Branding Rant

Recently over on Peter Laurent’s Best Looking Man Blog, I read a post about him hijacking Peter Newsome’s name on Google.

I bet you could have a bit of fun with that. In fact, back in the day, I remember when I used to outrank Pete Laurent for his name on Google. I was litterally Google’s Authority site about “Peter Laurent”, with my post “An Interview with Peter Laurent“.

For those of you Who don’t know Mr Laurent, he’s a Brisbane search engine marketer and online entrepreneur that enjoys making money and ranking well in Google. He’s currently well ranked for Best Looking Man in Brisbane and there is a serious debate around this topic. He’s frequently seen in the Valley, around Spring Hill and in various other parts of the Queensland University of Technology campus - whether that’s for the purpose of his learning or for making special types of “sandwiches”, I’m not sure.

Peter Laurent vs. Peter Newsome

With his double indented listing on Peter Newsome’s name, Pete Laurent is becoming quite a force against Mr Newsome. It will be interesting to see in due time what happens to this interesting debacle.

For more information about the attempted hijacking of Mr Newsome’s Name, read the full story here.

Hot off the Press. I was checking my AdSense Earnings for today and I noticed that Google has suddenly changed it’s FavIcon. Check it out here:

This looks to me like Google is trying to send a softer image. Instead of the capitalised ‘G’, the lower case ‘g’ seems a little less imposing and suggests they’re moving to allay concerns that the company is a large monopoly.

So far it seems the only services with the new favicon are AdSense and Webmaster Tools. AdWords and iGoogle still keep the old favicon showing proudly in your Tabs and Address bar. Here it is…

What do you think? Does this signal a modernisation, update or something else for the big ‘G’ brand?

I made a post on Small Business Branding the other day about my top website conversion tips. Read it here now. Otherwise if you’re lazy and all you want to do is read the main points I’ve listed them below for you.

• Be Clear about What You do - In your ad copy and website
• Receive Ultra Targeted Traffic
• Direct that Traffic to the Right Landing Page
• Direct Visitors’ Focus to the Call To Action
• Use a Professional and Relevant Website Design
• Make the Action Easy and Flexible for the User to Complete
• See What Professionals and Your Competition Are Doing to Convert
• Incentivise Your Call to Action
• Reduce Visitors’ Perceived Risk of the Call to Action
• Make Your Call to Action Appropriate for the traffic You Attract
• Pre-empt your Call to Action in Your Ad or Source Medium

I go into more detail in my post on Small Business Branding, so check it out now if you’re interested in improving your conversion…

I’ve been thinking a lot about applications moving online in the past few months in particular, what has me interested are applications like Google Docs, Zoho, Salesforce and even some Operating systems!

We can run most of our computer’s programs already from the web! This is why I’ve decided to…

Build a Cloud Computer

You see, in the future, if everything is run from the cloud, we won’t need big hefty computers to run our applications. Instead, we’ll be using basic specced systems which pass the real data intensive calculations onto massive server farms. This is exactly what I want to do with my laptop.

I’m going to install nothing on it besides Linux and Firefox and run everything from the cloud. I’ll also show you how.

My cloud computer is going to be an old centrino laptop for mobility. It’s a single core, 1.7ghz processor with onboard graphics, wireless LAN, 60gb HDD and just 256mb of RAM. This is barely enough to run Windows XP with a few applications running in the background, which is why I’m pushing all the grunt of intensive applications, to the cloud online.

I’ve been on twitter for a month and a bit now, I think. So I reckon it’s about time I announced it a little more formally. If you’d like to add me on Twitter, here’s my address:

http://twitter.com/RobKingston

If you’re not on Twitter yet, I seriously recommend that you join now and start interacting with your friends and the great online marketing professionals out there.

For those of you that are on Twitter, just a quick tip: Don’t be boring!

I generally go by the rule, that if what I’m posting has no entertainment or educational value, then it’s not worth posting. Simple as that. I also only add people who will follow that rule and help me establish better relationships with them.

Don’t Know What Twitter Is?

Read about Twitter NOW.

Here’s a bit of fun that got sent to me in a forward the other day. These are five of the most funny logos that I’ve seen for a long time. See what you make of them:

This logo is a ‘K’ … I hope?

I wonder if these people planned for this logo?

Let’s not go there.

I wonder what tools they use?

What treatment is that customer receiving?

Let’s hope that you can avoid having your business logo end up in an email like this. Although - you know what they say about all publicity…

Every day exciting new technologies are released to make our jobs easier, improve efficiency or cut costs.

Whether it’s the ease of a one-click WordPress install, the diminishing cost of buying a new computer or the endless stream of performance tweaks that help us improve our efficiency, there is always things out there to save our time. The way I see it, there are two things that you can do with these savings.

