see which plugins have update notifications enabled, control how often WordPress checks for updates, and more.

    ONW Simple Contact Form
    This Plugin creates a simple contact form.

    Popularity Contest
    This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Widgets and Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog.

    Random Pages widget
    This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar.

    Recent Posts
    Returns a list of the most recent posts.

    Robots Meta
    This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

    RSS Shortcode
    Makes it easy to display an RSS feed on a page

    SEO Smart Links
    SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

    SEO Super Comments
    Use your blog comments to get more traffic.

    SexyBookmarks
    SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

    SimplePie Core
    Does little else but load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it.  It is needed for the Single RSS Colleague plugin found below.

    Simple Tags
    Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !

    Single RSS Colleague
    A plugin to feature a colleague or tribe member for syndication.  You will find it under by social badges on the right hand side bar labeled “Visit My Colleagues”.  I will be making this available to everyone sometime next week.

    Subscribe To Comments
    Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

    Translate
    Adds a sidebar widget to display languages into which you can translate your blog.

    TweetMeme Retweet Button
    Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

    Ultimate Google Analytics
    Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

    What Would Seth Godin Do
    Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

    wp-cache
    Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”.  One note of caution.  TURN this off anytime you are changing anything.  Then when you are done, turn it back on.

    WP-Cumulus
    Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress

    WP-DBManager
    Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

    WP-PageNavi
    Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

    WP-Print
    Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

    WP-Sticky
    Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler.

    WP-UserOnline
    Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).

    WP Security Scan
    Perform security scan of WordPress installation.

    Contributing to the Conversation On Your Own Blog…

    August 15th, 2009

    conversationOver on a different forum related to marketing and blogging that I am a member of, there was a question that was posed that asked, “Is it poor form to comment on your own blog?” This is very important so I’d thought I’d share it here as well. This is how I responded.

    As marketers one of our main goals is to attract people to our sites to have them potentially sign up for more information about potential products or services we may have. I use the word potential because the best way to have someone click the big X on your tab is first appear as if you are trying to sell something. If you are pitching, touting, overtly recommending to buy or sign up, people will do one thing, Run away! This is not to say that you can not recommend things and ask them to buy, but that should only come after they have earned your TRUST.

    So how do they earn your trust? Firstly, by not pitching. Secondly, by offering value in the form of insights, education, thoughts, perspectives, interests, and humor. To do this, it will involve interaction. Certainly the number one ice breaker in the whole world is the weather followed by concerns of how things are going. There are psychological underpinnings in this small talk and it is usually a way two people determine whether (pun intended) each other want to continue in a dialog. What’s the best way to do this? It is to engage people in dialog by responding to people in your blog just as Julia suggested. People love it when you engage them and consider their questions, ideas, or concerns important. They even love it more when you ask THEM what they think about something. This isn’t something that we have to be phony about. It’s just having genuine and concerned thoughts and ideas that will resonate with people.

    So NO there is nothing wrong with commenting on your own blog posts. In fact I encourage it. I encourage it on all the social media you use. Engaging people and building relationships is something that will differentiate you from all the other spammers using social media as nothing more than an advertising bill board. In all your interactions with new people you meet should end with a question. This is the whole concept behind ATTRACTION marketing.

    I’d like to hear your opinions…

    Photo Credit McAzadi

    One-on-One Training

    August 5th, 2009

    <big> Personalized One-on-One Training and Coaching

    If You Are Ready For Extraordinary Abundance and Are Ready To Manifest Your Goals To Reach That Level, Then Read On. I’m Going To Show You Some Training Right Now That Will Allow You To Scientifically Start Generating As Many Leads On Demand As You Want and How To Earn Money From Multiple Income Streams Just As Easily As One.  You Can Be Signing Up New Partners In Your Business On Complete Autopilot Using Nothing But TECHNOLOGY To Do It…

    Napoleon Hill coined the term “Mastermind Group” as we know it today. It is sometimes referred to as the an “Inner Circle” where a group of entrepreneurs work together by challenging each other by raising the bar, implementing goals, brainstorming ideas, and supporting each other with total honesty, respect, and compassion. On a smaller scale, personal one-on-one coaching helps you to achieve the same goals. A one on one coach or mentor will give you their experience, skill, and will instill confidence in you as well as teach you the skills you need to be successful. You will gain real tangible progress and experience that will help your business and family life grow. Personal one on one training can shave off a years worth of your time, not to mention thousands of dollars chasing opportunities one after another without know what your doing.

    <big> Your Very Own One-on-one Personal 8 Week Social Media Marketing Training Program

    During your own eight 1 hour private one-on-ones you will learn:

    The fastest and quickest way to learn the secrets behind getting 100′s of leads per day on the Internet.

    A way to position yourself in the front of new trends hitting the Internet. Most don’t require much money.

    A way to position yourself to where your prospects will literally be seeking you out. You will stand out amongst all the rest who are marketing the same opportunity or product.

