When you want to do your thing, or even just spend some time figuring it out, does other stuff get in the way? Sometimes it’s “stuff” (picture big finger quotes) like a crammed schedule, tight finances or family responsibilities. Other times, it’s actual stuff, as in physical clutter.

Clutter Sucks

The clutter can show up in different ways. Maybe you’d love to get started on an artsy-craftsy thing, but the spare bedroom, which would make a perfect studio, is full. Or you’d like to sit at your desk and write, but the stacks of papers threaten to fall in on you. Maybe you really want to experiment in the kitchen more, but finding the utensils you need is a nightmare.

Maybe money feels tight because of all the stuff you buy that ends up as clutter (even the organizing stuff that you think will help you), or you have to buy things over and over, because they get lost in the clutter.

Not only does clutter create these physical barriers, it can be draining. If clutter is a problem for you, how much brain power do you use up looking for things, feeling frustrated about the mess, or just beating yourself up about how you should be? It can suck your energy until you don’t have any extra left to fan that spark of creativity you’re protecting and nurturing inside you.

Clutter is surprisingly complex

There’s usually a fair amount of brain clutter going on with the physical clutter. You should be able to just put things away, keep your desk organized, empty your email inbox every day. At least that’s what you tell yourself over and over. But it doesn’t always happen.

But why does it matter for you? Stop for a second and think about what you think about, when you think about your ittybiz. What do you picture? What do you focus on? What do you hear? Smell, taste, feel? Just observe, no need to draw conclusions or make judgments.

Do you have a clear picture, is it bright and inspiring? Or is it more jumbled and unclear? What are you paying attention to, what’s keeping you stuck, holding you back? What’s overwhelming you?

Now imagine what it would be like if the physical clutter were gone. If the crazy mind chatter were muted. If you could create a really clear, bright, engaging picture. This is your imagination, go crazy with it!

When you’re feeling really great about it, think about one small thing, something that feels pretty easy to do, that will help you move forward with your ittybiz. Maybe it’s file a few papers, put away some books, spend some quality time with your email box. Maybe it’s one of Naomi’s Get Off Your Ass suggestions. Doesn’t matter, just do one little thing. Then, rinse and repeat.

***

Shannon Wilkinson specializes in de-cluttering mind, spirit, home, and office. Her next course Declutter Happy Hour starts tomorrow. If you’ve ever thought you might need some help clearing out the unnecessary junk that accumulates in your life, you should seriously check it out.

“She claims that she is an excellent copywriter, yet nothing on the IttyBiz site seems to showcase this talent.”

I give the writer of this email credit for his honesty. Once your blog reaches a certain point everybody just sucks up to you because they want you to whore them out. Good for this dude.

My mother always said to me that when it comes to big business, if one person writes to you with an opinion, ten thousand people share that opinion but say nothing. Same thing applies to home business, just on a smaller scale. I have a feeling there aren’t ten thousand of you out there thinking what this guy thinks, but I’ll venture to guess he’s not the only one. I’d like to address that.

The definition of good copywriting:

Good copywriting compels your reader to do what you want them to do.

That’s it.

If you’re doing what I want you to do because of what I’ve been writing, my copy is good. If your readers are doing what you want them to do because of what you’ve been writing, your copy is good. That’s it.

What is compelling to one demographic is repulsive to others. If you know your demographic well and effectively target your copy to them, your product or service has to suck pretty badly before you’ll fail.

The objective of all copywriting is conversion.

Conversion means different things to different business models. Conversion for you might mean a new subscriber, the capture of an email address, a lead on a sale, an actual sale, whatever. What conversion means to the individual business is irrelevant.

Your copy is good if it converts. That’s it.

Not all copy is created equal.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples…

Tim Brownson is a Florida life coach. He does funky things like neuro-linguistic programming and hypnotherapy. He’s been known to write a book or two in his time and he sells those books on his site.

Pron Wear makes shirts. Really offensive shirts. These shirts are glorious in their vulgarity. Frankly, even I wouldn’t wear these shirts, and that’s saying something.

Now imagine they both have purchase buttons on their sites.

One button says, “Buy a fucking [insert product here] already.”

The other button says, “A better life is one click away.”

