I love ads. No, really – I do.

I watch movies for the previews, I watch TV for the commercials (OK, I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials). As a marketing consultant I pay attention to ads in a way that most people don’t.

I save ads. I have a portfolio of business cards. I have a file folder of my favorite direct marketing pieces, magazine ads, and newspaper ads. I love ads that make me laugh, ads that I can relate to, and ads that really grab my attention.

I recently wrote a blog post About Business Cards. As I was flipping through my business card portfolio one word came to mind, “boring.” So many cards were dull and looked just like the one next to it. In this over-communicative era, it is more important now than ever that your ads stand out!

The business cards got me thinking about the other marketing material, marketing collateral, and ads that I love. Here are a five of my favorite pieces from my files. (Yes, your opinions will vary. This is just a small sample of ACTUAL ads I have received. I am a 27 year old female and mother of one. – These ads worked on me.)

Maybe this one is just so effective on me because I have four sisters; I can relate. This ad addresses a woman’s never-ending search for the perfect pair of jeans. If your sister wants to steal these, they must be goooood.

“The two words every crazy-busy, socially overachieving multitasker wants to hear.” When this came in the mail I knew they were talking to me. I swear, whoever designed this studied both demographics and psychographics. They knew what would make me open this mailing. The inside is a pop up of the phone “Palm Pixi.”

“We’d like to apologize for just how effective Vicks Vaporub can be.” What a combination. This ad has a great emotional appeal. What parent wants to see their active child lying listless? It also clearly shows how effective their product is.

This postcard actually was addressed to me! It says, “Welcome Terra Fletcher.” The back looks like a handwritten postcard welcoming me to the Grand Canyon and Smoky Mountains. What can I say? People love seeing their own name. I’ve seen a similar idea that put the recipients name on the front license plate of a sports car. That’s the stuff that fuels daydreams.

“Will the Internet kill magazines? Did instant coffee kill coffee?” This effective, logical headline got me to read the entire ad. This ad is simple, but a different kind of simple – not as visual as most of these ads, but easy on the eyes and it addresses the question advertisers have been asking themselves.

By the way, none of these are ads I’ve designed. I have (in my humble opinion) put together some pretty great pieces for myself and for my clients. The hardest part for me to design a marketing piece is when I’m limited by the company I’m working with. We are so worried about offending, being misinterpreted, or NOT looking like everyone else – that our ads are BORING! Don’t be afraid to be bold. Be different. Get noticed.

A really inspiring resource is Outrageous Advertising, That’s Outrageously Successful by Bill Glazer. It’s a really easy read with lots of images.

What are your favorite ads? Why do they work? And importantly, do you remember the company associated with them?

By:  Terra L. Fletcher, owner Fletcher Freelance – business writing, marketing, and public speaking

Photo Credit: koekiehaas on Flickr

Print Marketing has been around for centuries. These days most companies have some form of print marketing standard that is in place. It might be as simple as colors that match the overall theme of the company or it could be an extensive line of brochures to match every aspect of their business.

The web as a form of marketing has only been around for less than two decades.  One of the biggest struggles within companies is the need to get their company website online and up to date. In a rush to “just get something up there” brands gets lost. Many companies forget to keep their brand consistent and wind up creating a second brand on the web. Having two brands can get very dangerous for a company.

Stay Consistent

If there is one piece of your branding that should never change, it is your logo. Your logo on your business cards should match the logo on your brochures which should match the logo on your website. Your logo is the face of your company and should never change on one marketing piece and not on another.

Keeping your brand for a long period of time is not a bad thing. If you have a company who has been in business for a while, your customers and potential customers probably have a good idea of your logo and other things associated with your brand.

Tag lines and catch phrases should remain consistent between print and web as well. If you are using a tag line in your print materials and completely leave it off of their website, customers might not be sure if it is the same company, especially if they’ve known your tag line for years. Not only are tag lines and catch phrases important, but it is also important to carry any images and colors from your print materials over to your website. This is something that customers identify as part of your brand. Knowing that they got a brochure that is blue and gray from you and showing up a website that is black and red could cause a lot of confusion.

