Hey–Chris here–if you saw me on NBC 4 and want to know more, fill in your name & email in the box to the right, or call my personal cell at 614-312-1941 to see what else blogging can do for you.

So I’m off a few of my projects and I’ll be attending (finally) to the buildout of this site.

This will be done by wednesday.

Same bat theme, different bat look.

Stay tuned.

Personal Branding.  It’s some kind of buzzword these days, isn’t it?  Well, the question about it is this: what are you here to give?  What is your brand?  People want to start the reputation management process all the time, but they don’t really want to consider the most essential: what are you here for, why are you doing this, and what are you here to give.

Without content, personal branding is fluff.  It is beatable, it’s not sticky, it’s not a winning pattern.  Without real content, personal branding is dumb.   You have to be someone (ahem, yourself) or else people will get the idea that you’re a phony.

Look, you can use our service to get everywhere on the web in a day.  But, if you have nothing to offer, and nothing to NOT offer, then you’re gonna be in some trouble.  Nobody will connect because there’s no substance there.  There’s nothing really that you’re giving people.  So, amp it up.  Make it more real.  Be yourself.

How to decide who you want to be:

1. What do you TRULY value?  Me?  I want to be fast.  At my core, I want to deliver projects FAST.
2. What else? Sure, I want to be cheap.  I want to be Henry Ford, not Dan Kennedy.  I want to make sure that everyone can afford my services.  So it’s wal-mart.  Doesn’t mean that there won’t be value, but my blogs can be any theme you like, so long as its thesis.
3. We’re going for a top three here…so what else? I want to transfer what I know to other people.  This site, this service is all about that.  I transfer what I know, it’s valuable enough to do a blog.
4. What Don’t You Care About? Being all things to all people.  I’m not gonna oversell you, my services may not be for you.

Now–when you decide what you DO, and more importantly what you DON’T do, it becomes easier to go on the internet and propagate information about yourself.  I’m the guy that delivers thesis blogs fast.  I’m Genuine Chis, the best friend freelancers will ever have that TELLS THE TRUTH about the market and about how things are.  You can expect value, you can expect speed.  If you want it to be hypercustom?  You’re out of luck.

You know what you’re getting.   You know what you’re not.  You can trust me because I don’t decide what I’m going to be after I size you up.  Like Popeye, I yam what I yam.

Small businesses like David Knapp and Artisan Outdoor Lighting are rare today. Dealing with the owner directly, getting a free, no-hassle design consultation, and having everyone involved show up on time—these are the things that made me so happy with David Knapp and his lighting crew.

I was unsure of what I needed, but David Knapp took the time to help me understand and he didn’t just try to sell me the most expensive package. He really kept my home in mind when putting the plan together and asked for my approval at every step of the way. The lighting scheme we picked ended up working fabulously!

I am happy to recommend David Knapp and Artisan Outdoor Lighting to friends and neighbors, and I’m planning on writing him a recommendation on Linkedin.

A lot has changed since Jay Conrad Levinson wrote Guerrilla Marketing in 1984.

His marketing system stresses delivering a mixed bag of inexpensive, unconventional promotions to select, targeted group of potential customers.

Here at Guerrilla.Me, we’re proposing that you no longer need a mixed bag of promotions and you don’t need to discriminate, segment, or do excessive research when it comes to deciding who to market to.

Instead, all you need is….YOU! Yep, You. Anywhere and Everywhere you can be, as inexpensively and consistently as you can get there.

You see, you’re the best vessel for your marketing message. You know how to make your pitch. You know that what you’re selling is rocks! All You need is an audience.

All you need is for someone to “Guerrilla”…You! Enter Social Media…

This, friends, is Joe Testcase.  He’s going to be a case study that–in the coming days, will be showing up on twitter, linkedin and facebook.  He’s part of the video series we’re doing to show you EXACTLY how to get started working with social media.

How to build your online personal brand so that is ‘google insurance,’ that prevents you from having to worry too much about having your online reputation stolen.   For now, let’s just consider who he is:

Joe Testcase is a financial planner based in Kirkwood, Missouri.  He’s currently licensed with Ameriprise financial advisers, and has been with the firm for 8 years.   He helps clients with financial planning, investments, retirement, IRAs, College savings, 401ks, estate planning and business health plans. Prior to his career as a financial planner, he was an analyst with a big 7 accounting firm in Chicago, IL.

