Life strategy? One life, Live it.

When you ask your friends if they have created a life strategy for the next week, month, year, five or even ten years - over 90% will answer No! or should I?

Yes, we should. Some of us create to-do lists, (I prefer to make not-to-do lists), other are permanently writing “business-in-recession” strategies, but do we share our life strategies? Rarely. Are you interested to prepare a life strategy, If you knew how to?

We share those mumble-grumble social network status updates that “it was a great weekend, but now it’s Monday again and I have to wait 340 more days for my next vacation“… but there is no time to think and commit to paper?

Most of my friends from the past have only shorter life horizons because it is difficult to them to look far into the future and predict an outcome.
We didn’t learned why it’s important to create a life strategy at school. It was only “I want it all and I want it now”, or “I’ll be happy if I can afford a beer tomorrow” Carpe Diem, live in the moment - spontaneous, natural and keep rolling?

Well my friends, I don’t agree. Well-being is the way you want it to be. We should be open to all possibilities and not overlook new opportunities, but how you will know WHAT’s a new opportunity if you don’t know where you are going?

A life without a strategy is like a ship without a target and reason. Your canoe will definitely sail you somewhere, but where you end up may not be where you really want to go. Or the most important part is to live every moment as though the whole world were watching?

Life strategy is not about a boxed career, income, buying a house, getting married, having kids or being a self-reliance, financial self-sufficient entrepreneur, retired as multi-millionaire at 60. It’s about the big idea, HOW to achieve the desired level of freedom, relationships, income, business, emotional and spiritual intelligence, etc.

I’m happy that most of my current friends and contacts have a life strategy, they can share it with a Tim Ferris’ DreamLine or Richard Koch’s ActionPlan in 10 minutes  and that we can compare our progress, meet for monthly happiness plan brainstorms and and we can shorten the horizon to our goals together.

Do I have one, yes, I wrote one, called Clouds (abstract, but solid foundation of clear life-goals) when I was 15-17 and it’s continually tuned every day, with every new knowledge and experience, tweaked for perfect outcome. Clearly, developing and sharing a life strategy makes a lot of sense and can be useful to all of us, which want to find something to be happy about.

Why? Because we can feel unlimited where we stand, to know that anything that we desire can be ours, that we are eager and full of life, free and fun and easy. Let’s challange our perception of personal limits and don’t let our dreams stay dreams.

Here are 10 highlights from my mid-2009 life strategy update:

In the second half of 2009 I will:

• Move from doing most of the things to what I do best and let others do the rest. (I can’t be expert on 80 things, just on 20
• Leap-frog my top5 direct competitors in the next 6 months, building and top positioning global brands with higher quality at 70% of the price.
• Increase the quality and reduce the quantity of my relationships and friend-lists by at least 30% for 6 months.
• Decrease compromising my integrity for anything or anybody to 10%.
• Decrease the communication and social noice by 60% more in 3 months.
• Say NO politely but immediately 20% more often.
• Stop expending energy on peripheral issues that cannot yield a payoff no matter the outcome.
• I’ll use pure strenghts and truth instead of trying to make true that which I love or I am weak at.
• Use free will and energy to go ahead and uphill, day after day
• Stop wasting time talking about my plans to others. Give you only 2 minutes to say what you have to say quickly and simply - then we probably stop talk/ chat? Zipping the lip.

We have all the time on this planet, but without Destination, Route and Actions, we are going nowhere.  Success is our own damn fault. So work less, succeed more, enjoy more, be more strategy-focused, less tactic-focused,  and let me know what you think.

The Revolution starts on 1st of July. You are Vellycomed to join.

What's your opinion?

Go global with InterNations

Sofia goes global

Last month we had our first InterNations global event in Sofia. Thank you all for coming and making the get-together salutary, rich and interesting.

I hope to turn it in a bimonthly tradition, as most of you requested. We are preparing presentations and live jazz for the next time. We will be around 60 people. Any suggestions for time, place and focus are welcomed.

