Yesterday, I finally made a decision to start this series, by discussing the 4P’s of Marketing.  Why didn’t we do this before, you ask?  Simple answer is, we just weren’t ready.  We were trying to match our message with our target customers, which is easier said than done.  Our internal debate is over, we now know what to call the book, which customers to target, and how we want to differentiate ourself.   This background work is often the most ignored and most important marketing task, and it is called strategic positioning.  Some times it can take months or years to get it right, but if you don’t get this part right, you will get everything else wrong.

By the end of this blog, you will understand who your target customer’s are, how to find them, and who you want to be known as to them? Wow all that, after reading one blog article?

To make the process simple, we have to answer simple questions. So that is why we are focused on eSuccess, a wholistic approach to your blogging, marketing, website and search marketing. The key to your success is the right keywords it takes a long time to figure that out thought. And finding the right keywords is the “secret” to your eSuccess.

The world Secret is so over used right now, It is a bit controversial and successful at the same time. So a part of us wants to take advantage of this new world created by it. But, the other part wants to be original, and use the word “Key”, as that is more us. So we will be us, and you be you. But we do like to unveil the industries hidden secrets, not to mention, we love the Movie. knowing the secret keywords is not enough, you have to blog about them every day or as often as you can. What? The secret to your eSuccess is as easy as blogging? Well yes, but I have to spend a lot of hours explaining this to you in detail, with specific examples, and show you the results of why it is so. Otherwise, you won’t believe me, will you?

Than and only than, your pragmatic side, will understand the world of Search Marketing. It’s too bad, that you can’t buy the DVD yet, we actuallly started it already on “The Secret Key to your eSuccess”. Yes we did, but it’s not hollywood style and not-dramatic enough, yet. Till than, you are stuck with stupid looking text, no famous actors, no music, and no dramatic productions. But you might tell all of your friends and invite them to blog on MyTypes.com if our Key helps, you, and it will. And maybe, just maybe, our specific advice will help you promote your business and gain more customers? It will, if you do some basic easy work.

It’s all in a word as they say, “Secrets” or “Key”, or “Naam-Hindu for God and Om” and “Jesus”, “Allah”, and “Jew”, these words mean so much. The Keyword we choose is as important as the business online, keywords or words you choose to target for your business are everything. That is what the search engines will define you as. That is why it is the key to your eSuccess, eMarketing, SEO, and search marketing.

Why do large companies and smart people usually get to the top, not just the top of the search engines? The successful people understand strategic direction, they know who they are are, and they target the power of words.

To tie it back to this world of “The Secret”, it really is simple you have to use the keywords. And especially as the SEO industry is so secretive, it’s not that hard, they just want you to think it is. Isn’t that what techies do, they hold things a secret so that they can feel important, ouch–I really don’t like that. Everything you do in search marketing and eMarketing, and eSuccess has to do with the most appropriate keywords for your business. Believe it or not, all blogging platforms not just ours are your #1 SEO tool. You never thought it was that easy, hunh, well check out any great SEO they will have a blog won’t they? imagine that, all this for a 4 letter word.

So what are the proper keywords for your business? This process of fully understanding the remification of all aspects of your business target customer and their searches is called key word analysis within search marketing. Can you believe some companies charge up to hundreds of dollars for doing this for you, and/or sell you expensive software tools that are free to most SEO search marketing firms by Google, Overture, Yahoo etc.

It isn’t enough to know your keywords, but you also have to know their search volume traffic by Google. Yes, Google, and only Google at this point. Sorry MSN Live, and the other search people, you are not driving the new economy yet. Google is the search marketing king, please don’t waste your Search marketing dollars on most SEO Tools, if they are not free don’t use them. Also, don’t do any thing, well spend money on a SEO company, or Search Marketing Agency or Search Marketing Firm, until you are done with this series. Simply said, MSN, Yahoo, and all others just don’t have the traffic and web tools for the market research right now. If you are in the midst of making a SEO company decision email me, and I will give you my 2 cents object advice. I am trying to be a third party analyst on giving people objective advice on Search Marketing Firms. Therefore, I will write about them quite often in a blog.

So after the proper “Keywords, or Keyword”, you will need to focus on competition of advertisers and their search results. The secret unveiled of right keywords is not just not enough, as you already know, it is hard work getting to the mountain top. So if you expect it to be super easy, you may go home now. But, we do make it as easy as blogging. The key is you have to do it every day, and promote your blog, and write with real important content of proper keywords. You may have to work less if you use MyTypes.com blogging platform. Because we do a lot of this for you.

