In this issue:

• Primary Tools for Brand Building
• Rental Real Estate uses Internet as Branding Extension
• Our "15 minutes" of Fame then a Google Slap-down
• Internet Ethics Workshop for Consultants and Coaches
• Someone You Should Know
  

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Nov - Dec - 2006 - January 2007 - Newsletter

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The Three Legs (tools) of Internet Brand Building

Your website is only one leg out of three, each of which is important to the Internet branding process. The other two legs are: 2) your work" on the ground" such as networking, press releases, radio advertising, television, interviews, writing articles, postcards, etc. and 3) your email list. How are you doing with your three pronged approach?

Developing the Internet Leg of a Branding Strategy:

The rental Real Estate industry has discovered that the Internet is a very useful extension to other branding efforts such as radio, newspaper and television advertising. In this situation websites are not usually the primary branding or marketing mechanism exception being the youth market.

Article: Multifamily Realtors See Benefits
of Branding in Driving Internet Sales

James T. Berger, our co-founder, writer and marketing maven has researched this real estate web branding phenomenon and has written about in a new article:

"Smart Realtors are increasingly seeing the value of branding to create an image for properties that are translatable to other properties they own. A by-product of the branding strategy is to drive prospective tenants to company Websites where the website applications perform many tasks that individual rental agents previously had to perform." The remainder of the article is on our site: Realestate rentals & internet branding

So Fleeting, that Fame and Fortune. . .
Our "15 minutes" of Google Mania

As many of you know, Dan Williams and I redesigned our site, http://websiterevamp.org from the ground up during the Summer and Fall of last year. We did many things differently from previous sites we've developed, appearances aside. During the redesign we used little of conventional search engine optimization techniques. So, one thing we hadn't directly aimed at was advancing our standing in Google and Yahoo.

Sixty days after the website changeover I was quite surprised to find we were on page one of Google and Yahoo for the phrase Chicago website redesign. Before that, the highest we'd been was page 8.

Wonderful!

I never expected to be much better than page 6 or 8 because while we had made radical changes, we hadn't done much search engine "fine tuning" and needless to say, the competition is extremely fierce! (Just checked again today and websiterevamp.org is not just on page 1 but #1 on Google, Yahoo and MSN for the keyword phrase Chicago website redesign; those three search engines cover about 90% of all searches made)

Bigger Fish Pond

In October I decided to see how we were doing against world-wide competition for that same phrase without the "Chicago" part of it, just plain website redesign. We were on page three of Google. Considering there are over 15 million competiting pages, many of them from other web development firms, I was astounded! (I shouldn't have been, we are pretty good at this kind of stuff and a year ago I declared that conventional optimization techniques are dead anyhow. This just seems to prove it.)

I watched over the engines the next couple of months as our site kept creeping up in the rankings until two months ago we arrived on page one of both Google and Yahoo. Recently we began a good showing on MSN as well.

Fleeting Fame

A week ago, while working during the wee hours I made a configuration mistake which kept the site invisible for 2 days. Wham! A slap-down by Google who had been indexing the site on a daily basis. Our site disappeared from page 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. . . . couldn't be found. Panic set in. I checked Yahoo and we were still on page one but a couple days later it too played the disappearing act. Meanwhile, site traffic which had been from 5 to 50 visitors at any given time dropped to zero. The phone stopped ringing.

Reprieve?

It's been a week now since the site went back up and apparently the search engines are indexing it again because today it showed once again on Google page one. In another week it should be up again in Yahoo and maybe someday MSN will admit it belongs on it's first page ;-) We thank our good friends at Westhost web hosting for helping solve the disappearing site problem.

Internet Ethics Workshop
for Consultants and Coaches

On Feb. 9th, 2007, Crystal Jurczynski and William Stocking CMC of IMC Chicago will be chairing a workshop roundtable on the topic of Internet Ethical Issues for Consultants and Coaches.

The Internet has generated many ethical gray areas that as consultants and coaches we need to deal with at one time or another. Areas such as:

• What is considered "fair usage" on the Internet?
• What Internet research data can you legally post on a website?
• Is "reverse engineering" a competitor's search engine ranking legal?

You have a newsletter that you'd like to announce to the 1,200 members of a professional group you belong to. What's the ethical way to do that?

Additional information and registration for the workshop:

http://www.imc-chicagoland.org/meetings.htm

This IMC workshop roundtable precedes our Websiterevamp February and March online conference call sessions on the same topic. Times and dates to be announced.

Someone You Should Know

I've known Rosemary Walters, a Chicago area marketing consultant, for years and she has often been an inspiration to me. Rosemary has a monthly marketing newsletter you should look into: Rosemary Walter's Newsletters and articles.

Unabashed Self Promotion

We've been very busy. Since our last newsletter Websiterevamp has launched three new or totally redesigned websites. Unhappy with with results from your site? Talk with us. Perhaps we can help you find success as we have helped so many others. See "Do You Have a Do-Little Website?"
http://www.websiterevamp.org/articles/internet_marketing/do-little_websites.shtml
 

Plants are budding everywhere - the specter of massive heating bills is over - Now all we need to do is try to avoid large cooling bills!

Best Regards,

Bill Stocking

See earlier newsletters:

http://www.websiterevamp.org/the_news/internet_e-mail_newsletters.shtml

2006©William R. Stocking
All Rights Reserved
If you wish to reprint this article or pass it on to someone else we ask you to use the whole article, unaltered.

William R. Stocking CMC* is a Founder and Director of http://www.websiterevamp.Org. He isn't a new-comer to the Internet; Bill has been involved in the design, re-design and deployment of websites since 1996. How many? He's lost count. Bill is also the author of over 80 magazine and newspaper articles on small business technology.

*CMC (Certified Management Consultant) is the certification mark awarded by the Institute of Management Consultants USA and represents evidence of the highest standards of consulting and adherence to the ethical canons of the profession. Fewer than 1% of all consultants have achieved this level of performance.