Now I haven’t exactly invested a lot of thought in these two lines of copy, but I have a pretty good feeling one would convert reasonably well on Tim Brownson’s site and the other on Pron Wear. If you were to switch them, they would convert badly. Reasonably good conversions indicate reasonably good copy. Bad conversions indicate bad copy.

The copy doesn’t change. The context and demographic are the differentiating factors.

It isn’t about the length of your sales letter. It isn’t about where you sit on the great yellow highlighter continuum. It doesn’t matter if your button says “Buy Now!” instead of “Sign Up!”

Good copy converts. That is all that matters. The end.

If you have a home business marketing consultant, they will often advise or supervise a split campaign — often called an A/B split.

This sounds scary. It’s not.

When I first heard this, I freely admit I freaked out. I will always associate A and B with algebra (X and Y I associate with chromosomes) and I don’t dig algebra. I am not saying this for comedic effect — I was borderline hysterical. Granted, I become borderline hysterical when I can’t calculate the tip at my friendly local tavern, but this was worse than usual. Anyway, moving on.

Splits are simple. Take your ad or your sales letter or your landing page or your spam or font or whatever, make another version that is very slightly different, and send them to two groups of equal size. Then measure the response. Easy peasy.

The reason for this is simple. When it comes to copywriting, either you’re doing it yourself — and let’s be honest, you probably don’t have a clue what you’re doing — or you’re paying someone else a hell of a lot of money to do it for you. In either case, figuring out what works as quickly and as accurately as possible is of the utmost importance. (According to MS Word, “upmost” and “utmost” are synonyms. Who knew? And I call myself a copywriter.)

Here’s what you need to know about splits, A/B, X/Y, and otherwise.

Make the difference between A and B very slight. If A and B couldn’t pick eachother out of a police line-up, you don’t have A and B. You have A and L. A and L is bad because if 90% of your sales come from L, you don’t know why. You can’t tell exactly what it was that made L better than A. (Actually, if 90% come from L, just go with L. It’s obviously fine.)

Make the difference between A and B at least marginally important. Do not change “very” to “really” in the third paragraph from the end. Any difference in effectiveness will be coincidental and not representative of a trend. If you’re new to splits, headlines are generally a good start.

Make everything else as equal as you can. If you’re doing direct mail, alternate houses. Don’t send A to a rich neighborhood and B to the projects. You need to keep everything consistent.

For God’s sake, measure it. Set up a system that can let you know which sales or leads are coming from where. This is a sadly and surprisingly easy mistake to make.

The best A/B split is one where you can hand both versions of your copy to an impartial observer, ask them which they like the best, and they don’t really have an answer. (Of course, if they don’t have an answer because both versions are shit, well, sorry dude.)

What kind of splits can you run? AdWords will monitor A/B split campaigns for you. You can have slightly different landing pages. You can have different colored fliers. Hell, you can even have different prices. Pretty much anything you want, you can split.

Some Common Splits:

Ever see a TV commercial run on a major network — one that you know isn’t a local feed — and the ad says to “Call Sue at …”? On the other commercial, they’ll say to call Jane, or Mary, or whatever. They want to see what ads are making people call. You call and say, “Yo, I wanna talk to Sue” and they know you were watching Dancing With The Stars at 9 on Wednesday in Duluth.

How about coupons? When you get a coupon in the mail and it has a numeric or alphanumeric code, it’s usually because they’re running a test. Some poor sap in the data entry department types those bad boys in and then The Powers That Be In Marketing determine what got the most asses in the seats.

Online sales and information products are notorious for splits because they’re nauseatingly easy to do, with the potential for astronomical profits. If I’m selling my ebook to you guys for $29, I can run an AdWords campaign to see if it will sell for $59 and keep tweaking until I hit the optimal price.

In other Search Engine Optimization news, I’m pleased to announce that no less than 25% of my search engine traffic typed in some combination of the words “Naomi” and “thong”. Because I’m cool like that.

Liked it? Click here to subscribe.

***

Want a small business marketing coach of your very own? Click here to get started.

Subject: Reach out and BONE someone

According to Wikipedia — which, as we are all aware, knows everything — spam as we know it today comes from the Monty Python sketch of the same name.

For your interest, Wikipedia also defines spam as:

A song by “Weird Al” Yankovic. It is a parody of R.E.M.’s song Stand. It is mostly an ode to the canned lunch meat SPAM.

The abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages.

For the sake of argument, we’ll go with the latter.

There are two types of spam in the world. Spammy spam and not-so-spammy spam.

Spammy spam is, as the definition suggests, indiscriminate, unsolicited, and sent in bulk.

Not-so-spammy spam is more discriminate but less bulk. It is also mostly unsolicited.

The key to spamming for fun and profit is understanding what it is about spam that people hate and avoiding it. People do not hate unsolicited email. I get unsolicited email all the time. People hate stupid and untargeted unsolicited email.

When Jamie is messing around on StumbleUpon at three o’clock in the morning and sends me a link, it’s unsolicited. I didn’t ask him to send it. He didn’t send me a double opt-in letter several months ago asking if I gave him permission to send me stupid jokes every now and again. Sometimes what he sends is annoying, but I don’t hate him for it. I know that on some level, he thinks I’ll like it and I usually do. I still didn’t ask for it.

How To Spam

Personalize.

If you’re looking at all the email addresses that you have in WordPress and you want to send them all an email, use their actual names. I comment as “Naomi Dunford”. Do not address an email to “Dear Naomi Dunford”. You may as well say “Dear… ah, fuck it. You and I both know this is spam. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?”

Personalize more.

Feel free to use standard body text, but tell me you hope my stomach flu is better. Mention this in the first line if you can. It shows you read my blog and then I like you. This is a very easy thing to do. Click link. Read most recent post. Read “About” page. Find something to say. Repeat with other lucky spam recipients.

Be human.

Write your home business spam like an email, not like a sales letter. If I’m selling, say, my new IttyBitty package, I write it to a friend. Then I send it out to a lot of people who are not my friends. I pretend that my good friend Melanie — who occasionally comments here and sent me a lovely email expressing her concern over the other day’s technical drama — has asked me about my package and I’m telling her. I try to say “shit” a little less than I would in an email to the actual Melanie, but you get the idea. If it’s too salesy for Mel, it’s too salesy for my email list.

Try not to sell.

If you can avoid selling anything altogether, that’s even better. If you can send an email that says, “Hey! What’s up? I haven’t seen you around in a while. We miss you” you will garner a lot more trust. And nobody will ever buy a damn thing from you if they don’t trust you.

Offer something at least marginally valuable.

When I say “offer”, I don’t mean sales offer. I mean honest-to-goodness offer. Offer your virtual friendship. Offer a funny story. Offer something you think they AS AN INDIVIDUAL might be interested in. For example, I write for Work It, Mom! If Nataly were to spam me, she should spam me with something like, “[somebody interesting] wrote a piece on how to get work done with kids in the house. I thought you might like it.” Frankly, she could send this to anybody in her database of members who works from home. But she shouldn’t send it out to everybody, because for only about 15 minutes more effort, she could send the work-outside-the-home moms something about child care or something and they would be delighted to receive a personalized email from the founder. They are happy. They love Nataly now. They are loyal.

Don’t be an asshole.

Email is not the place for hard sales. People get hard sales through email all the time and they ignore it completely. Do not bully. Do not cajole. Do not try and make me feel guilty. Do not make claims any intelligent person would know to be false.

Don’t use sales tactics.

I got an email from Teaching Sells the other day telling me that if I wasn’t one of the next 34 people who signed up, I wouldn’t get the introductory rate anymore. This wasn’t spam — I’m on the mailing list — but I wasn’t delighted. That may work on some people but it doesn’t work on someone in marketing. It just pisses me off. The worst thing was, I was going to sign up for it but now I’m tempted to drop an extra $200 to take it after the price increase purely so I can be stubborn about it and say “your sneaky sales tactics didn’t work.” Yes, I’m that stubborn.

Don’t use heavy graphics.

Heavy graphics removes the personal element and it forces me to click “display graphics”. I don’t want to. If you can’t say what you have to say using words — if you can’t get your point across adequately without big flashy pictures — it wasn’t worth saying and therefore isn’t worth reading.

Don’t use spammy text.

Do not use exclamation marks (points?). Do not use ALL CAPS. Do not use the word “free”. Do not use the word “cheap”. Do not use the word “discount”. Do not use any words that show up in the thesaurus under “free”, “cheap”, or “discount”.