Sorry, but I had to cut this article in half, 4 more paragraph had to move to part 2. So to summarize, you need to find the proper keywords for your business and do a keyword analysis. Remember, if you don’t plan for your eSuccess and develop a plan, you won’t be successful. I heard this from Anthony Robbins back in 1992-3, in Minnesota. If you don’t plan for your success, you plan to fail. So the first thing in your plan for eSuccess is a keyword analysis. Come back tomorrow and we will go in to it in detail. If you want to get ahead go read up on it at our SEO tools area at LinkMint.com.

This post maybe all you need to know about marketing, well maybe not, but it is a great primer. Most people don’t know the basics of marketing, we not only provide you that, but here we go further. We might give you better than a marketing MBA. Because we cover the most ignored principal of marketing, the 5th P. Having made millions with my marketing skills and entrepreneurship, I have not only been a student of marketing, but an enthusiast.

All of these the major topics of modern day will be covered in the book. Are you feeling the theme of the new book yet “Secrets to eSuccess: blogs, social, and search marketing”?

A few of my friends/advisers have Stanford MBA’s, and a conservative one with a Harvard MBA.  They all agree that SEO and search marketing are a must for any business in todays market.  As you already know, we cover a lot of these topics in our blogs, but something was missing, a holistic Marketing approach. So we decided to take a step back and provide the basics.

If some of you were lucky, smart or blessed enough to study marketing in college you certainly know about the 4 P’s of marketing. I have been talking about these 4 p’s for 7 years now. The 5th P, I will tell you in a second, and you will agree it is the most important. Marketing is not just about public relations or advertising, as most people assume. It’s a complex world of strategic positioning, product strategy, product development, product management, and public relations and advertising. Advertising, public relations and sales are really one of the lagging parts, though very important. The most important lessons of marketing was from Anthony Robbins, yes Tony, the great motivational speaker. He talked about the VALS research from Stanford, and profiling different types of people, but most marketing people don’t emphasize the 5th P principles.

The 5th P does not stand for “Process” as an MBA in Marketing from the U. of Washington in Seattle told me.  I can’t believe that is what they taught there at U. of W. U Dub is a great school, but folks, process is just a process. So here are the 4 P’s and the 5th will be discussed in detail below:

1. Product; if you don’t have a product, you don’t have anything. A product can also be a service so for sake of simplicity we will bundle them.

2. Price; if you can’t make money selling your product, should you sell it? Or go back to the drawing table, Well you know the answer right?

3. Place; needs more clarification, it’s where you will sell the product, retail, online, jewelry parties, it’s the sales channel.

4. Promotion; this is the world of public relations, advertising, and call to action sales materials, search marketing etc. etc. For those of you who study marketing you may already know that eMarketing tools is the fastest growing segment of technology. This is from a recent Gartner report, of July 2007 on marketing automation.

Without, any further a due, the drum rolls rolling, the hearts beating, yes the claps, and church bells ringing.  Tadaha..It’s People, People, People, how can the marketing geniuses of the MBA’s forget to teach about “People, the 5th P”. Is process more important than people, no silly.  So what do yo need to know about People and marketing?

Forget about demographics, focus more on psycho-graphics, and get the data to back up your strategy. It’s the art of understanding not only who your customers are. The 5th P of marketing is all about people, you need to know everything about your customers, their profile is just a start. You need to know their likes, dislikes, passions, dreams and aspirations. Where are they going today? How much money are they spending on products that you sell, how much will they spend on them tomorrow?  VALS research covers types, that I can’t really forget. There will be more on this topic tomorrow, so we will call the series, “Secrets to eMarketing, Part 1-6″, we will start with Part 1. tomorrow.

I am surprised that most people don’t know about search marketing, but they should. They all know about Google, Yahoo, and MSN, right? That is why. I want to use the word “Secret” to your eSuccess.

The word Secret is over used a little lately, we do love the movie and didn’t want to play on it’s message. But the people in the Search Marketing world and SEO world are too secretive. The hidden secret is simple, but they want you to think it’s too technical, but it’s not, and it should be unveiled. It’s as easy as blogging with the right keywords every day.

Traditional marketing is not dead, but the new media of the Internet is not a pipe dream any more either. The biggest most powerful world of Internet marketing is not email, it’s not the web 2.0 social media marketing. If we were to keep it simple and stupid, it would be the Google effect. But, wait Live Search from Microsoft got a big leg up this week. Live signed deals with Digg.com and Facebook.com two of the top 5 leaders in the Social media giants of the internet.