InterNations is the first online community for people who live and work abroad, reaching out to the international community: diplomats, members of IGOs and NGOs, foreign correspondents, expatriates employed by multinational companies and their family members. We also cater to the interests of local residents with strong ties to this community (e.g. journalists). While our network is represented by more than 260 local communities, membership is strictly invitation-based: you may join after receiving an invitation from a current member. In this way, InterNations will remain a network of personal trust, where data security and privacy protection are top priorities.

If you want to meet other global minds, stay in touch with international friends and receive advice from expats, let me know and I will send you a personal invitation to InterNations. Wish you a great day, see you again in mid July.

Dear friends in Sofia,

We are very pleased to announce Vellyslav Petrov as the InterNations Ambassador for the Sofia Community.
Vellyslav Petrov is a branding consultant, focused in corporate identities, web solutions and brand strategies for moving local and global brands to the top. His favorite activity is helping companies to grow faster and reach the top through digital marketing. Vellyslav is recognized for extensive knowledge of global web market trends and high-end web solutions, improving user experience, global visibility and brand popularity through design & technology.

As the InterNations Ambassador, Vellyslav is your on-site contact in your city. He will look after the local Guide, moderate the Town Talk forum, organize “real-life” events in Sofia and take care of the community in general. At our InterNations events, you can meet your online friends face-to-face and get to know each other better.

All the best from Munich, the InterNations Team

What's your opinion?

Late start to tell you a story?

I will tell you a story about the highest, poorest and most beautiful land of our Planet. A story in colors, fresh images, high-definition video and original music, which I brought from my last month’s visit to Nepal and the Himalayas. Is it created for the SlideShare’s Tell A Story Contest ? Yes and no, but you can still vote for it, if you like it. Once upon a time on the long way to the top of the world…

What's your opinion?

Brand name & Google ranking

Corn Brand wars (1340) proof

Choosing a name for your business, domain and brand is often the single, most critical decision you will ever make. Today it’s very easy to asses a solid, long-lasting, and highly profitable name. Can your brand name hook the brains in your niche? Yes, we all know that it should be intuitive, suggestive, benefit based, semantically short, easy spelled, memorable, sweet sounding, scalable and search-engine-friendly, so you will have a chance to hook them on mnemonics. Now what?

Before and after the launch of Google’s Chrome browser, more and more people love to skip irrelevant search engine results and attempt to reach websites directly by:
- Guessing and typing presumable URL domains
- Typing common brand names
- Using the search phrase suggestion tools in their browser
- Using search trends and social media “hot trends” tools
- Following links on web 2.0 status updates, social and RSS feeds

Sure, over 80% of the traffic still comes from the search engines (presuming the website is search-engine-friendly and optimized) and the first 3 SERP results still get 86% of the traffic for any given phrase, but this trend will change and we do see dozens of exceptions to this rule in our web reports already.

Google’s latest search engine ranking algorithm places Heavy emphasis on Branding, an enormous weight on branded search results. The top in most of our customer’s web analytics reports start with brand names, good brand names, burned, branded and tattooed into the customer’s mind, even in the marketplace.

SEO is not simple as the Florida update anymore. We notice more then 5 changes in Google ranking algorithm every single week. Smart brand’s CEOs and SEOs should incorporate the BRAND as the highest “trustful-content” factor and there are increasingly important signals from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his recent talk:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem, brands are how you sort out the cesspool, brands are not getting away, it must have a genetic component” he said.

If you love researching and reverse engineering (as I do) you can track the recent changes with hot phrases to see Google’s changes. In most of the cases brands have 7 to 9 of the first page search results for some of the most valuable keywords.

The trend is clear:  Google is promoting brands for big money core keyphrases. Further more Google’s Chrome tracks your behavior and content interaction through Google Accounts/Friends, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google DoubleClick/  AdWords, Google Reader, iGoogle, Feedburner, Youtube and other Giant’s channels.

