Caffeine ranking

Caffeine ranking

Yesterday was the first clear day in a month, clear and sunny enough to dream about snowy peaks, ski vacations, Christmas and presents… after the rain is gone, one can see clearly that we all are eager and busy to update our brand platforms, deeply immersed in Google Wave or Huddle’s tags-based collaboration. The localization of our branding platform in 4 new languages runs well, the last projects for 2009 are polished on a staging server.

Recently some clients of mine have been asking about Google changing the SEO game again, why all their linkbuilding efforts crashed, why strong on-page and off-page ranking factors are so messed and interwoven, why we optimized the websites of 3 direct competitors for top3, do we provide a top3 ranking guarantee – you got the idea.

Well, after the last month updates and Google Caffeine grabbing real-time results twice faster, chances are you are not top3 anymore, your competitors grab the most of the leads (don’t worry – they don’t). With only few organic results showing up above the fold of the browsers, recent changes at Google mean top3 rankings are more valuable than ever, and SEOs will have “few” more Christmas projects.

Crawling deeper, it means that we all need a brand new victory plan for 2010, a platform foundations upgrade, regardless whether to launch a new product, rebrand your company and emerge stronger.

So, get your brand moving again and grow on your global top5 ranking mission. Still I have to admit – there are some brand-building elements, where we have to forget about precise control and “the long-term healthy future” – it’s only the clear facts and the very moment of NOW which exists. The key metrics are still the same – Authority, fresh growing Content and relevant Anchor links. Website growth rate is getting very imporant, as well as organic brand growth.

How much of your time does it take, dear Mr. CBO? An hour to set up the platform, 3 hours to train the co-workers, an hour a day for writing, updates and monitoring, permanent linkbait and snippet links stacking /scultping. Brand-building is a process, not an event.

In the end of the day it gives us 3 sweet competitive advantages to outrank and outperform the competitors: top ranking, brand awareness in thousands of web channels and a brand-crisis proof shield.

So, don’t moan – act now! Fish where the fish are, in the muddy postcrisis waters. Only after that can we escape the “unable-to-stop” collective insanity, visiting dozens of global locations, collecting music, wisdom and tribal art, inspired and creative, full of fresh energy, as in the good old school days.

December is always full with tons of professional SEO webinars and seminars, so I’m looking forward to seeing you there or on our InterNations Christmas party!

In a search of an extra month

October

Back to our personal values, goals, beliefs, muse… and digital branding projects. After a long vacation, it’s kinda  hard to sync back with ongoing projects and schedules. Shouldn’t independent consultants merge their free and working hours to dissolve the difference?

Well it depends from your level of lifetime design freedom – what you do, when you do it, where you do it and with whom you do it. Some of us still can’t afford to travel all over the world for 4 months and keep up with all important todos in parallel.  Even if you cover 80% of them, you still need the rest 20% shortly afterward.

Despite the falling leaves, energy is here, the timing is right, we just need some more time, right? October usually starts with a day for dissection of personal and business life. What we dream vs. what we should do. Today vs someday. Excitement vs. existential vacuum of business boredom. Realistic vs. Reachable.

My approach is to sit down with a sheet of paper and glass of good wine ( helps getting terrific life-hacking insights) and cut down half of my activities and tasks to the bone, leaving only the 3 most important projects. Less follow-ups, more planning. After eliminating the “muda” waste (as a Japanese friend of mine use to say) , it’s time to dig in the swipe-file data and deliver (and overdeliver!) what I promised to myself and to the customers ASAP. To do what we do best, with greater speed, accuracy, efficiency, creativity and honesty.

This means launching important websites, upgrading production equipment, tuning brand performance. No communication distracters, no trips, no music making, no poetry, no blogging, and most of all, no fakebook chitchat (sorry virtual friends, I’ll be off for a while and I don’t care “Which kind of pasta are you” . Let’s cut the fat from our schedule, clone or replace ourselves with partners, outsource the fluff, free our time and focus on bigger/ better things.
Searching for the best life, unleashing our potential on a world-class level, living our days to the best with energetic passion and harmony… 500 months still to go?  Just pass me an extra one please.

Cheers from the sunny slopes of the autumn mountain! Great branding brains are warmly welcomed at our official BrandBuild launch – 20 October 2009.

P.S. What’s your secret recipe to recover your performance and sync your time, financial and ranking independence? Where you will be in one month?

Virtual branding escapism

Brand Trust

Oh my dear Nielsen,

I do agree that “virtual” and “real” friends are our best brand builders (not only on our birthday), but consumer’s recommendation from known people or strangers is not a form of advertising. You also missed the biggest brand trust builder -  Google’s top5 organic search results (I hope intentionally

Social media is the key for building trust in brands?
Yup, in a few “developed” countries, the rest of the world use it for time killing and enterprise resources wasting activities.

Consumers trust real friends, virtual strangers and brand websites the most? So, I have to start to trust my virtual friends same way like the people I know, right?