The world of marketing has changed dramatically due to Google and other search engines.  Search engine optimization or Search Engine Marketing or Internet Marketing in that order are subset of each other. Because Google is the first to give the small business a chance by it’s adwords product. What adwords does is makes it easier for small business to buy keywords to market it’s products. And contextual ads being mapped to search results makes everyone happy.

Why? When a consumer is looking for information, and a search engine provides the info.  Regardless if it is an Ad or not, they help by providing the right information at the right time. People don’t want to be pushed advertisements down their throat. People prefer to look for information, we are all treasure hunters and want to find stuff. And this is where Google made the search results better and created this huge world of Search Marketing. In fact, according to SEMPO.org the industry size is suppose to be a $7.8Billion dollars. We are not a member of Sempo, but we support it’s mission. SEMPO Mission: SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it.

So how do you have eSuccess in search marketing results?  Search Engines want to provide the best contextual related results to consumers, so should you.  They target news related websites first, and blogs are considered news.  Blogs are considered news because, well you already know this, right? Each blog post has a time stamp on it. So for a blog to be found as a search result, it has to be written with the proper keywords that is searched for. But, how do you write unless you know the targeted keywords. Well, that is easy you have to go back to the Search engines and start with Search Marketing. So it’s a full circle, search engines provide that information in their keyword analysis tools. Which is the most important, but one of the many tools required for your eSuccess via Search marketing. The tool sets as a whole are referred to SEO and SEM tools. This is what the professionals use, and you as a small business can learn these too, especially for free SEO tools site called LinkMint.com

We are a commercial site, and actually built our own SEO Tools last year. I have been studying search marketing and SEO since 2003, and have been blogging since the same time. Why did I continue to blog, even though I had nothing to write.  Because I knew the secret that is easy to get over looked.  Blogging is the best way to SEO and search market for your products and services.  So this makes Blogging the best SEO tool on the market. And to do it right, you have to blog often and with the proper keywords.

That’s search marketing in a nut shell, but we will go a step further.  I will do a series starting next week.  I will cover many of the unknown secrets to SEO, SEM, and search marketing.  You notice, how I took out the word Internet out of it, I am changing the words because the word Internet is so passe.  Search, social, eSuccess, inspiration, empower, human element, and new media is, what it is all about:-). You like the Pic above, I want to pay for it and buy the rights to it for my hard copy book, what do you think?  Is it too unprofessional, too provocative, indicative of uncovering secrets and beautiful for marketing?

This is a great debate that started for me well before we started MyTypes.com blogging platform. If you don’t have a business, do you still need a website? Does a website address have to make it a website there? What is a website, and how is that different than a blog? Is a blog just a journal or can a blog website actually replace your website?

My answer is simple, yes, yes, and yes.

A blog is no longer just a journal, and a blog website is what you want. We recommend that you get a WordPress blog website on any URL that you choose. Well, and if you don’t need to waste your money on a URL, for non business reasons, don’t waste it. Get the blog website on MyTypes.com/”your name here” or on “yourname”.wordpress.com or “yourname”.blogspot.com. Why am I recommending our competitors here? Because they are the best, options and we are really here trying to help you.

So every website in the future should have a blogging system built in it, or every blog should have all the features a website should have. Every website should have the ability to build community and make the content easy to upload and add. Every business website, needs to do that. And, every business blog and blogging platform should be customizable to your brand.

Most importantly, every blog and website should be able to promote your content to your audience. And the content either business or not, for a non-profit cause, should be search engine optimized (SEO). Tomorrow’s topic will be Design, the most important aspect of your blog or website, where beauty meets ease of use.

**I am coming back to edit and re-read this post as I do this time to time with our blogs.  I wanted to add for people’s perspectives, that blogs will continue to be better for promoting your business as they will rank higher in the search engines.  This shift 7 months after the original post of this blog, I think blogs are starting to replace people’s websites, especially the wordpress blogging platform.  Also now that we are providing SEO services to our clients such as CRM and CRM Software, silver jewelry, and generally doing more SEO, we believe that all businesses should have blogs.

I have a confession to make, I don’t do photos as much as I would like. I love photos and blogs, and actually photography has been one of my favorite hobbies. Now with 2 kids, a mortgage, a few high tech ePeople to manage, who has time? I have been coaching and evangelizing blogging for a long time, but until last week I did not add photos to my blogs. That was a mistake, I want to help you avoid.