Lately I see hundreds of URLs and company names, which are even hard to spell. If a customer doesn’t  agree on a name/ domain/ identity change, we reject branding or SEO services, due to poor results. It’s not necessary to start your name with a strong-sounding consonants (like the sounds of “D” and “T” in DECART), or set a song-singing rhyme in a combination of suggestive words like in “BrandBuild”, but it helps to emphasis, remember, get huge market and web authority.

The web is a vast wilderness in which your brand message can run in obscurity, so don’t work IN your business every day, work ON your brand equity and awareness and we will see us each other on the top.

What's your opinion?

Web Marketing Consultant

Wow, thank you very much for the great interest and the 340 CVs in our last top talent recruitment HR folder, but I should be clear here - we will pick only professional web marketers, who can backup their claims with observable results on the web - case studies, high-quality content, solved problems, top-ranked websites or reputable service.

Glad that you want to start a new hobby, a new digital branding career, but if you start at ground zero, there is a great chance to fail. Despite your skills and background, you will be overwhelmed with paralyzing volumes of information and digital marketing courses. Even following our blueprint, your lack of digital marketing basics will eat your time and focus.

Sure, persistence, good communication and writing style are one of the most important skills, but consulting and building successful online businesses is not equal to blasting emails, answering phone-calls and organizing cocktails. How about video, presentation or web analytics skills?

It takes years before one knows how to build successful online businesses. We just don’t have the time to spend months learning how all this works and you have bills to pay, right? Same here. Building a solid brand, successful online business or global top rankings in Google takes months and years. We look for this experience in every team-member and partner.

If you still believe you are the one, even overqualified! one, or you are an overnight-web-success-exception to all above (yes, we got few ones), please give us a call. Thank you again and hope to see you at the top!

What's your opinion?

The first-mover advantage

First Mover Advantage

Branding is not a buzzword, but the foundation for sales and success in the recent economy situation. It doesn’t matter if you are a reputable dinosaur or a brand new startup - the initial occupant of a market niche always gains the first-mover advantage.

A better product will simply sell faster. Hence, it’s not only the product or service to be sold.

A brand is the collection of feelings, perceptions, quality, image, lifestyle, delivered guarantee and global status. If you can not convince the potential customers that your product is worth, no amount of advertising, packaging or PR will help you achieve your sales goals.Your brand and customer’s mind share is the most valuable competitive edge you have, because today there is nothing that your competitors can’t duplicate in a matter of days or weeks. Creating a strong brand identity will build that mind share. Someday when you have your rock-solid identity, customers even will think of your brand first when they think of the product category.

First-mover advantage

Web strategists often talk about the first-mover advantage or FMA. In terms of brand development, by “first-mover” they mean that it is possible for the first successful brand in a market to create, move and retain a clear positioning in the minds of target customers before the competition enters the market. The first entrant can gain control of resources that followers may not be able to match. However, being first into a market does not necessarily guarantee long-term success. Competitors, drawn to the high growth and profit potential demonstrated by the “market-mover” - will enter the same niche and copy the best elements of the leader’s brand.

In the recent economic situation, first-mover advantages can arise from
1. Innovative technological breakthrough and leadership (R&D), protect it through patents or keep them as trade secrets!
2. Preemption of scarce assets (select the most attractive niches, take strategic actions, establish positions in geographic or product space)
3. Switching costs and buyer choice under uncertainty (achieve consumer trial and define the attributes that are perceived as important within your category)

Enjoy many of the characteristics of the first-mover-advantage brand, such as:
- name/brand is synonymous with the category.
- customers entering the market are more prone to default to the major player, because it is the sole entity of their business
- continues to add plans and options to your customers.

- add some free oprions for members, improve and add to their successful business, but don’t become a victim of the First Mover Disadvantages like inertia and trend-blindness!

Digital Branding

As Howard Kosgrove says, “A brand is the one thing that you can own that nobody can take away from you. Everything else, they can steal. But your brand can go on and live. It creates a lasting value above and beyond all the other elements of your business.”

