Building A Strong Online Presence

If you’re working with a new client who doesn’t have any following online, it is important to consider how you go about starting to build up a presence so that you can successfully sell a product or service using SEO.

As social media proliferates, obviously there is more and more good information out there. So you start off with building a powerful persona. You have to develop a person worth hearing and worth watching. I’m fairly fortunate, I have written books and I speak to about 100,000 people a year around the world, so there are a fair amount of people who follow me.

But having said that, my first book, when I first started this business, I had no clients either and there are now a lot of people getting into this business and are building a following. The thing to remember when you are getting into this business, there are two camps in this. There’s my camp which is the right one and there’s the other camp. The other camp says numbers of following matters because social media is a numbers game. That’s a very old school mentality.

That’s the sort of antiquated television sales mentality of listen, we have a million viewers. Well a million viewers don’t mean anything. You’ve got Ashton Kutcher, these celebrities who have a million viewers, Oprah who has a million following her on Twitter and it really has no impact. People don’t pay attention, there is no mind share.

What really matters is not the number of followers, it’s the number of followers who interact with you and who do something as a result of their engagement with you. So they retweet you, they actually have an ongoing conversation with you, they recommend what you recommend, they see you as an aggregator for information out there.

When I have a new client, we start out by building a persona for them. We start out by saying, ok, what makes you compelling and interesting? What can we do, how do you need to show up all of the time in order to be that consistent, personal brand that people have to see, in order to connect with you.

Social media is in many ways a one on one game. You’re building a personal brand because it has a voice. Even if you’re the voice of a large company, that voice has to be consistent, it has to be specific and it has to be planned. Specific, consistent and planned is a very big important point when it comes to SEO knowledge.

You start out by developing a persona, something that people would be interested in listening to and hearing from. It doesn’t matter what your audience is. I’m not saying you have to go out and be over the top and crazy and all those things, but what I am saying is, you have to be very consistent about it.

You have to be whoever your consumer expects to see in your position. They’re looking for the most knowledgeable, interesting expert they can find and that’s the person they’re going to follow. It’s being consistent, it’s creating this persona and then it’s putting out that killer information, the category killer information, the information that’s going to bowl people over, get them very interested in what you have to say and coming back for more. You have to do that too.

The interesting thing is, this does not happen overnight. When it does, it’s a fluke, it’s a mistake. People build trust over time, rarely do they build trust overnight. You have to provide them with enough information that’s compelling, that brings them back, so that they have time to build trust with you, so that they then can engage in the conversation, so they can then buy from you. If you want to learn more, contact an SEO specialist today.

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