The Benefits of Branding & Social Media

Hi All,

Today I wanted to share with you my experience in developing a personal brand, and using that to quickly rank in the search engines.

In my last post, I noted that I had registered the domain http://oddchihuahua.com on August 3rd of this year (just 10 days ago). In subsequent days, I also set up accounts on different social media sites with the same oddchihuahua brand. While I set up four different accounts, I have been focused on just Instagram and Facebook over the last week or so.

It was really just an experiment to see what could be accomplished in driving search results when using the brand across my website, Instagram, and my Facebook Fan page.

The results, rather astonishing:

If I search oddchihuahua in Google, my brand shows up six times on the first page.

• Position three for my facebook fan page
• Position four in images
• Position six, seven and eight for my actual website
• Position nine for my instagram page
• Fourth position on page two for my Pinterest account (though I've not done much with it)

If I search odd chihuahua, I show up in position 6 and 9 of the first page of Google.

My approach:

• I write one post per day
• I post the image from my post to Instagram (all unique content with watermark and a sentence or two)
• I either post the post to my facebook, but more often then not just "curate" and pass along interesting things related to my site)

It's important to note that I have fewer than 10 followers on Facebook and Instagram, but I get a few likes and shares every single day.

My Takeaway

Social engagement really does help. I have my first web post teetering on the edge of hitting page one, but the above steps have given me almost total domination of page one for my brand.

As I build more and more content, I can only imagine that having a sound brand in place will only boost rankings and drive more and more traffic in the days, weeks and months to come.

As of yesterday, I have had over 1000 page views with a bounce rate of only 9.21%, just 10 days after registering the domain.

Pretty awesome.

Thank you to all of my friends for your leadership, support and help.

You are appreciated.

Jim