7 Easy Steps to Turbocharge Your Online Brand

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good morning. First, I want to thank you all for joining us to this special workshop. I’m very excited to be here with you today.
• #3: Let me start by briefly sharing my background: My name is Elad Hogen. As the founder of PanPrestige.com and ReviewBooster.net, I provide strategic online reputation management services to global clients. I’m a serial online entrepreneur with a background in programming, information systems and business management. My sub-specialty, if you will, is crowd-wisdom and practical crowdsourcing. As you can tell from my accent, I’m originally from Israel, where I continue to have many CEOs and business owners as clients. Last year my family and I relocated to Toronto, where my wife is completing her fellowship in gynecologic oncology. We have three wonderful children. And I’m Ofir Yaacov. Most of you already know me. What you may not know is that I grew up in a kibbutz near one of the most beautiful beaches in Israel. I used to be a client manager and supervisor in an ad agency in Israel, looking after a variety of different clients helping them manage their advertising campaigns on pretty much every type of media (TV, Radio, Internet, Newspapers, Billboards…) I moved to Canada about 10 years ago with my wife Dalete. We built our life and family here and today we have 2 beautiful daughters. Here I was the VP of marketing and sales for a company that published the Jewish Pages and other directories. I helped establishing and managing the company’s transition from print to online. I am very passionate about marketing and especially online marketing.
• #6: Let me start by briefly sharing my background: My name is Elad Hogen. As the founder of PanPrestige.com and ReviewBooster.net, I provide strategic online reputation management services to global clients. I’m a serial online entrepreneur with a background in programming, information systems and business management. My sub-specialty, if you will, is crowd-wisdom and practical crowdsourcing. As you can tell from my accent, I’m originally from Israel, where I continue to have many CEOs and business owners as clients. Last year my family and I relocated to Toronto, where my wife is completing her fellowship in gynecologic oncology. We have three wonderful children. And I’m Ofir Yaacov. Most of you already know me. What you may not know is that I grew up in a kibbutz near one of the most beautiful beaches in Israel. I used to be a client manager and supervisor in an ad agency in Israel, looking after a variety of different clients helping them manage their advertising campaigns on pretty much every type of media (TV, Radio, Internet, Newspapers, Billboards…) I moved to Canada about 10 years ago with my wife Dalete. We built our life and family here and today we have 2 beautiful daughters. Here I was the VP of marketing and sales for a company that published the Jewish Pages and other directories. I helped establishing and managing the company’s transition from print to online. I am very passionate about marketing and especially online marketing.
• #8: The goal of this presentation is to share with you with many of the know-how and tools that you’ll need to build and maintain a powerful and rewarding personal or business brand on the Internet. With these simple methods, you will stand out from the crowd and position yourself as one of the top authorities in your industry or profession.
• #9: These are examples of Professions in which your personal name is your brand vs. businesses in which your business name is your brand. In both cases it’s important to make sure that when someone is searching your name or business name, your brand is well represented.
• #10: Search engines are the most common method people use to do market research or background checks, and even today, their popularity continues to grow. According to the latest research, more than one billion names are Googled every day; 75% of hiring departments are required to research job candidates online; and 86% of U.S. adults who use the Internet turn to search engines to look up other people.
• #11: How you appear in search results – both good, bad, and absent – will affect whether or not people do business with you. That includes customers, clients, investors, prospective partners, and even prospective spouses.
• #12: Amazingly, most people and brands are not well-represented online. Which is lucky for all of us.
• #13: When you Google someone’s name, there are three types of search results you’ll find on the first (organic) results page: 1. Irrelevant or Natural Search Results: First page of results is full of references to other people (wrong identity) or just irrelevant results. 2. Negative Search Results: A potpourri of negative press mentions; critical online reviews; unflattering images; libelous blog posts, and even revenge porn. 3. 5-Star Online Profiles: These are positive search results that reinforce your desired reputation. They include your personal website; up-to-date blog posts; recent social media profiles; and thought-leader content such as articles, presentation, videos, infographics, etc.
• #14: Irrelevant search results, even when accurate, are likely not relevant to your professional career and not the aspect of your personal brand that you want to showcase.
• #15: The most typical “non-relevant” results that come up are profiles and posts that belong to someone else.
• #16: Negative results can really ruin your personal brand. There are websites whose purpose is to publish only negative things: http://www.pissedconsumer.com http://www.ripoffreport.com Revenge port websites.
• #17: So how to create a perfect online presence?
• #18: Before you start building or repairing your current online presence, you must have a plan: Start by searching for your name in the relevant search engine, in privacy mode. Copy the first 30 results to Excel (I’ll show you how in a minute) (This works in Google, the various international editions of Google, Bing, and other search engines.) This spreadsheet serves two purposes: 1. It maps your web profile; showing you what’s missing, what’s buried, what’s hurting your reputation, and what’s completely irrelevant. 2. It creates a benchmark, allowing you to measure your progress and success.