• Be lazy/tight pocketed with the savings
• Put those savings into creating more value for customers

I’m totally guilty of giving into the instant gratification when it comes to saving money or time. We all are. This is just an idea which I have recently stumbled onto and become aware of. While many business owners and professionals rejoice at the idea of making savings – do they do anything with those savings? Do they invest their time into creating more value for customers? I don’t think so.

Another way to look at it is like this – historically, adoption rates for new technology take several years. If you’re an early adopter and you decide to implement new, cost saving technology, you can spend more on creating value for your customers than your competitors can for a good while. This will create a competitive advantage that your competition won’t even know about until it’s too late.

So, next time that new reporting software takes automation to a new level, why not add a personal touch to those reports? Maybe if you get a new computer that converts videos quicker, you could add a personal touch to your customer service with your freed up time? Perhaps, when your new CRM system is up and automating parts of your sales process for you, you could gather MORE customer data to help create value? The list is endless…

What technologies have saved you time and money in your business? Do you usually take the lazy approach or are you creating value to help you compete?

Yesterday I decided to make the move to WordPress 2.5 on my personal online journal - a highly coveted personal journal, largely unknown to even my CLOSEST friends.

Unfortunately at the time, I was uploading a configuration file (wp-admin.php for you WordPress geeks) to my site and I just so happened to drop the config file into the wrong directory. HUGE MISTAKE. Upon doing so, I redirected ALL traffic from www.BracingYourBrand.com to www.Journey2Mastery.com.

How I Published My Private Journal

Now this wasn’t too big a deal for me at first, since people were just just going to end up at a page stating it was closed. Little did I know, by redirecting everything to Journey2Mastery, I was also redirecting Google Feed Reader, Yahoo, Outlook, Feedburner and any other bot looking for www.bracingyourbrand.com/feed

By allowing this, I Posted My Private Journal to My RSS Subscribers.

This was HUGE for me. I write things on there that I even have trouble admitting to myself. So, as you might realise, there is some heartfelt stuff in there - stuff that is exceedingly private. Upon realising it, my heart stopped and all I could think was, “Crap! Crap! Crap! WTF.” I had just published my sex life, intentions, relationships with people and worse, to my employers, friends and followers who subscribe to my blog.

The Aftermath

Thanks to a chat with some mates of mine (props to West Loh and Cameron Mackay), I’ve finally come to terms with it and found time to post this sort of “Personal Media Relaease”. As you could imagine this will work wonders for my personal brand… and time will tell whether any publicity is good publicity.

I suppose it’s been interesting, in that I made the realisation that most people don’t care about this sort of stuff, so I’m happy in that regard. It’s also pushed me to being more open and honest - not quite brutally honest but moreso than before. It’s also helped me understand WordPress a lot more and recieve a spike in visitors.

How You Can Use This Lesson

Using this method, you can effectively hijack someone’s RSS Subscriber base and use it for malicious intent or to make a couple of bucks.

Over at TechCrunch, they have reported that along with Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick, they have also acquired an SEO company - Double Click Performics.

TechCrunch pointed out the obvious, that Google’s ownership of an SEO company represents a conflict of interests, but that’s not my only concern. I bet Google will look into the processes and clients of Double Click Performics and find out how they can identify sites that are manipulating rankings.

What do you think?

While browsing sites that I manage and have managed in the past, I noticed a little bit of Green in my toolbar that wasn’t meant to be there.

Back last year, Google removed the PageRank numbers off sites that they suspected were selling links. They were cracking down on people who were manipulating search results by buying links to boost their rankings artificially. This pissed a lot of people off, as you can see over with Andy Beard.

Anyway 3GN Media, a site I ran with Yaro Starak, was slapped for selling links last year. However on a second glance today, it’s back up to a PR3 on the homepage — and we’re STILL selling links! Hmmmm…

Why Do We Have Our Page Rank Back?

I have two theories about this and we have had a lot of changing circumstances which may have affected the situation. Here’s what I think:

• Change of Ownership
• Addition of a Blog Frontpage

Change of Ownership

Back in January, Yaro decided to sell all of his sites - 3GN Media was one of them. Selling the site obviously changes the ownership of the site around to another person.

Addition of Blog Frontpage

Initially we had no frontpage for 3GN Media. It was an empty directory besides a lonely .htaccess file which redirected people to the “/forums” sub-directory. After we got slapped by Google last year we setup the blog as a Frontpage and still sold links on the site.

My guess is that it either snuck past Google’s hard-hitting palm, or it’s got enough links going to it, that even with being penalised, it warrants a PR 3.

What Do You Think?

Open up in the comments… This has me confused still.