Joe is an Accounting graduate of the university of Texas (Austin), in 1984.  He completed an MBA at the University of Illinois (Champaign) in 1996, and worked.

He has been a resident of Kirkwood for 14 years, with his wife Jamie, and he has two children ages 11 and 9.

Joe’s interests include cooking, fly fishing, and studying the United States Civil war.  He’s been involve with the fight to end child slavery.

Joe can be contacted at testcase.joe@gmail.com and you can visit his blog at http://joetestcase.com

We’re gonna hear a lot more from Joe in the days to come.

Guerrilla.me is going to launch on 5/11/09.  The story of Joe, and how he proteched his online brand will be told then.

Wanna know the biggest secret to maximizing your effectiveness gaining business via social media?

You have to do it every day. Doesn’t matter when… Can be first thing in the morning. Or last thing at night. Or from your lphone while in line at the grocery store. But it’s gotta happen every day…

And if possible, Tell Them Something Interesting About Your Business!

Ok…Maybe Not This Consistently…

Huh? Science? Creating accounts on Social Media sites?

“My 4 Year Old Could Do That!”

(Guerrilla Tactic – Hit Em With Your Kids!)

Yeah, Maybe He Could, But Can He Help You Strengthen Your Presence In Organic Search Results?

So filling out “name, hometown, birthday, favorite books, etc” 30 or so times isn’t all that great a feat. But doing it in a way that helps you manage your reputation or solidify your brands positioning for a given set of keywords is a service you might want to leave to the professional SMO’s. (Social Media Optimizers.)

Yeah, we’re not a couple of Neil Patel caliber SMO’s, but we’re pretty ok. At least good enough to go pro..(Whatever that means for a profession that just went live pretty much last week.) And we’re pretty confident that the Guerrilla.Me Social Media Account Creation Service is one of the kind and well worth your investment.

So if you have a minute, feed that grenade box over their to the right your email address. We’ll spend the coming weeks educating (and yeah, selling) you on the value of our unique services.

Thanks!

Ok…

Where to start on a blog about enhancing your brand online? Hmm…Why not with some really basic, but fundamentally important stuff?

So here we go…. Wanna know how the web works?

Links Man, Links!

Tons of them. Millions and trillions and gabillion jillions of them, all telling everyone where to go and what to check out next. Yeah…links! Like this link and this link and this link about links and where you can find them.

Each of the first 2 links I just gave told you to check out the site’s of yours truly and my Guerrilla.Me partner Chris Johnson.  They also told the spiders (not real ones, don’t worry) to go check out our sites and look for more links. So off they’ll go when they eventually come a’ searchin’.

Ok, I know. The anchor text on these first two links wasn’t great.  But hey, even though they could’ve been better they got the job done right?

How about the anchor text action on the 3rd link?  Well, that might of been a tad better…you see it was a link to a post about where to get links and it actually had the word links in the link!  Jiggy!

Wuh? WTF is “anchor text?”

Really it doesn’t matter, this site isn’t about Search Engine Optimization…and I really don’t feel comfortable talkin SEO because I’m no expert on the subject. (Few are really, but I think this guy is.)

As far as building your personal brand online goes, the main thing to remember is this:  You want links that send people to pages that most accurately reflect the you that you want them to find.

So if you’re in the mood to link to Guerrilla.Me, go ahead and create a link like this: Social Branding and Social Media Optimization blog.

And while your at it…hook yourself up with the free “Battle Plan” over to the right…We’ll soon be sending you more usable info about building your personal brand online and how to best go about getting yourself some effective inbound links….

And another to see it all through…

(Hold Steady)

This blog  is about personal branding…the guerrilla way.  We’re an online toolbox, a repository of HOW TO GET YOU MESSAGE out there.  Guerrilla.ME was created to do a few things: help people catch up, learn the tools that work, and learn a cheap and fun way to market that works in the new economy.  We’re not your father’s branding company.  We’re not teaching the same old belly to belly techniques and the piddly marketing that worked in the 1990′s.

This is new information: how to create an online identity.  How to control your reputation online, and even–most controversially–how to make it hard for people to find information that they don’t want to find.

We’ll be posting every day on this blog, and we’re looking forward to serving you with personal branding tips, todos, techniques and more.