Branding becomes incredibly important if you have a good number of long time customers. People don’t like change. If they go to your website to look up a phone number to give you a call and it looks completely different from anything your company has ever given them in paper form could throw them completely off.

For example: Hershey’s has maintained the same colors on their wrappers since the company started. What would you do if all of the labels were suddenly bright yellow and had a different font? You’d be confused, wouldn’t you?

Believe it or not, things as simple as address and phone number can cause confusion too. Advertising a local number in your brochures and an 800 number on your website could leave customers wondering which one they should call. Do they both go to the same place? If you have multiple offices make it clear throughout brochures and the website which office matches which address and phone number. Sometimes, the fewer options someone has the better.

If you do have multiple locations, create separate landing page websites for each of those locations and direct your customers to the specific location they should call. This will cut down on a lot of confusion

Unify Your Message

Chances are if you have print materials, someone has put a decent amount of time into writing the copy and designing the brochures. These brochures can be translated up to the website in the form of pdf downloads or can even be used as the main website content.

Not all of your customers will have the chance to meet you in person to get a copy of your brochure so it is important to make that accessible to them in more ways than just the printed copy. If you do decide to have separate copy for the website and your print materials, make sure it sends the same general message out.

For example: if your brochures feature employees and show off their dedication to your customers, translate that over to the website. Don’t ignore them all together when it comes to the website.

The same overall language should be used throughout both as well. If you use a lot of technical terms on your website to try and rank for specific keywords, but your brochures are light and easy to read. Customers will ignore your website completely and go directly to the brochures. Make sure each cover what you want your customers to read.

Keep Your Social Media at the Same Standard

Keeping your brand consistent online does not only apply to your website. If your company has taken the plunge into social media, make sure those accounts carry the theme over. If you’re using a website such as Twitter, the background should be similar to that of your website’s background. Your logo should be displayed somewhere on the page as well as in your avatar.

For websites such as Facebook which give you limited customization, there is a plug-in called FBML that you can use to customize one of the tabs. Use that to include a page of your website or a page similar to your website to keep your branding there. You can set that tab as the default one, so the first thing your Facebook visitors see is your brand. Also, make sure to use your logo as your Facebook photo.

Going down the road of two separate brands is a dangerous one. If you have started going down that road stop immediately and rethink which one will benefit your company the most. In the long run it is better to have to rework either your print or your web up front instead of trying to maintain two separate brands.

If you work as a freelancer or other type of solopreneur where you market your products and services based on your name (rather than a company name), your name is your brand. What people think when they see or hear your name will influence whether or not they do business with you. That’s why independent professionals need to be aware of brand marketing as it applies not just to products or corporate images, but as it applies to them. We call it “personal branding.”

Why is Personal Branding Important?

Personal branding is especially important for the solopreneurs of the world because their name conjures up a certain image with customers or prospective customers. That means every time you post to a blog, interact with others on a social network, contribute to a forum, or even send an email, people are going to form an opinion about you and associate your name with that image. If you fall into that group, you want your name to convey a positive image — to generate immediate trust. Does yours? Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you’re a writer and you specialize in writing online sales letters. How you choose to promote your brand (your name) can have serious implications for your career. For example, you might decide to charge $50 per sales letter (knowing that good sales letter writers usually charge several hundred to several thousand). You’ve basically chosen to market your services primarily on price (never a good idea for service marketing, but that’s another topic for another time).

By promoting your services in that way, your personal brand becomes one of “the cheap guy.” That’s not a great image to build in any kind of business writing. “Cheap” in that market comes with a built in lack of trust (not to mention that it hinders your ability to earn anywhere near an industry standard income).

Becoming “the cheap guy” could lead to worse branding issues down the road. People who undercharge for services generally take on a lot of projects. They have to if they want to earn enough to get by comfortably. That, in turn, often leads to burnout. The person (in this case a writer) has to overload their schedule. If that’s done consistently for a while, they’ll start to miss all of their deadlines, forget about projects altogether, or run into other problems. That “cheap guy” brand image might just become “the unreliable guy.” Remember, word spreads.