This is for two reasons. One, they’ll get caught by the spam filters. If you have a thesaurus, odds are, so does their spam filter. Two, if they don’t get caught by the spam filters, they’ll get caught by the reader’s mental spam filter and the reader will mark you as spam, forever relegating you to spammer purgatory.

Put your opt-out at the bottom.

For the love of God, do not make your first line “You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up…”. Please don’t do this. You may as well just click unsubscribe for me. I barely have the time to read your email, let alone the administrative bullshit at the beginning. Everyone knows you can opt out at any time. You don’t need to beat them on the face with it.

Read it.

If someone sent YOU the email, would you read it? Would you click through? Would you buy? If not, CTRL-A Delete and start over.

Liked it? Loved it? Adored it? Click here to subscribe. It’s FREE!!!!!!! (Yes, that was irony. Poorly executed irony, but irony nonetheless.)

***

Think you need a micro-business marketing consultant? Click here to get started.

Unless you have been living under a rock for decades or do not live in an English speaking country, you’ve heard of Guerilla Marketing. You might think it’s something worthwhile trying for your home business. It would probably be a good idea for you to know what the hell it is before you embark.

If you go to Google and type in “define: Guerrilla Marketing” you will get these two responses:

1.) using unconventional methods to make sales.

2.) unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results from minimal resources.

While both seem right, they’re not. (If you happen to be Jay Conrad Levinson, the creator of the concept, and I’m wrong, please feel free to leave a comment.) The first definition is wrong because it does not address a crucial factor – resources. The second definition is wrong because it does not define resources.

Guerilla marketing is, at it’s heart, marketing on the cheap. It’s doing stuff – sometimes some pretty crazy shit – to make sales with minimal money. If you’ve ever read a book on the subject, you’ll know that Guerilla Marketing tends to be fairly resource intensive, although the resources are generally time and energy and creativity as opposed to the almighty peso.

A few things to consider:

What’s your definition of success with your marketing initiative?

If you want to make $100 million by Christmas, Guerilla Marketing is probably not your best choice.

How much time do you have?

If you’re hand-writing flyers to save on printing costs, it’s going to take some time. If you don’t have time, this is not for you.

How creative are you?

If you can’t brainstorm your way out of a wet paper bag, you might want to just take an ad out instead.

How good are you?

A little hard to be objective on this one, but it’s an important factor. If you can do a mean chicken dance, dressing up as poultry to hand out your coupons might be a good idea. If not, then, well, not.

Who is Guerilla Marketing for?

If you are energetic and creative and have more time than money and are interested in getting knee-deep into the marketing trenches, GM is bloody brilliant.

If you want to know more about Jay and his boyz and feel like reading one of his books, click here to read my review.

***

Overwhelmed? Freaking out? Borderline hysterical? Click here to get your own micro-business marketing plan. It’s not scary, I promise.

The press is people who get paid to relay information to other people via mass media.

The press is also people who do not get paid to do this, but are considered authority sources. If Anderson Cooper took a vow of perpetual poverty and decided to give up his worldly goods but still anchored for CNN, he would still be the press. Well, not the press. Not like, the whole press. He’d be some of the press.

Moving on, what’s a press release? There are a lot of possible definitions for “press release”, some of which are pretty freaking ridiculous. Seriously, use Google Definitions if you have nothing better to do. It’s funny. So maybe we won’t talk about what a press release is. We’ll talk about what an effective press release is. From my (very) brief foray into Google, here are a few:

“Description of a newsworthy occurrence written in journalistic style and mailed to news media.” From here. (Editor’s note: Don’t mail it. Nobody does that anymore. Then again, you might want to mail it BECAUSE nobody does that anymore.)

“A brief news article highlighting an important event, program, or piece of information by an organization that succinctly describes the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the story.” From here.

That’s a good definition, although I probably wouldn’t call a press release a news article. My favorite part is the last word. Story. Story story story story story story story story story story story story. That’s really important. Remember it. There may be a test. The most important thing you need to know about press releases is this:

If it wouldn’t make a good novel, it won’t make a good press release.

It might make a press release. Someone might even publish it. Barack Obama sneezes and it’s on the cover of the Post. You, however, are not Barack Obama. You are going to need a story. How do you find your story? Read on, dear reader, read on.