Today we have billions people online and no brand is going to appeal to all of them. That’s just great and help us target our prospects in a personal manner, they even create our brand on their own. If we have the right strategy, they position accept a good position in their mind. The value is called brand equity and it really can be quantified. Businesses that build their brand online have an advantage over brands in the physical world since the opportunity to start freehand new associations - if you are fresh and new, you have a clean slate.

As a brandmover, branding new unique products are my favorite projects, since a fresh start moves easier when all brand ingredients are mixed precisely:

name, identity, benefits, price, quality (which brings loyalty), long-term perspective (instead of short-term profitability), communications, positioning, distribution, media and online presence, recognition and the results of a successful branding and top positioning campaign: increased share of market, loyalty, brand awareness and reputation

How we do that?

1. We prepare a great brand message - focused promise, backed with support and relevant to our customer’s lifestyle
2. We spread and share it on our website, direct campaigns, web 2.0 networks, blogs, tuning our digital assets for the top
3. Relevance of the message and the top positions in Google make our prospect to decide which brand they will buy and which will discard.

Research confirms that, statistically, higher quality brands achieve a higher market share and higher profitability that their inferior competitors.
Focus to build a powerful perception of our brand’s quality and value is what we need. Strong brands have a clear, often unique position in the target market.

Financial and economical recession? Yes, indeed. That’s where branding, SEO for Google top positioning and repositioning helps your business to stay and sell at top performance.
See you at the top,
yours BrandMover

What's your opinion?

See you at the top

This month I jumped in a great adventure, which I dreamed years ago.
Visiting one of my SEO and Google top positioning customers in Kathmandu, I discovered Nepal - the highest country, Buddha’s birthplace and best destination for mountaineering, adventurous trekking, rafting, wildlife jungle safaris, cultural and mystical tours and even golf. With a diverse population of more than 57 ethnic groups, 6500 species of plants, over 800 species of birds, and history, starting with the Kiratis 2800 years ago, today Nepal has an awesome nature, fragile economy, extreme poverty and illiteracy and an ethnically fragmented population, growing at a frightening rate.

I didn’t managed to shoot how the Mediterranean see met the Tibetan plateau when the Indo-Australian plate collided with the Eurasian continent to form the earth’s buckle Himalayas 60 million years ago, but I did manage to get thousands of great pictures and videos from the top of the world. From paddy fields with bamboo, mango forests and palms, through the tropical jungle, used as safeguard against possible invasion by the British (you can still see the rhinos, tigers and elephants in the Chitwan national park’s jungle) through the hills, where the large mountain ape gigantopithecus (my brother Yeti) was roaming half a million years ago, to the countless Himalaya snowy peaks and ranges…the soul for the Sherpas.

The Khumbu region, which was opened in the 1950s for trekking, is awesome. You can trek only with a daypack and spend over a month there with a relatively tight budget. A great holiday of fresh air, breath-taking views, great people and culture on the trail. In 1964 only 14 foreigners visited the region. Today they are over 25000.  Independent teahouse trekking is the most flexible, free and economical way to enjoy the mountain. You can stop or rush whenever you like. One of the great joys is that you meet common-minded people everywhere on the trek - at the airport, hotel, bus, lodge, on the trail. Another great experience is to mingle with the locals for a culture-rich and colorful adventure.

When I get a chance, I will publish my notes about the Nepal kingdom’s adventure as a rich-illustrated PDF.
Meanwhile check my HD video about the great world beyond laptop and iphone horizons and the Nepali-inspired music with western instruments, recorded in my studio back home.

Himalaya Spring - trekking in the Everest region

Instead of altitude sickness, I got altitude addiction.
So, keep brandmoving and we will see us at the top!
(both on Google and Everest)

What's your opinion?

Perfect time and place to buy?

Price trend for 60 days

These days I get trend alerts for services and products with over 520% price deviation! (my last booked fare moved from $650 to $3420 and back to $870 in just 2 months).