On the other hand, you could build an image for yourself (and your name) as a responsible and respectable professional who commands higher rates. Ask yourself “if I could afford to hire any copywriter to write my sales letter, who would it be?” The name you answered (assuming you’ve heard of any sales copywriters) has a strong personal brand. How did they build it?

Brand Marketing Tips for Building a Strong Personal Brand

That writer you thought of is probably pretty successful. Most of the top sales letter writers probably don’t even have an opening to take on new work right away because the demand is so great. Wouldn’t you love to be in their shoes, able to pick and choose your projects, have waiting lists, be able to turn down work regularly, etc.? It’s a nice feeling. But how do you get there?

You build your personal brand, and you become a trusted name in your industry!

In this example, the writer may have done any number of things. Chances are good that they have their own website (after all, if they can’t sell themselves online, why would anyone hire them to sell their products and services for them?). Maybe they have a blog where they position themselves as a thought leader in the copywriting field. It’s also likely that they’ve published at least one book. They probably have one or more mailing lists and newsletters. They might even have a subscription site, speak at seminars, or offer online courses.

They go beyond practicing their craft — they also teach it. They become authorities in the field.

Education as a Personal Brand Builder

People love it when you share your knowledge and teach them more about what you do. It shows them that you know what you’re talking about. It gives them a better feel for your style. It also makes them respect your work a little more. Let me explain.

I used to be a PR consultant before becoming a full-time writer. I specialized in online PR. A service with a quickly growing demand at the time was press release writing for online syndication (combining good old PR with SEO benefits). While demand was growing, I found that a lot of online business owners really didn’t understand news releases and how to use them. So I taught them. When they had questions, I answered them. I blogged about them. I wrote and sold an e-book teaching them how to write their own.

Over time I released another version of that e-book — this time for free. It included a marketing message (similar to marketing white papers) promoting my services. Essentially, I was teaching my prospective clients the basics of doing what I do for them. People downloaded it, and better yet they put it to use.

“Why is that good?” you might be wondering. “Didn’t you lose money?” Actually I made more money! Here’s why:

Credit: BigStockPhoto.com

The people who downloaded my e-book broke into three primary categories: those who wrote their own press releases and were satisfied, those who wrote their own press releases but weren’t satisfied, and those who either tried or just read about writing their own press releases but decided there was more to it than they originally thought.

Members of group one may not have ultimately hired me to write their press releases. But they did remember me when they needed other PR consulting or writing work done. They also passed my name along to others who did hire me (referrals are the lifeblood of many successful solopreneurs).

Several people in group two decided that since they weren’t happy with the results from their own press release, they’d hire a pro next time (me in this case) and compare the results. Several of them have turned into long-term clients.

Those in group three should be your favorite. They’re the ones who originally might have thought your work was easy. After they learn more about it, they have a new appreciation for what you do, and that’s a great start to any business relationship. They’ll be the most likely group to hire you. Basically, your free information reminds them that time is money and that their time is better spent on something other than trying to master your job.

Giving away knowledge doesn’t make you less marketable. If anything, the opposite is true. And it works for any type of independent professional! Give it a try. Share your knowledge openly in online communities or in consultations. Release informational products in your niche or industry (free or paid). Show people that they can trust you, that you’re worth hiring, and that you can get the job done!  Those are the things you want associated with your personal brand as a solopreneur. If you need help coming up with specific ideas for how you can showcase your industry knowledge when marketing your personal brand, check out our article on how business freebies can help you land more sales for more examples of information-sharing tactics.

Beyond the Basics of Personal Branding

Personal branding goes far beyond your selling points. It’s not just about putting information out there that you want to be associated with your professional brand. It’s also about keeping other, less appropriate, information at bay. Remember that your name is probably associated with more than just your business on the Web.

If you have personal social networking accounts, you might want to consider keeping that information private if the personal information you talk about could tarnish your personal brand (for instance, if you like to brag about your drunken flings on Facebook, you probably don’t want your potential clients seeing that).

