TheAnand

A question posed to me by one of my chat mates. To answer that question, you need to know the chat we had before the question.

He: Hi Anand
Me: Hi
He: So, what do you do?
Me: I am into Internet Marketing
He: So, you are a liar?

Reminded me of the popular book by Seth Godin and a similarly popular proverb in my home state. In this age where the people have been empowered with search engines, decision engines and more engines than I can think of, do marketers and salesmen have any role to play?

My startup was recently approached by another small business with a very energetic man on top. They wanted to know how they manage their brand online as a company. We decided to go with the Personal Branding route as their CEO was a known personality with the number of conferences he had been to and the number of online relationships he had with his friends and collegues from his previous work experience.

Here are a few tips I provided him to get started with his own personal branding online.

Traditionally, when advertising and marketing was considered, we did not have much of a choice. Newspapers, Television ads and radio ads and our age old bill boards were the only options, of course after our very own ancient dhol beating announcer dude.

Problem was, me being online for more than half my life now never understood them. When I tried advertising my services a few years back, newspapers here in my place charged around $20 per day of advertisements which could contain less words than half a tweet(for those ignorant, a tweet is 140 chars!).  A 5 seconds ad slot on most national TV channels in the country will run you around $20 minimum in off-peak times. Problem: But how do I know if the people I want to approach will read this paper or watch that particular television channel?

I was thinking on the lines of a competition for my new top secret project: Shymz which led me to look around for fresh ideas. I found that a lot of sites are running new competitions for various prizes and stuff to be won.

With blog contests becoming a rage all over the blogosphere, I was wondering if it will help you in anyway to increase your statistics online.

By stats, I mainly refer to:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rankings
• Technorati