Branding Yourself Will Bring You Greater Success

Wouldn't it be amazing if there was a way to successfully brand yourself without selling products and or services.Now most new internet marketers starting out their businesses just want to make a quick buck so they do not brand themselves correctly.

But smart folks like you and I know that if you try to brand yourself just by selling products and services if your customers don't like what you are offering, it is a lot harder to get your business off the ground.

If you brand yourself correctly and are known as a provider of good information you will have far greater success in selling your products thus improving your income.One of the most commonly used ways to brand yourself is to tell real life stories, show your audience that you relate to them.But beware once you have branded yourself and you are known and trusted by the public don't stop providing information to others.

Build up your business by branding yourself and providing relevant and popular information.How to position yourself as the obvious expert branding yourself as the obvious expert is the only way to dominate a niche in the marketplace.Now let's look at this for a second, why would people brand themselves when they could just brand the product and makes sales.

The people who brand themselves are in a completely different mindset.When you brand yourself, people trust you, they see you as the expert people are much more willing to listen to you and most importantly buy from you.If you just brand a product a person will buy the product and probably not even know who you are.

By branding yourself as an expert on your topic, you can easily increase your traffic to your site, as well as sales. Marketing and branding works for products and companies.

The point is this. Branding yourself is all about self-expression.The notion of branding yourself is not new. Your idea of branding yourself is a dynamic strategy everyone should use if they plan on being a big success.What prevents you from over branding yourself is the ability to express a quick summary or movie preview in a concise and articulate way. Particularly in any sales-driven industry, branding yourself is as integral to the success of your business as the company logo.

Pay Per Clicks

There are many advertising options out there for small and large businesses alike. A new phenomenon that has recently hit the scene is the use of sponsored link searches for advertising needs. Are sponsored links really the best way to allocate valuable advertising dollars?

A re occurring complaint I hear from many of my customers is that sponsored links are not developing the return on investment they desire. There are several key reasons to why this may be occurring. Sponsored links, or pay per click advertising, are links on the right hand side of most search engines. These links, historically, are only used by approximately 30% of the online search market. By using only sponsored links in your online marketing campaign, you have essentially cut out 70% of the market that may be searching for your business. Further, did you know that there is a constant bidding war on the sponsored side of the page? Business are having to spend valuable working time managing their sponsored link page to make sure the are staying on the first page, while not breaking the bank. Because most consumers don't search past the first page of search engines, it is a constant war to "out bid" your competitors and stay in those valuable spots. But what is to keep your competitors from clicking your links and costing you tons of money and headaches? Thankfully, Google (among others) have allowed you to set certain limits on the amount of money you wish to spend monthly on sponsored link searches. While pay per click ads may get you some form of business, I do not believe they are the end all in online marketing. It is important to recognize several key factors when thinking about investing in pay per clicks.

1) How can I minimize "fraudulent" clicks by my competitors

2) Are their other online options, for around the same cost, which can give me a better return on investment? and

3) Am I willing to cut our 70% of the search market by spending money on sponsored links?

For some businesses, pay per clicks work. I am not advocating that they don't. The law of "big numbers" may come into play here where if you do something long enough, the average return will be worth the investment. I have found other advertising mediums that allow my customers a better, more stable, return on their investment. Diversity is the key to the marketing game and in order to advertise to all corners of a market, it is necessary to weigh your options and decide if you have the time, and money, to play the "big numbers" game.

Chad Sandifer
http://www.tenlist.com

Do Good CAPTCHAs Really Have To Be Unfriendly? An Expert Explains

For those of you who are not familiar with the term, a CAPTCHA is a feature on many user populated websites, such as Myspace with the purpose of blocking automated programs from spamming its users and for overall security. Here is how it works:

A user is required to enter a random letter and number password into a form before being able to submit information, log in, etc. This password is essentially given directly to the user in an image, rather than in text form, so that an automated program cannot detect the characters. The password the form field expects is the same as that shown on the image, but this sometimes causes problems.

Jeff Atwood at the Coding Horrors blog discusses whether CAPTCHAs are dead. This follows a news report that scalpers probably beat the CAPTCHAs at Ticketmaster.

Jeff links to a Chinese site that sells CAPTCHA decoders. The site quotes different prices for breaking different CAPTCHAs. An eBay decoder, for example, is being sold for $4000 and claims 70% accuracy.

What caught my attention were the unbreakable CAPTCHAs in the list. The Yahoo CAPTCHA is listed as unbreakable. That isn't surprising. Most of us can barely get it right ourselves.

Consider a Yahoo CAPTCHA. Sometimes you cannot tell the difference between a G or a 6? And the way that letters are often skewed, the difference bewteen certain uppercase and lowercase letters is virtually unrecognizable?

Contrast that with a Google CAPTCHA also listed as unbreakable. The Google image is clean and legible. Most of us have no difficulty getting it right. Google demonstrates that effective CAPTCHAs don't have to be unfriendly to users.

I am curious to learn which CAPTCHA libraries generate strong, yet user friendly challenges.