How To Find Your Story

Ask people. Preferably ones who love you. See what they say. Ask them outright. Say something like “Yo. What’s interesting about me?” Other people, unless they are incredibly stupid, will almost invariably have a better view of your story than you will because they are not a part of it.

I don’t personally know Erin from Durtbaz and I haven’t interviewed her extensively about her history, so I’ll make something up. Let’s say Erin’s mom wanted her to grow up and marry an accountant because Erin’s dad was a professional gambler and thus, highly unstable. She wants something better for her baby girl.

One day, Erin is clad in a dress that makes her look like a giant meringue, about to walk down the aisle to marry the accountant of her dreams and when the doors open for her to start her processional (recessional?) she sees that he’s not standing there. Why? He discovered the truth about her shady past and has also found Jesus. He wants nothing to do with her.

So Erin is destitute, doesn’t know what to do. The wedding-that-wasn’t cost her forty grand (which her dad would normally pay for, except he’s in jail for gambling related offenses) and she’s completely unemployable. While channel surfing on her sister’s couch and getting fatter by the minute, she runs across a late night airing of The Three Amigos. She hears Chevy Chase tell the old Mexican lady, “Sew! Sew like the wind!” and she’s got it.

She can sew. She could probably sew like the wind if necessary. Then she makes bags, makes a business, pays off her father’s mob debt, and lives happily ever after with heir to the mafia throne, Mario.

You can tell I got a little burned out by the end there, can’t you?

If you are still reading this, you know that this is a good story and I’m proven right. (If you’re not still reading this you don’t that I’m saying how right I am and can’t, therefore, prove me wrong.) You need interest. You need drama. You need something that will cause somebody you don’t know and never will to sit up in their Barcalounger, throw their Swanson dinner to the floor and say, “Wow!”

Your hat boutique’s semi-annual clearance sale does not fit the bill.

In order to get your story in the paper, you have to get the reporter interested. In order to get the reporter interested, you need to know what they want. What do they want? They want to keep their job. How will they get that? By writing good stories that their editors don’t hate.

Give them that, you’ve got your press coverage. Easy, huh?

Want more insight, intrigue, and IttyBiz? Click here to subscribe.

***

Want a small business marketing consultant of your very own? Click here to get started.

Why is it fun? I thought you’d never ask. There are two key elements of public relations.

One: It’s public.

I am about to have very sexy business cards. I’m telling you, people, they’re going to kick ass. Are you going to see them? Unless you live in the backwoods of Ontario, probably not. (OK, that’s not totally true. I’ll post them on the blog. But you know what I mean.) So many of your marketing efforts will be completely unnoticed by the world at large. Such a small percentage of anybody, let alone your target market, is going to see your stuff. You bust your ass and the people don’t even know about it. But with PR, the whole world could see it. Cause it’s, like, public. Get it?

Two: It’s about relations.

You can write the best damn ad copy in the world, but nobody’s going to call you for an interview. (Unless you’re David Ogilvy, who is dead, or you did the 1984 Apple Superbowl ad, which you didn’t.) Other than that, nobody gives a shit.

With PR, though, people want to hear your home business story. They want to hear what you have to say. They’re going to ask you provocative questions and if you answer them well, they will say very nice things about you and treat you like the rockstar you are. (Side note: Why does spell check pick up “Superbowl” and “rockstar”? Does my computer live under a damn rock? “Funnest” I can understand, but seriously.)

What is the difference between PR and marketing?

The short and arguable answer is that with your marketing efforts, you’re trying to actively sell something. With PR, you’re enhancing or increasing your relationship with the public. (And who said there was no truth in advertising?) This generally will result in stuff getting sold, but it’s not direct. There’s no sales funnel, no hard sell, no cold calling, no sexy brochures. You get your information out to the public via the media in some way. There are other kinds of PR — like the kind the Britney Spears needs — but you don’t really need to know about them right now. Unless maybe you do. If that’s the case, you’re reading the wrong blog, honey.

Why PR kicks small business marketing ass

Well, because you’re broke, for one. In the online world, PR is generally free. In the offline world, it’s cheap as chips. You may need to hook up your interviewer with some swag or a yummy press release (also called a PR, just to make things confusing) but other than that, you’re not spending any money you weren’t going to spend anyway.

