In my opinion, the best type of branding for home sales professionals is Personal Branding. Much in the same way we like a certain waitress, mechanic, etc. the same applies – We like them because of their branding. Branding that is service, quality, etc. Personally I have obtained services from another company when a person moved there – In other words, I retained the services of another company when the individual who’s personal brand I like moved to that company. Did this individual have a logo, colours, etc.? No, not in this case! But she did have my trust, I liked her and  everyone knew her (as she was a gregarious professional). In some ways her new employer benefited by having her high quality brand associated with their business (and therefore the logo along with it).

So it seems that personal branding as reflected on a blog needs to accomplish three things:

1. Build awareness.
2. Build trust.
3. Build popularity.

For those of us who are savvy web users, you’ve probably heard of the Duct Tape Marketing site, John Jantsch phrases it best in the following video:

As such, your blog graphics (like logos) again are for the most part only there to identify the brand – They are not “the” brand. However while we’re on the topic of logos, don’t misconstrue the importance they can have on your brand. If you’re known for high quality service and attention to detail, your logo must reflect this! A poor quality logo that lacks professionalism demonstrates low quality service and indifference – Quite the opposite to the brand it’s supposed to identify.

When impressing your brand upon your blog, it’s important to consider the exercise suggested by Mr. Jantsch in the video. Make sure you ask as many clients as possible (he suggests 20) to use one word – ONLY ONE – to describe your business. Ostensibly,  if most agree, that defines a pillar of your brand, that should be reflected and focused in every element of your blog. If there is little correlation in the words, then that’s a call to action to work further on defining your brand.

While we know what three primary accomplishments our branding must bring to fruition (on any blog); what things can be focus on (blog wise) so as to ensure effective blog branding? In my opinion, the following points are paramount:

Personality is one method to develop rapport with visitors (who are potential clients). By being personal, you are showing visitors who you are and demonstrating your positive branding. Don’t misunderstand personal in terms of photos and professional biographies. By personal, I’m referring to giving advice, helping others, demonstrating your positive personality in your writing style, developing trust and so forth.

Consistency demonstrates a genuine brand. Constantly changing focus makes it difficult to establish a trustful, personal rapport with clients; and over the long term can erode your blog branding (reduced popularity).  Don’t get me wrong here… Every blog changes to meet the needs of the people it serves, that’s normal. We change over time as well (as we get older, wiser, etc.) and that maturing process is naturally reflected in our brand. Every thing we post in our blogs reflects our brand, we can elevate it or bring it crashing down. Have you ever seen a business you like  being bought out and then see that business become unpopular as service or quality levels deteriorate? That’s the power of negative branding due to loss of consistency.

Trust is the way to garner improved branding awareness and business opportunities. If your blog constantly spews “blog-positive” type content, it’s going to look as fake as a spray-on tan.  From personal experience I generally only retain or prefer the services and products of businesses with whom I have a personal rapport and trust relationship; with one key person! Your blog must reflect this, be direct, explain what you do or do not provide. Provide content that shows successful and not so successful aspects of your business. For less than successful scenarios, show readers how you approach and help them resolve issues and how that helps their interests.

Leadership and expertise in your genre needs to be earned and in many respects, seized! Nobody is going to give you leadership, sure you can earn it, but unless you seize that owned leadership (and expertise), nobody is going to place that crown upon you. Demonstrate your expertise with helpful, in-demand, driven content to your readers. Always try to ensure that you show some original thought. Don’t hesitate to give useful information freely. Think away the box instead of thinking outside the box – Remember the old cliché: “A very pretty box with a bow but nothing inside.”

Finally, there are some important steps to consider prior to launching a “branded” blog.

• Write a plan on how you would like to be perceived by your visitors. How do they perceive you now? Did you do the exercise suggested in the video yet?
• Look at the blogs that you keep visiting regularly. Why do you return to read from them? What features of branding do they use that appeal to you and illicit a call to action?
• Develop your 2 second commercial (blog tagline). It might not be as easy as you expect as it will immediately focus your branding.
• Talk to your existing or potential visitors, find out what they want to see more of or less of. Get their input – I’ll remind us again that our blog readers are our potential and existing clients!
• Who is going to respond to blog reader questions? How is communication going to be effectively managed?

As a side note: I emailed Mr. Love a simple, singular question that asked:

“What do you want your visitors to do on your blog?”

