It’s my first time to come up with a more formal model on real life problems. It is not meant to be complete or entirely accurate.  A model is just a representation of the real world.  It is meant to help us make decision on real life problems. It has weaknesses and we shall not depend on a model entirely.

I came up with this model on personal branding as I’m preparing for a talk on the topic.  The model doesn’t try to cover everything about personal branding. Nor does it explain why we should do brand our self, or how to go about doing it. But it’s more on the elements of personal branding and the kind of questions we should ask our self when developing and evaluating our own personal brand.

I hope to elaborate more on the model soon. But for now, I’ll let the mind map do the talking. Click on the map to get the full picture. If you can roughly get the ideas I want to convey simply by looking at the mind map, then I know my mind mapping skill has improved

Your comments and criticisms are much welcome.

FB post #2 - Have you been working diligently but other people just don’t see your hard work? Perhaps your performance is not yet good enough to attract their attention? Perhaps you need some “selling skills” to make them notice you? Or perhaps you are not exposed enough that they don’t even know your existence?

FB post #3 - Sometimes what we want to do conflicts with what other important people in our life expect us to do. Maybe we haven’t learned enough of their needs. Maybe we don’t know enough of our own ability. Or maybe we haven’t communicated enough with them on what we can do for them.

How do you respond to these posts and questions? I’m in brainstorming stage to prepare for an upcoming talk on personal branding. Your comments are welcome.

Without much thinking I replied, “Don’t be a magazine.” Before that, I had been habitually telling people to operate a successful bookstore, don’t be a bookstore; to be a successful nasi lemak store, don’t sell nasi lemak. That is, be bold to come out of your product category, create your own market space and be perceived as offering something different or more than what you sell.

As a matter of fact, I know of one magazine which is not really in magazine business.  The company behind is actually in branding business. They charge clients fees to certify their brand, give them brand awards, and promote them in a number of ways, magazine being one main channel. No wonder I can’t find advertisements in the magazine.

I guess the lecturer asked me about magazine because he knew I used to write a column for a magazine called MBA Edge Quarterly. Again, if I had resources and owned a magazine like this, I would do it in different way, rather than a traditional one going around soliciting for advertisers and presents only good things about MBA. Create an MBA 2.0 magazine!

I always plan and assess an Internet business on three levels, that is, business, marketing and technical.  Internet business is much more than just technicalities such as web design and Flash. It is also more than mere selling and marketing.

Instead, we need to think and rethink the way to attract visitors, leads, enquiries, and then convert them into customers. It is the business model that is most important.

In the session, I shared 7 general steps in details to set up an Internet business:

1. Plan your Internet business
2. Register your domain name
3. Get server hosting service
4. Develop your web site
5. Set up online payment and e-commerce facilities
6. Market your Internet business
7. Maintain and evaluate your business online

I also shared 7 ways, among others, to market a business web site online:

1. Search engine marketing
2. Trade and business directories
3. Email marketing
4. Advertisements (including banners and pay-per-click ads)
5. Blogging
6. Social media
7. Mobile marketing

It had been a fruitful non-technical introduction for business people to know how to go about starting and doing Internet business online. The feedback from attendees was quite good. I love learning, and I love sharing

You may have read about companies being taught in business textbooks, or mentioned in management courses. Your company too, no matter public-listed or sole proprietorship, can get such exposure among the business community, starting from the nascent circle of business students.

Your company will be covered in areas of mutual agreement, such as management, leadership, marketing, human resources, finance, operations, strategies and so on. Please share your success stories too and how you cope with challenges, whether in the past or now.

So you not only get your company name out, you also get free consulting service as we work to analyze your issues faced and propose solutions to them. And by the way…

Have you seen many business students come out to work only to find themselves unable to cope with real world issues? Please help reform our management education and train our students by contributing a part to give them real business issues to solve as their case study.

Please don’t worry about any trade secrets, strategies, financial information and anything being leaked out. We can discuss on how to cover up and disguise these information for win-win situation for all.

Please contact me here. Your contribution will go a long way toward improving the quality of our business education.

Marketing is applied everywhere, whether we like it or know it or not. Maybe we can learn from Peter Drucker on what he says about selling and marketing in his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices..

“There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.”

Now let’s apply and adapt marketing vs. selling (courting) to boy-girl relationship and see if we can get any insight from the wisdom

“There will always, one can assume, be need for some courting. But the aim of marketing is to make courting superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the guy/girl so well that you fit the target and sell yourself. Ideally, marketing should result in a target who is ready to accept your proposal. All that should be needed then is to make you available!”

Question – Why am I different from others?
Answer – Do you have to be like others?

Don’t seek to be like others! Everyone of us is unique and has our own destiny to realize in life!

From marketing point of view, the commercial is also great. Pantene shampoo is a functional product and has its conventional market of shampoo users. But now it seeks to cross over from functionality to emotional appeal. Instead of using logic to tell us why it is a better brand, it seeks to attack our emotion and win our heart over.

Not only will it persuade more people from the its traditional market to use the product, those who don’t use their kind of shampoo maybe bought over too. Who knows I might decide to buy Pantene for my family next time? Perhaps this is one of the blue ocean strategies to conquer a new market.