    A way to give yourself “Celebrity” status on the blogosphere and attract a massive avalanche of free traffic from the Internet for your own business.

    A sure fire way to develop yourself as a true professional and authority of your niche while at the same time having people literally seeking out to work with you or buy your services.

    A way to convey scarcity where you will be able to double or triple the amount you make others think you, your product, or time is worth.

    A way to make people outright feel foolish for not joining into business with you or buying your services

    Being a success by being an entrepreneur is not rocket science. It’s a skill that you CREATE within yourself. Most everyone who has been in this business has at sometime, had a mentor or coach. They recognized the desire to learn much more quickly and acted on the challenges confronting them. They recognized the advantages of learning from the experiences of a mentor and coach as well as the months upon months it would save them.

    You also get:

    Training in what ‘Branding’ is, and why it’s the most important thing you will have to learn. It will also be the easiest to learn as well!

    Training in the most popular social media sites, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. You will get the best practices that position you in the top 3-5% of all those who use this media. You will stand out for NOT doing the things everyone else is doing.

    Training on Blogging. I will teach you to “BRAND” yourself using your own blog as a central hub of all your activity. You will learn how to set up your blog, how to post and create pages, how to give it all the bells and whistles so it looks appealing, how to use it to attract the leads, and most importantly how to build a list of hungry prospects that you can market your products and services to.

    Training on how to develop a Content Syndication Network. You will learn what it is, why it’s important, why your competition will want to start working with you, and how to implement it.

    Marketing strategies that will create multiple streams of income, of which many will be automatic month after month.

    A training guide that will outline and explain all the strategies that will be taught over the course of the 8 weeks. It will explain in detail all the training that will be covered.

    “You Will Be Able to CRUSH the Competition By
    Following These Strategies and Principals”

    Hey there is a lot of information that you can obtain out on the Internet. But you have to sift through all the chaff to find the nuggets, and that’s only if you can even identify them. There is a lot of material, systems, programs, and other things being touted out there and it can be hard to know what to specifically do. A proven method that makes sense and has a proven track record is the way to go. If you have the desire to succeed and the drive and ambition to do so, there is no way you can’t do it. If you implement the things I will mentor you in and use the methods, the right resources, the tools and strategies, and PRINCIPALS I teach you, there is absolutely no reason you can’t change your life forever. This is absolute life changing information.

    If you want to become one of free, really free from the confines of your BOSS, someone who took control of their own life, someone who grabbed hold of today’s advantages of technology, then you need to take action. Dreams amount to nothing if you don’t take action. Save yourself some money and time by enrolling in my personalized one-on-one training. The mentors I have been training with over the last 12 months charge nearly $1000 dollars an hour. Most of what I will be training you in originated in things I learned and practiced from these 7 figure earners. This training could easily be worth $2000-$2500 dollars or more. I’m not going to stretch this out and count down the price, I respect you to much for that. I’ll just give you my bottom line. $797 dollars.

    But wait, there’s more. If you sign up today you will also get an additional $399 value. I will provide you with a reduced price on your very own turn-key professionally branded blog with graphics of your supplied photos. I won’t be giving you just a skeleton but a Premium Blog that has all the bells and whistles built in as well as something that will scream YOU, Inc. You will be ready to go in under a week.   For a reduced price of $249 you will get

    • Custom Pages for your About Page, Opportunity Page, Contact Page, Newsletter Page, Site Map Page.

    • Plugins that will help you easily get syndicated, easily get optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), that will make your visitors curious and want to look around on your blog site, ways to engage your visitors to comment and interact with the site, that will integrate the social media sites into your blog.

    • Widgets that make navigation easy for your visitors, that provide the newest items on your blog such as posts and comments, really cool looking tag clouds, social media badges that link to your social media sites, opt-in boxes to capture your visitors information. and other requested functions (if possible).

    • 2 hours of training on all the ins-and-outs of your blogs back office.

    Again, this will totally customized for YOU.   This will be before your very first one hour session.

    And still more. You will receive a site for your very own Content Syndication Network management, that you and 2 syndication partners can use FREE for 3 months.  With it you can effortlessly syndicate your partners content and they yours.  While this can be done manually, this site will SAVE you 75% of the time required.  Do 8 hours of work in 2 hours! If you want more partners they will have to join.  The current price for this is $5.49 a month.

    And even still more. If you want to train with a buddy or two at the same time, I will drop the price to 2 people for $1249 and 3 for $1649.

    There is a wave of people wanting to enter the internet to make a living.  It’s no secret that the economy is in bad shape and very little reassurance on the horizon.   The bottom line is that with the Personalized One-on-one Training and Coaching there is no reason you can’t be one of them.  With the techniques I will show you, you can stand out among all the others who won’t know and understand what you will.

    Number of Students

    Number of Blogs

    As always, have a REMARKABLE day!

    Chris Kilber

    ChrisKilber.com

    Health · Wealth · Freedom in a Modern World

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