Today we can track service prices and scan product barcodes at the store, choosing the perfect time and source to get what we are looking for. Awesome, isn’t it? Same product, same quality, 526% price amplitude ? Welcome to 2009!

Name it as you want it  - crisis, shaking demand or branding wars…

What's your opinion?

A brand new PC for €100?

Do you remember your first 1MB SIMM memory, which you got for $100? Yeah, it was around 1992.

A new PC for €100

Yesterday, while asking a friend supplier for a small web server component, I found a mini treasure with the new dual core Intel Atom onboard.

Interested in what Intel D945GCLF2 is capable of, I got one and it turned in my first PC under 100 euro!

It’s much faster than we need it for the new on-demand web service processing box.

97 euros dealer's pack

Well, I agree that most of you will need a full-featured netbook with financial analysis processing power, but that’s not the current case (although you get 14.8 score for Business Winstone) and 5x faster MP3 and video encoding!

Others may say that it’s a bulk recession-friendly piece of hardware, but actually it’s more than most of us currently use in our daily work:

• 1 x Soldered Dual Core Intel Atom 1.6GHz 45nm processor
• 1GB DDR2 up to 2GB
• Intel 945GC chipset: 82945GC on the Northbridge, 82801GB ICH7 on the Southbridge
• GMA 950 integrated graphics
• S-Video output with HDTV encoder
• RealTek ALC662 codec with HDA and 6 channel audio
• SPDIFF header on motherboard
• 1x PCI slot, 8 USB2.0 ports, 1 x IDE, 2 x SATA2,
• 1 x VGA, 1 LPT, 1 RS232, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
• Rapid BIOS boot, Express BIOS Update
• 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet, wake on USB, PCI, PS/2, Lan
• Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows XP Home and Pro, 32/64 bit support

…although my new industrial friend boots Linux from a USB flash…

the IOs

All of that on a 17×17x3cm board with a maximum total power draw of 8W! Let’s see how it will perform in the web services controller.

Wow, that was a sunny and eco-friendly Sunday! Cheers and see you at the Room full for Mirrors movie tonight

What's your opinion?

SEO analysis & the Enterprise

SEO Analysis for the Enterprise

If we do a quick comparison of the last 3 enterprise SEO analysis reports, they all share the same onpage/ offpage problems:

• Mature and huge brands with rarely noted websites, scattered on 3-4 “fresh” domains on foreign servers;
• FRAME-based! corporate websites with zero URL visibility or rewriting;
• Thousands of products, hidden in ZERO crawl-rate framed pages and MISSING /duplicated metadata;
• Missing lead capturing system or CRM – 30% of the “requests” were found in the spam folders;
• Extremely low traffic, measured in raw log files, full of unfiltered dummy robot and spam visits;
• Corporate focus and business sectors are presented NOwhere, industrial slang EVERYwhere;
• Hundreds of “keywords”, stiffed on the homepage, leading to 0.4 -0.7% keyword density;
• Poor navigation, structure, internal linking, MERE external linking;
• Bad server response codes, HUNDREDS of bad crappy neighbor websites on the same shared IP?!;
• Less than 60% indexed content by Google. Yahoo and Live are doing better!?
• ZERO ranking for the 5 top priority phrases in ALL search engines;
• Top5 ranking (by a “SEO expert”) for a few phrases, which NOone searched in the last 3 months;
• Poor URL mentions in the search engines, some non-relevant poor quality links in local FFA directories;
• DMOZ and Yahoo virgin, ZERO blog links or bookmarks, mere brand reputation and web2.0/social media backlinks;
• Alexa…

I will skip the next 17 pages…

The fun part is that in the end of the day we won the SEO tender NOT with a statistically proved triple conversion and double sales increase strategy, but with the “sense that the consultants know why we don’t like our website look-and-feel”

The moral? If the line of business don’t gets the SEO part, shoot the Usability, Customer experience or even the CRM part.
… and keep brandmoving. See ya at the top!

What's your opinion?