The understanding (I hope being transmitted)  was “If you cannot answer this question, exactly and to the point, then how do you expect visitors to know what to do. If they don’t know what to do, then there’s an obvious negative impact to your personal brand.

What do you think of personal branding? How do you view it on your blog? How has branding improved your blogging? Feel free to provide your input it the comments. Do you know of any blogs that demonstrate great branding? Please do list them in your comments!

As I’m sure we can appreciate, humourous as the video may be, the end result is not the fault of the developer (or so we might initially think), rather the input of the clients. It’s one thing to provide valuable input (and we should), it’s quite another to assume command as if we are a graphic design or web development professional. Let’s elaborate on some of the issues in this video the majority of which have been mirrored in actual projects I’ve worked on:

• Over analyzing.
• Too many cooks in the kitchen.
• Unrealistic time line expectations.
• Changing the parameters mid-stream.
• Adding parameters that are not related to the targeted message.
• Too much information.
• Use of copyrighted or trademarked material.
• Obtaining the advice of people without knowledge and/or outside the target niche.
• Assumptions without supportive facts.
• Assuming personal ideas are paramount and effective.
• Providing conflicting information or directives.
• Impractical expectations.
• Assuming we’re in the drivers seat.
• Use of unresearched an unrealistic ideas.

Over analyzing, resulting in a loss of focus. When we are creating (or changing)  a logo for our business, keep it’s message to the point, clear, neat and understandable. Not all ideas are good, a professional, effective graphic designer will be up front and tell us if an idea is horrible – and why. We need to (really) listen to the professionals we’ve retained. Remember, from an experience perspective they work in the graphic and online industry day in and day out, we don’t.

Who’s in charge? Ensure that one team member in our group is in charge, and the liaison with our designer. Prior to flooding a designer with all our ideas, let’s weed them out amongst our team members. Remember the old adage, “garbage in, garbage out“. To many ideas are confusing and again facilitates the loss of focus. If there are too many cooks in our kitchen, we need to remove some of them.

An effective developer or designer can give us a realistic time line to project conclusion. Expecting a Valentines Day period launch, for example, should be considered four to six months earlier for most projects. The point here is that it’s up to us to ensure we provide enough time to allow our web contractors to complete a project on target.

Once a project is in development, it is not a good approach to change the parameters. This increases costs, lengthens development time and further confuses and loses the focus of our original message. Additionally, the inclusion of new, extra materials, ideas, etc. not only delay the completion of our project, they also further muddy the focus of the intended message. This would be a time to pause and consider that our “additions” should be part of a separate project.

It’s a good idea to provide our developers, designers, copywriters, etc. with as much relevant and pertinent information as we can. However, ensure that we do not overwhelm them with superfluous information. We should feed information that retains the focus of our project message.

No, we cannot use copyrighted or trademarked information, etc. unless there is written authorization from the legal owners to do so.

When inviting input from third parties, ensure that we’re asking the right people. Namely, the very people who are our intended niche and whom our message is targeted towards.

The old adage “When you assume, you make…” is applicable here. Remember, and idea we think might be good is exactly that… “might be”. Find out, do our research, gather the facts. Listen to the individuals we have retained to service our needs.  They can very quickly provide us with feedback, in great part because they have broader exposure. Remember, just because we like something does not mean it’s going to be effective, also, it does not mean that our target market is going to like it as well.

When we provide conflicting directives and information, that should be a clear sign that we’ve lost focus of the message and it’s objective. Stop, stand back, organize and then return. Remember, an effective contractor is one who works with us, not for us.

Remember, common sense and practicality are effective approaches. Expecting impractical fixes or changes, things that work opposite to their intended or standard fashions, etc. are often impractical, silly, add extra cost and frustration to us and our target market and provide no other function than to move focus to bear upon these inconvenient “things”. Again, we really should listen to the advice of the professionals we’ve retained.

Key point, when we retain the services of  a graphic designer, web developer, copywriter, etc., we are not the boss. They are. Our job is to provide them with the tools they need. It is their job to lead the project and bring it to successful fruition! They are the experts in their fields and should not be fettered. We rely on their expertise – That’s why we hired them, as such, we should not be trying to do their job (by constantly telling them what to do and/or how to do it). Instead we should be providing feedback based upon our own research.