Two, and most importantly, people still view media outlets as experts. In a world with Fox News in it, I don’t know why they do this, but they do. If you say you’re cool, no-one listens. If the newspaper or the TV or even somebody’s blog says you’re cool, the world sits up and takes notice. People are inherently lazy and they don’t want to do their own research. Remember Virginia and Santa Claus? “If you read it in The Sun, it’s so”? Yeah, people still think that way and you’re an idiot if you don’t leverage this tasty tidbit of information in your plans for world domination.

Tell me more, Naomi! Give me a real-life example!

If you’ve been paying attention, we’ve been talking about Erin from Durtbagz. If you haven’t been paying attention, Erin makes cool bags and she sells them. That’s all you really need to know at this point. What can Erin do for her PR?

Giving things to the destitute and then alerting the media is a good way to get press. Our favorite bag lady could take the least offensive of her bags and give them to people re-entering school. People who just had an ill-timed pregnancy or are getting out of rehab aren’t exactly flush. Not that I’d know. She could do this by way of her local shelter and call the local paper. The media angle? Erin is a hero.

If she’s not in the mood to hand out swag, she could go to one of these places where the flotsam and jetsam of society congregate and give a talk on how to run your own business at a young age and with no money. The media angle? Erin wants young people to succeed.

If she thinks the poor and disadvantaged are riff raff and doesn’t want to be associated with them, she could just write a press release about something remotely interesting about her situation and submit it to the local press, the press that cares about young entrepreneurs, the press that cares about bootstrappers, the press that cares about women entrepreneurs, etc. Some of them are bound to pick up the story. The media angle? Erin is a motivational success story. Or a horrible warning. Whatever. It’s press.

Soon (probably in a couple of hours since I’m really behind on posts) I’ll do something on how to do your own PR.

This is where I’d normally say something witty to make you subscribe to IttyBiz. Honestly, though, right now I’ve got nothing. Feel free to come back later. Or just subscribe. Whatever.

***

Think you need a micro-business marketing consultant? Click here to get started.

The other day, we talked about branding. Some people left stuff in comments and other people emailed me to indicate that they didn’t understand the difference between branding and image. I could come up with my own topic or I could just give the people what they want. Therefore, I give you…

Brand Vs. Image

Let’s keep the cow analogy and repeat from the other day:

“Conventionally, brands were used to identify cattle. They did not say the cow was a good cow or a bad cow. They did not convey the temperament of the cow. They just identified the cow.”

I’m going to add something to what I drunkenly wrote the other day. Brands are permanent. When a cow has “Joe The Tree-Hugging Vegan Farmer” on her ass, it’s there forever.

Therefore, your home business brand (whether it’s the flesh-searing kind or the mind-searing kind) can really be anything. It honestly doesn’t matter that much. You want to take the lower-case letter “Z”, put it in 72-point type, and plaster it from here to lunch, fine. Just make sure that everyone in your market sees that Z and thinks of you. Forever.

A brand represents your existence, but does not represent your qualities.

Image, however, has the added bonus responsibility of connoting something. It can represent you, but that’s not its primary role. Image says something about who you are, what you do, and how you do it.

Image can say you’re cool. Image can say you’re fast. Image can say you’re reliable.

Some real-life things you can actually apply

1. Brand is exclusive. Image is not.

Erin sells bags. But she doesn’t call them bags. She calls them bagz. Why? Because that’s her brand. Even in casual emails, she refers to them exclusively as bagz. She also spells “dirt” with a “u”, making it “durt.” Durt + bagz = Durtbagz and my little red squiggly spell check lines go crazy. Also, her bags have made-up street signs on them. Nobody else in the bag industry is doing this. It is her brand.

Her image, however, is cool. Her image is functional but still wearable by people under 50. Her image is low-maintenance and down-to-earth. Her image is “we understand what college kids want.”

Durtbagz with the Z and the U and the street signs is a brand. Cool, functional, low-maintenance and down-to-earth is her image. Nobody else can take her brand. Lots of people can take her image. This is why you need to have both.

2.) The line between brand and image is often very, very fuzzy.

