How do you know when your brand is successful? A successful brand comes in two parts: Recognition Feelings While those two properties are powerful, they are also imprecise enough to be frustrating for many people. How do you quantify feelings? How important is recognition? Recognition can be achieved simply enough. Repeated interactions with consistency. Just like Pavlovs experiments with his hounds, there needs to be a positive pay-off with those repeated exposures. We are … [Read more...]

Body Language, or Non-Verbal Communication, is the majority of communication. Never more so than online. OK, if you publish video or you are a podcaster you have more expressive possibilities. For the rest of us though we have to be more careful to put across what we mean, who we are, our brand. Your blog is communicating both intentionally and unintentionally. If there is a miscommunication there is no-one to blame but ourselves. Audit Your Blog Brand Take a good, long, hard look at … [Read more...]

Branding is about being memorable. It's about staking a claim to a specific part of your prospects brain and putting up a little white picket fence around it. In the last post of this series we looked at finding your uniqueness, in this one let's look at a simple way you can stand out. Your Prospects Mental Map Everyone carries around in their head their map of their world. There are few things these maps agree on and many people go to quite strong lengths to maintain the status quo. Rather … [Read more...]

Madonna Gandhi Charlie Chaplin Princess Diana Elvis Sum up each in a few words. Think you could do it? Go on, have a go :) It's strange. Each of us is unique. We all know that. But ask someone to define how they are unique? Then we struggle. Finding your Uniqueness is difficult but critical. What makes you different matters because it is why someone should go to you rather than your competitor. It is what makes you memorable. The thing people will talk about, the "word" … [Read more...]

Branding exists in the mind of your prospects and customers. It is not about what you say, it is what they experience and remember. Branding is how people feel. Brands make promises. Branding is what people think of when they hear, see, touch, smell. Your brand "means" what they think it means, not what you tell them it means. Volvo might mean safety to you, to many people, but it could just as easily mean boring. Coca-Cola could be "the real thing" but it could just as easily … [Read more...]

Online advertising should be your best bet in terms of confidence. There is little you don't know about performance of internet advertising campaigns. No hoops to jump through here, everything you need to know should be automated and available. So why is it people waste their advertising budget on no-hoper campaigns that generate lots of traffic but very little impact on the bottom line? Did you see the report that eBays traffic increased when they stopped their USA Adwords … [Read more...]

Why have I selected Aweber as my newsletter software over the free service from FeedBurner or FeedBlitz? I have thought a fair bit about this before taking the plunge, particularly because making a choice between fee and free is never easy for someone with a tight budget! Perhaps my thinking might help someone else who is considering email for their blog. One of the decisions I had to make when considering setting up my new newsletter was should I use FeedBurner, look at using Feedblitz or … [Read more...]

A coaching client asked this doozy of a question and I just can't decide what the answer is, particularly from an SEO perspective. Should your blog be integrated, eg. subdirectory, on a subdomain, eg. blog.domain.com or seperate domain, as I have chrisg.com (blog) and omiq.com (website)? Obviously there are advantages to both. Subdomain and seperate domains have the following benefits You do not have to use the same technologies The topic can be different to your main site No … [Read more...]

This post was created and queued for later viewing. As I write this I have just quietly launched a small experiment. In a news roundup post I have slyly tucked away a link to an email newsletter signup form. Yes, you read correctly, I have launched an email newsletter. I have no way of knowing as I write this what the reaction to that little bomb shell will be but I thought I had better explain anyway. Why would I as a blogger need an email list? Especially considering I get a … [Read more...]

Last night I had the rare treat of going out to a gig. I don't go out much so that might have been treat enough but it was an especially enjoyable night because this was one of my favourite bands, Marillion. You might not have heard of them, especially if you are under a certain age, but I think their story is quite instructive. You know how the music industry works. Bands fight to get noticed by record companies. They may or may not get a deal. If they do the money they are paid is really a … [Read more...]