Few would dispute that the Harley eagle and logo are part of the most effective brands ever created. If you doubt that claim, just name another logo that many people routinely tattoo on their body. Just think how many people have voluntarily become walking billboards for the Harley Davidson motorcycles? So how did this company create such dedication? Effective brand management, proper positioning within a market, and selling to the market’s most basic needs. What can we learn from Harley Davidson’s promotion approach? The answer to the question is everything.

Your brand embodies the fundamental essence of your company. It is your logo and brand that people are going to recognize. Your logo should represent how your company is perceived, and it is the continual promotion of this symbol that creates awareness in your client’s mind space. Therefore, continually ensure your logo properly represents your organization, and always include your logo on your correspondence, and promotion collateral.

Branding you logo is a fundamental step in securing your market. Branding requires that you repetitively present your specific market with your logo while associating the image with the wares that you provide.

The objective is to assist your customer in establishing a mental association with the image so that they know exactly what the logo represents whenever they see it. The mental relationship can be a product such as the RedX Real Estate Data Exchange or an image and lifestyle such as Nike and Harley Davidson. Regardless of the service or product that you offer, your brand needs to create a strong mental connection to your target customer.

You ought to constantly promote your brand and logo, and should always stay away from significantly modifying it. Establishing brand awareness is a massive task, and each time you logo is updated, the process must be started over. Promote your logo on all of your products, on all of your correspondence, and most of all, on all of your marketing material. Make you know, and use all accessible means to brand yourself to your clients and prospects. The approach is expensive, but when you are branded, your company is the first one to enter a prospects mind when they think of your product.

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When you commission the building of your website, the biggest focus for you and quite often your designer is the design. We all want our sites to look great with great graphics, but quite often the trade off comes with functionality.

Your website should be a working tool for your business, it should be a 24/7 sales man, bringing you business so that every time you check your emails you have new leads waiting to be converted into sales.

The job of a website can vary. You can use it to capture prospects contact details so that you can contact them at a later date to sell to them, you can use it to generate leads for you to contact with a quote, or you can use it to sell direct to the public automatically. It will of course depend on your business as to what the purpose of your website is, but the important thing here is that your site must have a purpose!!!

Once you have established your sites purpose you will want to add Calls to Action on each page, so each visitor has an action to take once they have read your content. Content needs to take to format of.. identifying the prospects problem, issue or need explain how you can solve, fix or supply it.. provide an easy system for the prospect to take action.

Once your site is set up in this way and its all set to work like a proper sales funnel, it is then time to try and bring in some traffic. This is where many web designers fail as many dont realise that some functions of a site, like having lots of Flash animations or using a content management system is likely to hinder the sites progress in the search engine rankings.

The best course of action is to seek advice from an experienced SEO company before you commission your web design so as to avoid having to completely re-write your content and re-design your site in order to get it ranking well in search engines.

t is no secret in the online world that in order to get a high profile for your site and for lots of new people to see it, it has to have lots of links pointing at it from other sites that are seen as valuable by search engines.

Several different methods of gathering links exist and some are more effective than others. One of the older, less effective methods which strangely some people seem to favour is reciprocal linking. This is the simplest type of linking and basically involves two websites which have links on them pointing to each other.

This isn’t a great way of doing things any more because search engines like to see that your site is gaining links as natural votes of quality from other websites, however if sites are linking back and forth to one another, then search engines can conclude that there has been a agreement made in order to try and move up the search engine rankings faster, and so the link is unnatural.

Although these links aren’t worth a great deal, they are worth something and should not be completely disregarded, but the only time that these reciprocal links are really worth having is when the sites themes are related to each other, like a shop and supplier for example.

So from this we can conclude that one way links are the preferred method of linking, but people aren’t all that likely to link to you just because you ask them nicely, you will have to offer them something in return. This is where three way linking comes into play. For three way linking, either you or the other party needs to have more than one site, for this example, well say you have two sites.

The 3 way link model is essentially this: site a places a link to site b, site b then places a link to site c, and if you want to, site c can then link back to site a. This method creates unprompted one way links in the eyes of the search engines that appear completely natural, and therefore will be more valuable.

For example, say you owned site A and site C and you wanted to get a link for site C, you would simply use site A as somewhere to offer a link from and in exchange, the other person would link to site C, meaning that their site becomes site B in the model. This strategy will do you far more favours than reciprocal linking, but when used alone you will probably make fairly slow progress, however when you use it alongside some other methods (which I will go into in my next article) it is highly effective.