Your brand can contribute to your image and your image can shape your brand. It’s kind of cool if they can intersect, but it’s not necessary. They probably shouldn’t actively conflict but you shouldn’t worry too much about it beyond that. You’ll want to take typeface, illustrations, and color schemes into consideration when building both your brand and your image, but we’ll talk about those later in the week.

3.) The most important thing to remember about both branding and image is consistency.

With a few exceptions, it doesn’t really matter what you present, as long as you continue to present it. If Erin all of a sudden decided to start selling upscale laptop cases, people would wonder what the hell was going on. If you went to her site and saw the blog section called “Dirty Laundry” instead of “Durty Laundry”, you would be confused. Does it really matter that she chose a “U” instead of an “I” when creating her brand? Does anybody really care? No, but it’s her brand now and it works. She didn’t need to hire a marketing company to do a research survey to discover that 78% of college students preferred “durt” to “dirt”. She just made a call and stuck with it.

As the week goes on we’ll talk more about what makes up a brand and image and how to keep your consistency. Fire questions in the comments if you’ve got ‘em. In the meantime, I leave you with…

Spam of the Day

“Feeling like your dick is working like a broken vending machine?”

Not subscribed? You really should be. Click here… you’ll thank me later.

***

Think you need a micro-business marketing consultant? Click here to get started.

Let’s pretend that you are taking me out on a date. (For my lovely female readers, this can be a “friend” date or you can pretend we’re lesbians. Doesn’t affect the story at all.) Because you’re a cheap bastard, you’re taking me to McDonald’s.

We get to the counter and I’m trying to decide between the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the Big Mac. They both look pretty good, but it’s taking me a while to decide. I step out of the line because I don’t want to piss off the people behind me and I see, to my left, another menu.

“What’s this?” I ask the nearest 15-year-old employee.

“Oh, that’s the menu for Burger King. They’re our competitor. You can go there if you want. In fact, we actually have a driver on call. He’ll take you there, if you like. You can go right now! You don’t even have to come back.”

Because you’re not insanely stupid, I won’t tell you how ridiculous this is. It does lead me to ask, though… why are you running other people’s ads on your home business blog?

At the moment, I’m feeling neither benevolent nor patient. I don’t really feel like holding anybody’s hand. I don’t care that you made $4.21 off Adsense in July and if you keep it up for a few more months, you might just make enough cash to cover your hosting.

If you run a blog that promotes your product or service, do not accept money to shill someone else’s product or service. To half of you, this is obvious. To the other half, this is not. To the half who find it obvious, I’m not talking to you. Read on if you feel like it. Go do some work if you don’t. To those of you who don’t find it obvious, just listen and don’t argue.

Let’s say you run a company that offers custom digital illustration. Let’s also say that you’re pretty good at what you do, and your blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic at the moment. You’re thinking, let’s make some money off this whole internet thing. So you pay attention to what the SEO gurus tell you and optimize your site with the appropriate keywords. Let’s say “custom illustration” is what you’re going for. You slam your site with “custom illustration” and wait for the Google traffic to come in. You also happen to be running Adsense.

What happens? Since Adsense picks up on your keywords, it sends ads your way that use those keywords. In our custom illustrator’s case, they send ads for other custom illustrators.

In Google’s mind, that’s relevancy. In your mind, that’s competition.

If you sell a freelance writing ebook, they will run ads for other freelance writing ebooks. If you sell gift baskets, they will send ads for other gift baskets. And so on. I won’t continue. Would you go to any offline business and find them advertising for their competitors? Or even businesses that aren’t their competitors, for that matter?

There should be only one person they can find to give their money to, and that person is you.

Homework

If you’re selling something of your own, whether it’s a product or a service, remove contextual advertising RIGHT NOW. Ugly blank space may send buyers away, but not as fast as other people’s ads will.

Are you subscribed yet? Click here.

***

Think you need a micro-business marketing coach? Click here to get started.

Branding is a very big deal these days. We talk about personal branding and business branding. There are many definitions of the term, but here’s one I like so you don’t have to go searching for it on your own:

“A traditional advertising method used to elicit a latent response from a target based on cumulative impressions and positive reinforcement.” (from AdServerSolutions, via Google dictionary)

Conventionally, brands were used to identify cattle. They did not say the cow was a good cow or a bad cow. They did not convey the temperament of the cow. They just identified the cow.

