Making news headlines here in Australia is our opposition leader Kevin Rudd making a political statement and it’s going viral. Kevin Rudd has launched his site Kevin07 so that voters in this country can use the site to have their say with video comments and by emailing your thoughts.

As a web junkie and I’m pretty impressed with Kevin’s fresh approach to politics who has also been using other online social sites like MySpace. I spoke about being remarkable to differentiate yourself from others in the same arena and Kevin has hit the nail on the head really being different and making headlines leaving other traditional politicians in the dust by using online to support offline which is really important in reinforcing your brand.

Building your online business is just the same! Do what everyone else does and you’ll soon find yourself as just one of the crowd. Take a look at a few web sites and it’s really just the same boring sales pitch with a different company name and logo at the top.

Be Creative and Dare to be Different. You never know where it might take you.

After speaking with many clients and discussing new or existing work with them, often I think the wrong person is asking all the questions.  You can almost always assume that as a service provider you are going to be asked the usual array of questions like, what do you do, what is your strategy, who are your current clients, how much is this going to cost etc etc and we often answer all of these to ensure that we win the work and keep our businesses running.  Clients love to ask questions about you, after all they need to feel safe before they’ll hand over any of their hard earned cash.

These questions are fine and are part and parcel of the work flow process however it is in my opinion, more important for the service provider to ask about their business and what they do and how they do it, who they are, what they stand for, how are they different from their competitors, why should someone pick them over the competition etc.  As a web designer, developer and search engine marketeer all these questions need to be answered by the client so we as service providers can get a hollistic view of their business.  If a service provider doesn’t understand your business how can they possibly create a successful marketing campaign?

Are you asking the right questions?

When I first started with the web in 2004, I didn’t know very much about the web and didn’t know very much about web design, programming etc but I had a passion to do it and here I am today having learnt alot, but still learning, still excited and still very passionate about being as good as I can be.

When I started, I remember checking my web stats and nobody could find me and they probably didn’t care either as I was a small time startup and my site didn’t have any online value yet. As I learnt about the web and learnt alot from others both in the web design & search I started to understand what makes you popular on the web. Aaron Wall often talks about being linkworthy and how social interaction on the web is a great way to become popular amonst others in the community. Seth Godin also talks about people talking about you and how this applys to every business in his best selling list of books and why being remarkable is important as part of your overall business strategy.

These days my web rankings are getting better and better with first page results becoming more and more common as I slowly climb the search engine rank ladder and over the competition. What I have noticed is that more web masters are noticing me now more than ever before and I am getting more link requests than ever. Isn’t it funny that people only want to know you when your popular!