And the tagline is inspirational – You can shine!

By the way, I consider the Thai language very beautiful phonetically. It is a language I wish to learn if I had extra time.

When you see the catchy words and sentences at the top of the page, you may be tempted to scroll down to read the rest.  You may find out more about the product, its benefits, some customer testimonials, and of course a link to buy it.

Normally there is no link to any other page on the same web site where you can find more out more about the company, the product or service.  All information is contained in one single page.

Such one-page web sites have existed for more than one decade since the 90′s, advocated by Internet marketing gurus such as the late Corey Rudl.  However, nowadays many still advocate the use of one-page web sites to sell product.  Perhaps it may still be working.

For me, I normally consider such web site as mere advertisement, sales letter and simply spammy.  Normally when I come across such web site, I will simply leave and go elsewhere.

I once asked an Internet guru who is himself using an one-page web site to sell his training course.  He answered that on such web site, visitors have no link to click away and so must stay on and focus on the web site to read the rest.  Whereas visitors to a web site with multiple pages will be tempted to click around.

I reason that perhaps on an one-page web site, the visitors will be forced to follow the desired sales process by the seller, whereas this may not happen on a web site with multiple pages.

On regard to whether it’s spammy, the Internet guru said that if the web site is owned by your father or your trusted friend, surely you will not go away.  So the challenge is to build trust.

And what do you think of an one-page web site?

Yes, the Internet is getting more and more “social”, with real people using the Internet to interact and influence one another.  Much thanks to the advent of blogs, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (strictly speaking, blogs are not social media).  Even the older generation have jumped on the bandwagon and claimed an account on Facebook.  In fact, if you are not “in” social media nowadays, you are “out”!

Therefore, the social media now presents a natural channel for marketing your products and services on such increasingly social online networks.  After all, many people have always been looking for others’ opinions when deciding to buy (or not buy) something, used to be offline, but now online also.

In the local hosting industry, it seems hosting providers are picking up on marketing through social media.  I know one company has set up their profile on various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Plurk!

This company is capitalizing well on social media.  They offer money for bloggers who write about them.  They give out prizes for lucky draw winners who follow them on Twitter, tweet about them, and ask others to retweet about them.  They also own a company page on Facebook and promise to offer discounts for domain names based on the number of Facebook members who become their fans.  Yeah, many social media jargons here, I know

I also had set up a Facebook group and a Twitter account for BizPartner, and tried to create some buzz in social media.  I have yet to achieve what I want, but I’m trying, and learning.

And we can expect that more and more hosting providers will soon start to use social media for innovative marketing, branding and customer relationship building.

I heard some say that market share, or “mind share”, is first and foremost important.  When many people have got to know a dotcom brand, they will visit the web site,  the “eyeballs” will be so increased, the “critical mass” will be so achieved, the “branding” will be so built up, and naturally the profit will come.

On the other hand, others think that profit should be the first to focus on, not market share.  A business can grow its market share so much that it is still not profitable.  It can command a large market share yet sacrifice the profits that could have been earned during the growth.

One typical example is a membership business online.  Shall we first focus on market share by giving out free member accounts in order to first attract the mass, and then try to sell some premium services later to them?  Or shall we start with a chargeable membership so that we can starting earning right from the first day?

Perhaps profit should be our first objective.  And as we do things the right way towards the objective, market share is a natural result.  What do you think?

Receiving spams is a reality nowadays. How many spams do you receive each day? We know most spams are about “sexual health”. But I found more and more spams related to training and education these days.

These are subject titles of some spams on training courses received in my spam folder recently. I have never subscribed to any of their mailing lists before:

• How To Sell Successfully To Corporate Customers
• Train The Trainer
• Enhancing Interpersonal Skills
• Corporate Social Responsibility For Competitive Advantage
• Public Speaking & Presentation Skills
• Planning For Strategic Marketing (do they teach us to spam for marketing?)

One of these spammers is even more “sophisticated”. They know how to use a different email address to spam each time to bypass spam filter and to hide their real identity!

But do you really need to spam in order get the words out about your products and services? Nowadays there are many ways to do Internet marketing, such as search engine marketing and blog marketing. Unless you are in fly-by-night business, sending spams will not only not work, but backfire on your reputation as well!

So I advised that company not to spam but consider other ways of promotion that could be more long-term and beneficial. Unfortunately, they said they want “fast results” and will go on shopping for another hoster who allows them to spam. But as I understand, no legitimate hosting provider allows customers to spam. So good luck!

I turned on the radio and tuned to FM 89.9 immediately.  I was so delighted to have found such a channel that I have long yearned for

I’ve been the type of person who don’t listen to music while driving.   No, I was not like this when I was younger.  I spoilt my car audio speaker before for playing rock music too loudly in early years of driving.  It is also not that I don’t like music.  If you go karaoke singing with me, most likely I’ll sing more than you.  But as I grew older, I just became the kind of person who would not turn on car radio for music any more.

But apart from its normal programmes, BFM is music most of the time!  In order not to miss any good business programmes, now I keep the radio on while driving and listen to music after so many years!