I think it’s important to write about photo blogging, and everything we can share to help us make our blogs more impactful. The problem, I use to believe was, well, I don’t really have a lot of photos, do you? Most people don’t know how they can use photos for their blogs. The biggest news I can tell you, Yes you can, and it’s easy.

Yes, you can Jazz up your blog with a photo or two. Here are some tips on jazzing up your blogs with Photos. I usually add at least 3 photos per blog now days, but back when I first wrote this blog, I only used one.

1. Do any Google search on “Free Photos” and you will find many small to big photo sites providing amazing photos you will love. My favorite is Sxc.hu, but Flickr is not bad as you have to ask individual permission, but just love the name, what can I say.

2. Every time you blog, spend at least 5-10 minutes looking and finding the best photo for your topic, make it a unique photo and beautiful.

3. Give credit where it’s due. Always give the website and the photographer if you can, credit by mentioning their name. Do it with your name of the photo saved as for example the photo above, has the website name in. I did that for them, they didn’t require it.
4. Be contextual, pick your photo on the blog topic. This will help with the search result and Google search marketing, and SEO. Be as descriptive as you can, but don’t over do it. Yes, that will actually have a positive effect and get your website ranked higher in the search engines too.

5. Use an Alt Tag, on every photo even your blog every time. But, What is it you say? You are right, that could be another post on it’s own. An Alt-tag describes the image for search engines so they can index it. It’s the same for a video blog too. Alt-tags use to be a big craze a few years ago for better search rankings, and SEO. Here is a few don’ts: Don’t stuff keywords, don’t upload huge files, don’t place weird or strange photos. Make them beautiful, as we are professional bloggers here:-0)>

I believe that photo and video blog sharing along with blogging are some of the top reasons for the success of the Internet. The Web 2.0 social networking world is full of blogs with colors, photos, videos, empowering the human network. Go blog your way to the top!

Honesty is usually a key to our Success, but sometimes it can get you in trouble? Or will it get always get you in to trouble by saying too much? Well, it depends, but as long as you are not thrashing someone/business defaming them, or yourself, you should be ok. Well, you might actually benefit, by having a loyal following.

Often, I am told by advisor’s, associates to not share certain things, and most of the time, I find that advice worthless. People can’t handle the truth, I am told. And, I am sure the uncomfortable truth is often best unheard:-). So how radically honest should you be, especially in business, blogging, and in your personal life? 

One of the my favorite books of all time is called “Radical Honesty”, and I try to be as honest as I am comfortable, which is usually above and beyond most people’s threshold. So what are the rules of honesty, and how should you follow them.

5 Rules to keep your Blog honest and be eSuccessful:

1. Do not defame or thrash anyone, even your enemies.

It only hurts you in the end, they might actually file a law suit against you, besides it’s just bad Karma? A lot of people might disagree with me. Hey, I totally understand you have a case, and I feel for your gripe. I have been defamed by jealous competitors and ruthless business people, at the end I am glad I did not defame or retaliate. I feel good about me taking the high road.

2. Only share as much as you are comfortable, as long as you are sane that is.

Don’t say too much or too little, but use your gut, intellect, and rational common sense.

3. If not sure, Ask someone else’s?

Before you publish your thoughts, your business insights, or anything, espcially if it is businesss related, ask someone. If you don’t have anyone to ask email us bcoach@mytypes.com
4. Make sure you don’t share any business secrets

Don’t share what you don’t own or private or business intellectual property that you do not own, that includes Confidential information, copyrighted material that belongs to others. We are a society of laws that protects the rights of others. I am shocked by the number of people that steal music and copyrighted materials, thinking they are above the law. If it’s not your’s don’t, if it is unintentional admit your mistake and move on, but asking your self the question “does someone else own this?” ahead of time will help you avoid pitfalls in the future.

5. Don’t share all of your feelings in a blog.

Do write them down, and or keep that post private on your blog. But, especially if you are a emotional person, well we all are. For business blogging and for your own safety, people often wish they had not shared their reaction. This includes pictures, videos, reviews, think about what you are putting on the web. If you really want to share it, do share it. But, if it is personal, be cautious.

At the start of this blog I wanted to share some private business information about MyTypes.com and Inc. I chose at the end not to share it, so give it a rest, maybe you will decide not to share something.