• #19: Google search results are personalized: Privacy mode When a user performs a search, the search results are not only based on the relevance of each result to the searched term, but also on which websites the user has visited previously. Google relies on cookies to deliver what it concludes are more targeted results. When conducting a search, you do not want the results to be skewed because of your computer’s hidden cookies. The best way to prevent that, is to activate a “private browsing” mode. Always open a fresh browser window in privacy or incognito mode SE & IP Google returns different results depending upon google country search engine and upon your computer’s IP location. For example: If your target audience is in Canada, you should use a Canadian IP and Google.ca as your search engine
• #20: You can activate private browsing on all major browsers.
• #21: In reputation management the main objective is to promote your personal or business brand, which is your name or business name. However, what I’m demonstrating will also work to link your specific name to strategic generic search terms for your business or profession. The main idea is to find the most valuable keyword for your business. In two slides I’ll show you how to do it.
• #22: The first step in keyword research is to find some basic terms. Check how do influencers from your industry describe themselves on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
• #23: This free tool will help you to find the best keywords to include in your website, profiles and other web properties. The keyword research process is complicated so we should have a separate webinar only about how to do a keyword research for personal branding. You can read about it in details in our blog. Later in the presentation, we will show you how to use these keywords.
• #25: The best method for improving your online presence is to create positive, relevant content that is optimized to rank well for your name
• #26: If you still do not have a personal website, you should start by creating one. Your personal website will be used as a hub for all of your other web properties. Once your website is live, make sure you are present in the 4 major social platforms and then move on to more general and industry specific profiles. In the next slides I’m going to show you exactly how to do that.
• #27: We will start with a personal website… First you need to select a platform. There are a lot of good blogging platforms that can use as your personal website like: medium.com, tumblr.com, weebly.com and others. I deeply recommend to use WordPress self hosted (WordPress.org) as your personal website and blogging platform. This is probably the most common content management system (CMS), It’s SEO friendly, have an unlimited number of premium themes and a large number of developers if you prefer a custom design. Self hosted website cost little bit more than the other options but will allow you the maximum control and flexibility. if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, then WordPress.com or any other platform mentioned above are also good option …
• #28: themeforest.net is the biggest market for premium wordpress themes. Currently contains more than 5,000 WordPress Themes & Templates. With a one time investment of $30-$60, you can purchase a fully customizable, responsive design (suitable for mobile) with many features. You can search for suitable theme by category or keyword related to your niche. Before you purchase the theme, you can see review the screenshots and play with a live preview. This way you can save a lot of money and still make your website looks professional without the extra cost of hiring a designer or developer.
• #29: Make sure your personal website contain at least the following elements: About Me page Contact page Easy to navigate Menu Write an original BIO in 3rd person Links to your social profiles If you want to enhance the photos that google find when Googling your name, you should add a “Media-Kit” page with all of your best profile photos.
• #30: Make sure that your website is mobile responsive. If it’s not, please fix it. One of Google’s latest algorithm changes is preferring mobile websites over non mobile ones.
• #31: Make sure your personal website contain at least the following elements: About Me page Contact page Easy to navigate Menu Write an original BIO in 3rd person Links to your social profiles If you want to enhance the photos that google find when Googling your name, you should add a “Media-Kit” page with all of your best profile photos.
• #32: The best method for improving your online presence is to create positive, relevant content that is optimized to rank well for your name
• #33: When you done with your website, make sure that your LinkedIn, FB, twitter and G+ profiles are completed. Continue with other authority websites that tend to rank well on Google (I can share with you a complete list) Fill as many details as you can. Completed profiles looks better and are ranked better within LinkedIn and on Google.
• #34: Almost every industry has its own social networks and websites. Try to open a profile on some industry specific websites. In many cases, Google tend to rank this profiles higher than others because they are more targeted.
• #35: In this example you can see that a profile on doximity (a professional networking tool for physicians) appear in the first page of google search results when searching the doctor’s name. You can also find on the first page of Google a profile on zocdoc (another professional site for physicians) These kind of profiles on the first page of Google make you look good when someone Google’s your name They also put you in a position of an authority and expert in your industry.
• #36: Some basic optimization rules: Use your real name as a username. Use only a professional profile image and use the same image for all your profiles and pages. You'll be easy to recognize that way. Write in 3rd person. Write a set of unique bio’s to each platform.
• #37: canva.com is a great tool to create a professional set of headers to your main profiles (you can use it also to create images for your posts and more…) Another option is to pay few dollars to a freelancer from a website like fiverr.com or Elance.
• #38: SEO is about optimizing a new or existing content to make sure it shows as high as possible for a specific keyword. In reputations management, the main keyword is our name.
• #39: Basically, there are 2 methods to do SEO: Black Hat – is about trying to manipulate Google algorithm. BTW - Google search algorithm is complex and no one knows exactly how it works, but we know the principles. This kind of methods became less effective in the last years. We have to remember that Google main objective is to provide their users with the most relevant content. In the last years Google fights against black hat SEO by updating their algorithm Frequently (with much of success I must say). Penguin, Panda, and Pigeon are names of Google algorithm changes from the last years. The second SEO method is: White Hat – optimizing according to Google guidelines.