The moral of this story is that, BFM turned me from a non-customer into a customer.  Just as Nintendo successfully turned non-customers such as adults to its Nintendo Wii video game console, BFM just successfully turned me into listening to music!

Instead of taking away existing customers from competitors in the market, this is defining a new market boundary by appealing to non-customers and turning them into customers.  A blue ocean strategy!

Question

Hi Ricky,

I need a favour from you, can you please advise me – How can I promote my website (http://name.company.com) as you are an expert in this.

Answer

I’m still long way to become an expert.  Anyway, here’s my brief feedback.

I have checked your web page.  However, as the web site does not belong to you, and so you have not much control over the web site content, there is not much thing you can do on the web page itself.  Otherwise, you could do some search engine optimization (SEO) to attract Internet traffic.

But I guess there are at least two other ways to promote your business online:

First, use social media like Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn and even Twitter.  Not only mention what you do, but treat these media like your “mini PR agencies” to constantly update and tell the world how you are doing in your business.

Second, set up a blog and tell the world what you do.  Although you don’t have control over the web page your company gives you, you have control over your own web site.  Use blogging not only to attract Internet traffic from search engines by SEO, but also to show your products and services, with photos and funny stories.  Those people having similar mindset as yours can get attracted to you, and maybe your business.

in just a few sentences and short span of time, you need to catch his or her attention and leave a good first impression. Perhaps he or she will want to hear from you again and become your customer, or develop a business relationship with you later.

That is called the elevator pitch, a little sales pitch in as short span of time as an elevator ride.

When people ask me such questions, I normally answer “I’m an Internet business developer”, “I run a few dot com web sites”, “My main business is web hosting”, “I operate an education portal” and the like.

Non-technical people may reply, “Oh I see. So you design web sites!” Sometimes I just said, “Something like that lah!”, although I’m not a web designer. But it seems this is more understandable to many people.

Anyway, I have failed to explain and failed to impress them. Lost opportunities

So now I need to think of a better pitch. Do you think these are a little better?

• To business and finance people – “I develop Internet businesses that generate positive cash flow within 6 months for its owners”
• To non-technical people – “I build businesses that operate on the Internet. Learning to earn money in my pyjamas” :-)
• To bosses, sales and marketing people – “I sell products and services on the Internet using the latest technologies”
• To technical people – “I develop dot com web sites with PHP and MySQL”
• To hosting customers – “I provide you a platform to put up your web site and email accounts on the Internet”
• To people in education industry – “I do a little match-making in the tuition industry. Are you interested to be matched?”
• To my mother who doesn’t know what I’m doing – “As you can see, I sit in front of computer everyday to earn money!”

How about you? What is your elevator pitch? Feel free to introduce yourself!

But obviously I have been left behind after so many years, that now you can no longer find me when you type the phrase above in Google. Yes, the competition has caught up. But to my fault, I have remained stagnant and didn’t keep up with the changes

Anyway, now I consider myself a newbie “reborn” on the Internet and will try to catch up as much as I can. Found this blog post from E-Myth, a very good introduction to search engine optimization (SEO) for web sites.

It introduces you how search engines work (you need to understand them to be able to optimize your sites for them), and what you can do to increase your chance of being ranked highly on search engine result pages.

It’s basic yet very important. Lots of web sites still fail to heed the advice. So check it out!

PS: By the way, I no longer position myself as an “Internet marketing expert”, simply because I am not. Even if I am one day, why should I tell the world?  I can use the skills only for my businesses, and projects which I really have a heart for, including some non-profit and community projects I already have in mind…

I knew Kenneth three years ago when both Kenneth and I were called to a meeting by a common customer to advise him on Internet business.

It’s good to catch up with him again. Kenneth has been an e-commerce consultant and Internet marketer.  Impressed by projects done for clients and ideas inspired by him.  The web sites are showing among the very top in search engine result pages!

I feel grateful to have listened to his presentation, though many ideas are not new.  There are a few facts and interesting points that I cannot agree more:

• 80% of companies in Malaysia are still not using the Internet to promote their brands!
• There are many well-known brands in Malaysia.  But amazingly you can’t find them on the first page in search engine result pages.
• Digital branding online does not need to be expensive.  In fact it could be much cheaper than offline brand building.  Branding using YouTube is an example.
• Your web designers can develop a beautiful web site, but may not be the right person to be your branding and marketing consultant.  You won’t hire an IT person to do marketing, will you?
• Many people are worried about payment and security issues on the Internet.  But when they come to buying air tickets from AirAsia online, there is no problem! Why?

Yes I think businesses are under-utilizing the Internet to do branding online.  What are they still waiting for?  Internet is not just a channel to reach customers, but is a market battlefield nowadays!

Besides the more technical aspects, I wish I could learn more about the more business aspect of building brands online, such as what brand image and personality to take relative to competitors.

Digital branding leads to me to think of how we as individuals and bloggers can brand ourselves on the Internet or in the blogosphere.

Kenneth took on the brand of being an “e-commerce doctor”.  Hanzo Ng poses as “sales ninja”.  Shall I become a “monkey blogger”?   How about you?