Brandon Hopkins' Reputation Management and SEO Blog

How to Brand Yourself Online

This is part 5 of 34 in Poker and Making Money Online, a 34 Part Series.

Your “brand” is important.

OLD:

NEW:

Branding started out with a steel rod with your brand (or logo) that was then seared into a cow. That effectively meant that cow was yours. Everyone in town knew what your brand looked like and you knew their brand.

Today things haven’t changed too much except that now companies are branding us. They put their logos on our clothes, cars, computers, and just about everything else. Does that tell you how important branding is?

In order to set yourself apart from the sea of competition you need to establish your brand and make sure that brand is recognizable and reputable. Your brand doesn’t have to be your logo, it can be your name. Many internet superstars (not this kind, but this kind), are famous (internetely speaking, yes I just made that word up.) while others do indeed have a visual brand (Shoemoney).

So to brand yourself online you need to understand what people “see” about your brand. What they “see” is what they can find online. If you search for your name, do you find positive or negative stuff? It doesn’t matter if it’s about you, or about the other guy who has the same name. Protecting your brand is often called brand management or reputation management.

One of my recent clients had a bit of an online reputation problem. A newspaper insinuated that he did something he did not. He hired me to bury that story, which I did. His brand is still strong because what you see is only positive stuff about him.

When writing online, filling out sing up forms and commenting on blogs, consider this. Every time your use your name, it will be archived for ever. One day when you need that big client, and he goes digging, what is he going to find?

By Brandon|January 29th, 2009|Projects|1 Comment

How To Sell A Website for Maximum Profit

This is part 4 of 34 in Poker and Making Money Online, a 34 Part Series.

Act weak when strong, act strong when weak. Know when to bluff.

Poker Bluff

Selling a website for top dollar is similar to bluffing in poker and here’s why. You want to sell your website for the most your buyer will pay, your buyer wants to buy your website for the lowest amount possible. Good old negotiation.

In order to sell your website for top dollar and get the most money out of your buyer, you need to really sell the features and benefits. In poker, when you’re bluffing, you want to do the same thing. You want the other people at the table to know everything about your cards, that is, you want them to think that you have something worth folding to.

So in order to win this melee and come out with the most money, you need to show the buyer why he should pay top dollar. This includes listing all of your stats, income, and generally unspoken benefits such as:

1. RSS subscribers
2. Newsletter members that are opt-in (or double opt-in)
3. Type in traffic
4. Organic search engine results
5. Current backlinks on popular sites
6. Unpublished content
7. Ideas for future development
8. Domain age
9. Popular content
10. Accounts (Twitter, Technorati, Blogspot, etc)
11. Multiple revenue streams
12. Relationships with others in the same industry
13. Affiliate company contacts

Explaining these benefits to your buyer is like going all in. You are telling your buyer that you have the nuts. If your site lacks value, by showing more quantity of features, you’re bluffing. Sometimes it works and sometimes you bust out!

By Brandon|January 28th, 2009|Projects|0 Comments

It’s OK to Switch Horses

This is part 2 of 34 in Poker and Making Money Online, a 34 Part Series.

It’s okay to switch tables if you discover it’s too hard to win at your table.

Horse Crossing River

We’ve all heard it said, never change horses while crossing a stream. In essence it means that when you’re in the middle of something, see it through. I couldn’t disagree more. I’m notorious for not seeing things through. A recent example is my free hosting website.

I designed a site, rented a full server, bought software, spent countless hours setting it up and then went live. I estimated that I would need 200 members in the first month, 600 after 2 months, and 2,000 after 3 months, in the 4th month I hoped to break even with 4-6,000 members. After 15 days, I had 60 members, and only 7 had actually taken the time to switch their domains to my free web host. So in reality, I was 193 members short, by the end of the month I had 14 domains switched and websites built and 7 subdomain websites created. So after 31 days I was 179 member websites short and couldn’t see how it was going to work. After the first month, I emailed the members that had created sites, and arranged a deal with another web host to get them set up somewhere else and closed 22Gigs.com.

I had thought about this idea consistently for about 3 months before diving in. I had done market research, had a plan, marketing lined up, sponsors, contests, etc. I realized pretty quickly that my horse wasn’t going to make it across the river. Should I stay on that horse and keep digging my financial hole, or should I get off the horse and find a stronger horse to cross the river?

So if you’re in a market that is beating you down and you can’t see an end in site, maybe it’s time to move on. Keep that site in the background and try something new for a while. You never know when you might want to give it another shot.

When the going gets tough, the smart find an easier way.

By Brandon|January 26th, 2009|Projects|0 Comments

Choosing the Right Table to Play At

This is part 1 of 34 in Poker and Making Money Online, a 34 Part Series.

Table selection is the most important decision you can make.

Poker Room

When you first walk into a poker room, you’ll see tables, lots of tables usually. At these tables, you’ll find both fish and sharks. When you’re playing poker for money, you’ll want to find the tables with the most fish and the least amount of sharks. Unless you play every day at this poker room or casino, you won’t be able to tell just by looking at them.

The same is true when deciding on a niche. When you first start building websites and working on affiliate marketing, you don’t know how to evaluate competition. You don’t know which backlinks are strongest, and which SERP’s you can overthrow. The more experience you have, the better suited you are to choose a table or pick a niche.

Take this example, you see Paul, a guy you’ve played with before at a table. He knows you, you know him. At his table are a bunch of fish that you don’t know, that are consistently losing hands and folding to bluffs. At another table are a bunch of unknowns. Which table would you prefer?

Personally, I would rather play against known competition. I know that “Paul” is my only competition. When niche marketing it’s just as important to know your competition and know which markets you can stay alive in.

In my experience, technology related fields are like sitting down at a table with Phil Ivey, Doyle Brunson and Gus Hansen. Would you sit at that table? Only for two hands to say you played with the big boys right?

Jumping into a niche like iPods, computer parts, or laptop batteries is just as bad. Those markets are flooded with superstars that, as good as you might be, you’ll always be fighting a seriously uphill battle with.

Don’t get me wrong, picking a popular niche isn’t a bad idea, you might be able to do really well in a niche like Acai Berry Supplements even though it’s flooded, but when there are so many tables full of fish, why take your chances with a shark?

By Brandon|January 26th, 2009|Projects|1 Comment

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