Granted, we’ve discussed a fair bit of what we can do to ensure our focus remains effective and targeted, but as depicted in the video above, I noticed several failings of the developer among them are the following four:

1. He never indicated or further clarified conflicting information.
2. The designer didn’t seem to communicate that the initial message was becoming lost in the graphic flotsam being added.
3. Frustration seemed to be increasing for the designer and he should have approached the client to discuss and avoid the issues that were creating frustration (he should have said something).
4. Above all, the designer should have alerted the client that their ideas are obscuring their initial focused, targeted message and that it is putting the final success of the project in jeopardy.

Conclusion? Prior to even considering a project, we should already have documented our plan and fully researched it. We should have an action plan in place (much like writing a business plan) and be able to effectively communicate and answer the questions from the professional we retain. On a personal note, the best client I ever had was one who had a web site plan developed . She gave it to me to read (and it read almost like a business plan). It listed all the information and answers to questions. It was well organized, very focused. It was designed in a way that clearly outline the objective, goals and needs, while providing the freedom for me to complete the site in a professional manner, as I needed (so as to meet the objectives).

What’s your take on this? Agree? Disagree? What would you add, remove or suggest? Feel free to comment your input below.

Remember, if your packaging (blog design) looks unorganized, ugly, “busy”, disorganized, etc. then that’s the message your sending to potential users. In other words your design is telling visitors a fair bit about your blog, before they even read the content. If the blog looks terrible or is not functional, you’ll probably lose that visitor. A blog with horrible typography (fonts), positioning or navigation is a clear message to readers saying “I don’t have attention to detail, I don’t care about quality, I am not professional“. After all, would you go to a wedding with dirty worn-out jeans and a soccer tee-shirt? Of course not!

Having said this, let’s pause for a moment and consider that design is not just about the graphics on your blog but more importantly, design is about planning and functionality. And in my opinion, graphics take a back seat to the functionality of your design. If the blog is poorly planned and has poor functionality, no manner of quality graphics is going to improve it. (If I cannot easily access what I need from the blog, then why would I return to visit again?).

To fix or change such issues, we’ll need to take a hard critical look at our blogs. We need to pay special attention to any sidebar widgets, our navigation and where elements are placed on our blogs.

Look at your blog (do it right now) and ask yourself:

1. Do I really need all these buttons and widgets in my sidebar?
2. Which things can I move out of my sidebar and place in my blog’s footer, header or navigation?
3. What home page (or sidebar) elements can I move to a separate blog page?
4. Which plugins can I find that will combine the jobs of two or more existing ones?
5. Does my sidebar really need all these links? (Am I really receiving as much beneficial traffic from them as anticipated?)
6. What things in my blog layout (including sidebar elements, widgets, etc.) is distracting my readers?
7. Do my “link exchange” links really do anything for me?
8. Is my navigation simple and intuitive?

While many of us will feel a bit of trepidation about removing or moving something from our blog design (I always do), there are some simple factors we can take into account – and make the hard choices. Much in the same way we need to prune our plants to make them grow nicely (and it’s hard to do), we need to do the same with out blogs.

One aspect that needs particular attention is linking and link exchanges. The Link Exchange web site explains some of the Bad Link Exchange Practices and SEO Mistakes that we all can make at times.

Another helpful online tool from Bad Neighborhood provides a text link tool to help you eliminate questionable links. Why is this an important thing to consider? From their site:

“…Text links are an important factor in today’s search engine optimization, and exchanging links with other websites is a good way to get them. However, doing a link exchange with a website that is penalized can have some detrimental results…”

In other words, if you’re linking to “bad” sites, your SEO may be penalized. Why am I mentioning linking and link exchanges? Because a list of links just adds clutter and in my experience… Most people don’t use them as they don’t provide any added value! If you want to link to a site, or exchange links, it’s more effective to write a blog post (or page) that also highlights some of the benefits of the link. A list of links does not do that, as such is not very useful.

Widgets and buttons? I found out from my other blog that many of them are not worthwhile and simply clutter your blog up with visual noise. Remember what your focus is (the niche your blog caters to) and keep this focus in mind. Evaluate your traffic statistics, if a widget is not serving you the traffic you expected and provides no “real” value to readers – then remove the widget! Also, if a button is not related to your blog, why post it on the blog?

For example placing buttons that show your blog’s traffic statistics to readers makes no sense. Why? They are there to read about your products, services, etc. not about how many people visited you. As such, that would simply be another piece of clutter. Another example, if I’m a photographer who has uploaded my work to Flickr, a Flickr widget might make sense, but not a “Who has visited my blog” widget (again, readers are interested in your photography work, they are not interested in what strangers are doing).