Yada yada. It’s like “the law of big numbers” by Mr. Power. You start a spammer’s “social network”, expose thousands of personal emails in their profile URL to Google and than you claim that Quantity is what matters. When you “build your network”, you do some business with 1 in 100 people, good businesses with 1 in 1000 and than “1 in 10000 of those people will become mentor, supporter, helper in your life”.

Well, I really have great ideas sharing and collaboration experience with hundreds of “virtual friends”, but I do care only for real friends I’ve met in personal (most of which started out as online ones .

Do we need a friend/girlfriend in every city?
Nope, just few real friends, who care, dare and move ahead, together eventually.

Just a recent example: When you share your birthday wish (to help few kids from “underdeveloped” countries get a color text-book and attend a school at least for few days) with hundreds of “socially responsible and concerned” western “virtual friends”, you get (accidental, inspirational and spontaneous) response by few “real friends” from your eastern neighborhood?! and zero feedback from them.

Hey Mark, where’s the “friends”-list sanitazing app? Let’s make every day a great one and let’s care about our real friends and Future. Yeah, birthdays, holidays, virtual or real…

THANK YOU FRIENDS for all your phone, facebook, email, twitter and sms birthday messages. I’ll have a small out of town/ traffic/ heat/ smog chill-out party with lot of music, cocktails, fruits and icecream… A big thanks again for all the birthday wishes, everyone!

Do you have virtual friends, who are as good as real ones (without huge exposure in facebook, twitter and other illusions ?

BrandBuild to the top

One of my best friends: CBO

Differentiation evolved from
“what it is” to “what it does” to
“how you feel” to “who you are”.

Globalism removed borders, we created tribes – intimate social worlds, which we understand and participate in. Brands are the little gods of our modern life – each ruling different need, activity, mind share, tattoo, mood or situation. What is your tribal identity, which tribe you want to join today?

When a prospect finds your offer or company (one-click away, first choice in Google, good color, strong contrast, irresistible arresting brand message, etc.) he thinks:

1. What is it (Who are you) ?
2. What it does (What do you do) ?
3. Why should I care (Why does it matter, what’s in it for me) ?

It’s always better to get a rough answer to the right questions, than a detailed answer to the wrong ones, right?  Otherwise it will be less that it could be. So, go ahead, ask them Why you climb Everest? Because it’s there, dude! Why we have to brand-build? Because the BRAND DEPENDS on others for it’s existence: on 72% online searchers of products in information in EU, on the 85% top3 Google search result visitors for any given phrase and market niche.

Why Branding is such a big deal now?

Because our society has moved from mass production to mass customization. We are info-rich and time-poor. Now people value feelings more than informations. Design and aesthetics are the language of feeling. Only one competitor can be the cheapest. The other HAVE TO use branding to become a guarantee of trustworthy behavior. Our purchase choices have muliplied in thousands (sometimes million companies/ websites) and we have to differentiate, to stand out of the crowd, to be in top 3. If we can’t be #1 or 2, or 3, it’s better to redefine our field or to change our tribe/ category.

When people talk to themselves it’s called insanity, when companies do that, it’s called marketing, when customers talk about companies, it’s called brand-building.

Here comes the CBO (Chief Brand Officer)

Lot of people talk about it, few understand it and even fewer know how to manage it but still everyone wants it. Brand-building is connecting strategy to creativity, logic to magic, communicating and managing the difference.
Brand-building is a process that can be studied, analyzed, learned, taught, replicated and managed. Go for the huge worldwide trend of tomorrow; don’t look just for tiny improvements of yesterday’s data.
The more a brand becomes distributed, the more it requires strong centralized management.
The CBO is focused around building and managing sustainable and successful world-class brands.
It’s not about likeness, it’s about understanding: a brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. The position and degree of trust is the determination and differentiation factor.
A CBO is the brand’s personal recession-proof brandometer – he will show you what the brand is and what makes it tick, he will manage your online reputation, write a brand education program, define the brand’s DNA for constant regeneration of corporate memory, he will control the chaos, necessary for brand’s innovation. If you are tired of thick quantitative studies and analysis paralysis, he will bring you some great brand building ideas into sharp focus, he’ll give you real market insights and new niche ideas in less than 3 days, using a rooster of worldwide research partners and databases. You will never skew or loose the focus.
The CBO is the executive, who lies awake at night, thinking “How can we build the brand?”. He will manage brand collaboration, innovation and strategy at the highest corporate level, forming a human bridge across strategy and creativity, connecting the left and right brain of your business.
A charismatic brand is any product, service or company for which people believe there’s no substitute. Any brand, backed by enough courage and imagination can become a charismatic brand, even yours.

Am I a CBO? I was for more than 10 years. Now CBOs are my best friends (and customers) in the great wild world out there. So, are you a CBO?

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.

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

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…

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.

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!