• #40: In the next slides, I’m going to show you some simple and powerful white hat SEO Techniques. There are 2 major components to search engine optimization: On-Site and Off-Site. On-Site SEO mainly deals with factors on the website. Off-Site SEO mainly deals with external factors. On-Site SEO is the first thing you should do. So lets start…
• #41: 3 elements from your website or web-page that appear in google search results should be optimized: Title – one of the most important factors. Put here your full name and the generic keyword that you found on step 2 (keyword research) Domain – Your domain name should be your full name. Make sure it isn't already in use, and if it is, add a suffix (like SusanLewisWriter.com) Meta description – Less important than the other factors. Google use it in the search results, other search engines ignore it. More optimization tips: Headers – Put your name in H1 or H2 HTML tags. Body – write in 3rd person. User friendly menu Off-Site – Add links from your site to your social profiles and other important pages that you want to promote. Loading time: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• #43: You should optimize the main components in your social profiles, like: Title, headline, about (or bio), links to your main website and other profiles. You should add your name in third 3rd person and add generic keyword in the relevant places.
• #44: When all your websites, profiles and pages are set and optimized, this is the time to link them all together. Make a map of your most important web properties and check if you missed an opportunity to link between them. Linking between your pages also helps Google to understand that all of your pages are related to your name. Google gives more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others. Backlinks are a vote of confidence from the website that mentions you.
• #45: Producing great content is definitely the most important factor in personal branding. You probably heard more than once the sentence “content is the king”. Well, today informative content is not enough. If you want to enhance your personal or business brand, your content should be inspiring, updated and engaging. BTW – By saying content I also refer to rich content like Image, info-graphic, video or presentation that in many cases works better than a written post.
• #46: Your content should be updated in 3 levels: 1. Blogging is the most effective way to stand out from the crowd and enhance your online presence. 2. Second form is micro-blogging: Using your social media channels to share your original content and 3rd party content that could be relevant to your audience. 3. To get as much value as possible, you’ll need to continually update your profiles. Post regularly (make a plan) by scheduling your posts in advance (in the next slides I’ll show you how)
• #47: You can use your personal website for blogging (which I recommend you to do) or use a 3rd party platform like wordpress.com, medium.com, tumblr.com, weebly.com or Linkedin.com. There is plenty of information on the internet about almost everything. People do not want to read about the same thing over and over again. What interesting is your point of view, your voice. Try to write about your personal experience to express your personality. It is much more interesting and engaging. Writing by yourself is the best option, but if you can’t do it, find a dedicated ghost writer on Elance or crowdsourcing platform like Textboroker. BTW – Long form content gets more social shares than short form content. (I’m not sure they read it, but they share it more). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noah-kagan/why-content-goes-viral-wh_b_5492767.html Don’t forget SEO
• #48: You can get inspiration from many sources: Your clients FAQ Twitter and Google trends Your competitors blog and website. I manage lists of references that I want to share or write about. When I run into an interesting reference, I save it within FB or Twitter for future sharing.
• #49: BuzzSumo is a great tool to look up for engaging content for blogging or social media. This search tool ranks content on social media based on the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. You can search the content by keyword, category, domain and so on… Highly recommended. http://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-alternative-to-BuzzSumo
• #50: There are two main sources of content that you can share on social networks: 1. Content that you created. 2. 3rd party content about your industry or interest (by using BuzzSumo for example) Professional SM managers use automatic tools to schedule that content. Using this tools will help you to be more efficient and consistent with your SM publications. Most known tools are Buffer and Hootsuite. Both have free planes. More recommended tools: tweetdeck.twitter.com for Twitter only sproutsocial.com agorapulse.com
• #51: Hootsuite allows you to open a free account with up to 3 social profiles. Using this tool enables you to schedule your posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ and recently they added Instagram. You can also see all of your social streams in one place which is easy to track and monitor.
• #52: One of the biggest challenges is producing an engaging content. Content leverage is using every piece of content in multiple ways in order to get the highest return on investment from each piece of content.
• #53: Your blog posts can be converted to: Slideshow on Slideshare Infographic for Pinterest Number of tweets Slideshow can be converted to Video on YouTube and Vimeo Video can be converted to podcast Series of posts can be used to create a webinar Few webinars can be used to write a book or an ebook. And so on…
• #56: The best method for improving your online presence is to create positive, relevant content that is optimized to rank well for your name
• #62: In this stage, you already have an established personal website, blog, profiles, authority webpages with your bio and maybe some more content about you online. You should also have a content plan to update you blog, profiles and social media regularly. This is the time to start to monitor your brand mentions on SM, track your pages ranking on search engine and measure your progress and success (remember step 1???)
• #63: socialmention.com is a free social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the web into a single stream of information.
• #64: socialmention.com is a free social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the web into a single stream of information.
• #65: socialmention.com is a free social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the web into a single stream of information.