One resource you may find helpful is Smashing Magazine’s post: 7 Ingredients of Good Corporate Design. It provides some valuable insight into design, typography and branding among other aspects. When you’re reading this, one question you should keep in mind is how you could redesign your blog for the future.

One final issue of cleaning up our design I’d like to address is sound. That’s right, you’re blog could be turning people away because of noise. Some examples of “sound clutter” on blogs:

• Noises or beeps every time someone clicks a link. After a while it get’s annoying and effectively can become a deterrent for many people.
• Videos automatically starting to play. This can be an issue if there are more than one video streams on a post, let the reader click to play when they are ready.
• Music automatically playing when a page or post is visited. Keep in mind that we don’t all have the same musical tastes. Also, this can become a deterrent when people visit your site, they may be researching your services or products but will leave when the music starts playing, as they do not want co-workers or management to assume they are playing with the computer on company time.
• Talking avatars in our blog’s sidebar – And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say those talking avatars make a blog look cheap, unprofessional and provide no real concrete value, they are, in my opinion, tacky.

In conclusion, if I could some the above into one phrase, perhaps it would go something like this:

“Prune your blog’s design. Remove features that have not provided expected results. Keep your graphics clean and simple“.

To help you with this excersise, look at what some of the successful blogs are doing, this will provide you with ideas and visual examples of how to accomplish the “clean up” tasks above. Blow is a list of blogs that I think have good design, in varying degrees:

TechCrunch

ReadWriteWeb

techdirt

Gizmodo

So… before moving on to the other posts in this series, let’s get our design cleaned up!

What would you suggest? What have I missed? What’s your input? Share your comments below and help everyone out (don’t forget to include a link to your blog!)

It seems that launching a blog for some new and inexperienced blog owners is a huge exercise (and for some a steeper learning curve than for others). I’ve often observed clients who have launched their blogs, fail to garner traffic, further excitement and buzz, or for that matter, reach any of their goals and blogging aspirations. After a time they become discouraged as they feel let down by their blog.

One of the biggest barriers I’ve observed (among others) is that often people just don’t do anything, mainly because some don’t quite know what to do (or how) and others just need more motivation.

Some launch their blog and expect the Internet horde to rush over and visit. To be blunt, the days of “Build it and they will come”, are long over. A blog is akin to your business tools, if you don’t use it, it will become rusty. Defining some of the barriers to improving a blog is well and good, but what can we do about it?

As many of you know, I’ve recently recovered from a disaster, which prevented me from posting for a few days. As such, this has provided me further motivation to provide more valuable content; content that I’m sure you’ll all find valuable.

This post is the beginning of a series exploring hands on activities we can complete, after which you’ll have improved your blog. We’ll be completing activities such as linking, using social media, cleaning up our blog design, developing and examining our SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), creating sticky posts, improving SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and much more!

Personally, I urge you to please do three things:

1. Diligently participate in each activity.
2. Provide feedback in your comments as it’s helpful to everyone.  Learning not only about successes but also suggestions and alternatives.
3. Provide ideas or suggestions if you think I’ve missed something.

I’m taking a couple months reprieve from the seminar track as I’ve a fair bit of work to catch up on. Doing so also presents me with the time to develop my seminar track for the next year “Blogging to Grow Your Business”. While developing the content (and bouncing ideas off some of my seminar regulars) on of them challenged a chapter I working on. In particular was the issue that the success of a blog (for that matter a web site too), was NOT incumbent solely on quality, in-demand content. Several others also voiced similar issues, and it occurred to me that we’re comparing apples and oranges.

Most would agree that in the most basic terms we can appreciate that search engines find quality content attractive, thereby directing more traffic to the page containing such content. That may have been a more realistic perception for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but certainly not in today’s Social Web! Your online presence very much follows the general rules within the tangible world. Think about it… When I meet a prospective client in a brick & mortar environment, I need to be just as personable and professional as I am in my online blogging and web development environment.

The value and importance of networking does not end when we include online solutions (such as blogs) to grow our businesses. It’s the networking we do that in part that helps to ensure our blogs success. You could have all the content in the world, but are you really going to grow traffic if nobody knows about it?

Is it realistic to expect your sole source of traffic to be search engines? Of course not! The days of “Build it and they will come”, are long gone.

Needless to say, there were a flurry of email messages, so much so that I thought I’d post some answers.

First, lets break the issues down to the “features” and “benefits” issue. One of my mantras has always been:

“Benefits Sell, Features Don’t“

Think about it for a moment, all blogs have content -That’s a feature!