That is branding.

People think that a brand is a logo.
People think a brand is a uniform.
People think a brand is a storefront, a package, a company car.

A brand is none of these things – it’s a combination of them, and so much more. A few days ago, in response to one of my posts, Bill wrote this:

“Ever seen an ad for some service company, like the lawn care guys (excuse me, greenery maintenance specialist), and in the ad the guy’s driving the truck with the logo, and he’s wearing the short-sleeve shirt with the logo, and he’s wearing the hat with the logo., and he’s holding the clipboard with the logo. His shorts likely have the logo…. Branding is useful, but not super-useful. It’s almost, I don’t know, tertiary — like, yeah, I work here, see, I have the company logo on my butt. However, it doesn’t prove that I know squat. Think of the Geek Squad people. Initially, the image was interesting — gosh, so uncool, they must really know what they’re doing! … But now, the Geek Squad image is more of a Yeah, Sure, Right, I Really Believe that someone smart and bright will show up and do PC magic for me. Uh-huh. Its just an image. Didn’t I see you folding shirts at WalMart last week? It doesn’t convey ability; it just conveys that you’re on our payroll.”

This is true. A brand does not convey ability. It’s not supposed to. A brand is supposed to convey consistency.

Geek Squad puts the logo on the underwear of their tech guys not to make us think that Best Buy is more competent. They put it there to make us think of Best Buy. Whether we think well of them or ill of them, we think of them. That’s what they want, and that’s what they’ve got.

Ellen Degeneres has a very solid brand but she doesn’t wear a shirt that says “Ellen” on it. She doesn’t need to. She wears tuxedo pants and does funny dances on her talk show and wears minimal make-up. If you saw some other short haired blond pushing fifty, dancing around in tuxedo pants, you would think she looked like Ellen. That is good branding.

Branding And Your Itty Bitty Business

Since you don’t have a budget to set up a bunch of nerds in ridiculous looking vehicles, you’re going to need to find another way to brand yourself. With a smaller budget this tends to take more time, but it’s not only possible, it’s easy.

The For Dummies Version Of Branding:

Popular nostalgia has an image about the 1950s housewife. She worked hard, she cooked, she took care of the kids. Every now and again, her husband would take her out for dinner and the kids would sit around her vanity, watching her get ready. She would very carefully take her special occasion perfume out of wherever she put it so the kids wouldn’t get into it, and dab it behind her ears.

When it was time for mom and dad to go to dinner, she would hug the kids and they would smell her perfume.

Today, 50 years later, those kids remember exactly what their mother smelled like. If they smell that perfume on anyone else in the world, for the rest of their life, they will think of their mother.

That is branding.

They don’t necessarily think nice things about their mother. They might think of how much of an alcoholic she was and how every time she made a casserole she would stare sullenly into the sink, smoking a cigarette and ignoring her kids. But they think of her and only her.

That is branding.

At its heart, branding is about being the same. It’s about conveying the same image, each and every time you perform a function. Yes, a logo is a part of that. Every letter you send should have the same logo and typeface at the top. Every time your customers come to your website, they should see either what they saw last time or a big sign that says “Check out our redesign.” And every time they see you, as a person, they should identify with your brand.

As “some other Naomi” said in the comments, she’s a designer so she can walk around with antlers on her head and nobody would think anything of it. That’s part of her brand. Her brand is not “some other Naomi who wears antlers on her head.” Her brand is “some other Naomi who does some pretty crazy shit with her wardrobe.” If she showed up in khakis and a twinset, she would be lynched.

Homework

What’s your brand? If you’re like 98.372% of small business owners, you don’t have one. That’s OK. You’re in the majority. Most people don’t really expect you to have a brand. They expect you to wither into obscurity. Your job now, though, is to find yourself a brand. Think of something that embodies you, something you can stick to. Then think of what you’ll have to do to make that brand a reality.

Oh, and while I’m talking about branding, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you to go read this post. It’s short. Come back and say something when you’re done.

Liked it? Click here to subscribe. Then I can write a big long post on how I got so many subscribers in so little time.

***

Overwhelmed? Freaking out? Borderline hysterical? Click here to get your own small business marketing plan. It’s not scary, I promise.