A blog that shows you how to save money or save time (for example), and thereby reach more people – Those are Benefits!

Which brings to mind the salient question (I think) all business owners should be asking themselves:

“What benefits can a blog provide my business?”

or

“If content is simply a feature and not the primary element of blog success, what’s in it for me?”

Subsequently this leads to some of the immediate questions that arose in our discussions, questions that I strongly feel are of the most basic surface benefits and do not really grasp the deeper concepts (which I’ll raise towards the end of this post).

• Where do I get traffic (readers)?
• Where do I get inbound links?
• How do I become visible? and so on…

It’s important for any business owner contemplating a blog to remember some of the basic aspects of business (and blogging) promotion:

• Design/Branding.
• Titles/Content.
• Interaction/Personality.
• SEO/Structure.
• Promotion/Marketing.

An aesthetically pleasing blog environment is one “surface” cornerstone. You could call it your packaging or “branding”. Your branding broadcasts a lot about you and your business. Blog branding directly reflects your business. If it looks horrible, that’s the message your sending to readers.

Titles are critical. Newspapers are masters at this. Think about it, when you look at a book, magazine or newspaper, the title is probably one of the first things you read. If the title captures interest, then readers will dig deeper into your content. Titles should try to include a call to action.

Interaction has always been a successful strategy. Using a blog to educate, inform, guide, demonstrate and so forth… is much the way successful business owners promote their operations. The same holds true in the virtual environment. Interaction shows that somebody is there to serve your clients.

SEO, if search engines know where your content is, what your most important content is and how to access it, this (among other SEO facets) goes a long way to helping search engine users (remember the focus should be on the people) find your most valuable content. The easier your blog is to navigate, the more likely readers can find the content they are looking for.

Promotion and marketing have always been important. Every business that has a blog is able to join the crowd. But, how do you get noticed in a crowd? You don’t. It’s important to bring to fruition the most important aspects that make your blog stand out and get noticed. Nobody is going to give you leadership, you have to earn it.

As I suggested, these are (in my opinion) some of the most common questions, the answers of which don’t really address the deeper aspects. Aspects that show us that it’s no longer content that’s the key to success, but rather a related web of elements.

In my experience, there are four intangible elements that contribute enormously to a blogs success. And arguably may be considered some of the most important elements!

1. Luck/Karma.
2. Charisma/Leadership.
3. Confidence/Trust.
4. Professionalism/Genuine.

Luck/Karma.

I kid you not! My other blog had several posts go viral. In one case (shortly after I launched the blog) it was sheer luck that a reader posted the link on Digg and that the Digg community moved the post to the front page. That truly was luck. (Update: I’ll blog about this later, but another aspect of good luck was during the launch of this blog, I lost all my content – But Google cache and Live cache returned copies to me).

But can we control luck? Can we make it work to our advantage? I think we can. While this could easily be a separate discussion altogether, I’d still suggest that one way to illicit good luck is to communicate effectively. Tell everyone what you need, plan your goals towards your desires, be optimistic and relax, doing so will allow you to approach any setbacks with a positive attitude. In turn this will help you to turn lemons into lemonade (as your mentality will already be in a positive zone).

Charisma/Leadership.

Participate in your community. Be the mover and shaker. Earn leadership through your insight and wisdom. Don’t micro-manage, rather stand back and look at the whole picture. Connect the people around you into a community and empower their participation. Your blog can be among the best tools to this end.

Confidence/Trust.

When you blog about a topic, mean what you say and follow through. Be genuine in your relations with readers. Always be professional. If you’re writing a controversial post, do so in a positive fashion, comments written with negative or combative language, do not build confidence in you or trust in your blog. Invite guests to contribute content to your blog, doing so goes a long way to building trust and ensuring confidence.

Professionalism/Genuine.

Impart your knowledge in a positive manner. It’s not what you know, but how you express it that helps build your blog success. I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert in online business promotion, network engineering, web development/coding or even Linux blogging. But I’ve had years of training and/or experience in these areas. In particular, my linux blog has taught me that some of the most valuable content on occasion comes from my readers!

Finally, I’d like to clarify again, I’m not suggesting that the value of content has fallen by the way side. Rather that more blogs are savvy to the issue of quality content. Therefore an area that can further a blog’s success is to focus on empowering the four intangeable elements to your fullest potential. Doing so, in my opinion, is one step towards becomming bloggersavvy!