Think about personal branding this way: When someone searches for you online, what will they find? What does it say about you? By all means, be authentic. It’s a part of building trust with your target market. But there’s a difference between being authentic and leaving yourself completely exposed. Know your limits. Know your comfort level. And most importantly, know what is and isn’t “TMI” for your own target market.

Now get out there and start building your personal brand!

Whether you want to promote a business or improve your own professional visibility, being interviewed online can help. You want to make yourself available as an authority source in your industry, but how do you go about it? How can you get the attention of people in your niche who are looking for professionals to interview? More importantly, why are online interviews important?

Benefits of Being Interviewed Online

Any time you’re asked to do an interview as an expert source, there are positive outcomes. For example the more often your name and quotes appear in reputable print, broadcast, or online interviews, the more likely it is that people will start to recognize your (or your company’s) name. The idea is to go beyond name recognition though, and more towards trust. When people interview you because they trust your feedback on a certain type of subject matter, that trust can translate to other things (for example, it can mean more book sales if you’re an author).

While all interviews can offer this recognition or visibility, online interviews can have added benefits. Let’s still assume you’re an author, and let’s compare an online interview with a major news source in the niche of your book with a radio interview. Both can reach a large audience potentially, allowing you to promote your book. But an online interview may make it easier to drive direct book sales (because you can sometimes have a link included in that interview directly connecting potential buyers to your sales page, whereas with a radio interview you have to rely on listeners hearing the URL, remembering it until they’re at a computer, and then manually choosing to visit your website–or buy your book in a brick and mortar store).

The online interview allows direct connections between the reader and your website where people can find out more information. A link in an online interview can do even more though. Links from authority websites (which could range from a major news site to a related blog in the niche) help to increase your own site’s search engine rankings over time. What that means is that the links in your online interviews will continue to help more people find your site (and buy your products) for weeks, months, or even years to come by helping to boost your search engine visibility.

Speaking of search engines, keep in mind that an online interview will likely be indexed in the host’s archives. When their own interview page is archived and indexed in search engines, it will also continue to attract traffic over time, sending more people to your website through the link contained within it.

How to Make Yourself Available for Online Interviews

Now that you know why online interviews can be beneficial to your business or career, let’s explore some of the ways you can present yourself as a possible interviewee or expert source in your industry.

1. Pitch Letters - These are short business letters which you use to pitch a specific story angle or idea to your choice of websites or blogs. In the pitch letter, you should explain why you’re an authority source worth consulting on the topic. (A pitch shouldn’t revolve around your own company – to release company news, use a news release instead.)
2. Letters of Introduction - These are similar to pitch letters, except you won’t suggest a specific story idea. Instead, you just introduce yourself and your credentials to hand-picked journalists and bloggers, letting them know that you’re open to future interviews if they’re later writing a story where your expertise could come in handy. Don’t forget to let them know how to contact you.

3. Expert Directories - Another option (and a good one if you’re currently relatively unknown, where a pitch letter may not be enough) is to sign up with expert directories. You sign up and list your areas of expertise. You give permission for journalists to contact you about stories through the site, and those writers visit the directories to browse for possible sources when they’re researching a story. Some of these services are free, and others require a paid membership. Two popular options are ProfNet and ExpertClick.
4. Help a Reporter Out (HARO) - HARO is like an expert directory that works in reverse. Rather than writers searching for listed experts, they put out calls for certain types of people they want to interview. You can sign up to receive daily emails listing source calls, and when someone is looking to interview a source in your specialty area, you can contact them.

If you want to make yourself a more attractive source to large online media outlets, try to get a few smaller niche interviews under your belt first. You can do that by personally reaching out to bloggers, who are often happy to have expert sources (especially if you pitch them with a story idea).

Get comfortable with all of the different types of interviews you may be asked to do, from telephone to email interviews. Give outlets multiple options for contacting you, and try to be available at their convenience (news sites can have short deadlines, so if you’re not available, they’ll find someone else who is).

Whatever you do, don’t pass up the opportunity to get interviewed online. No matter what your niche or industry is, chances are good that someone who has a reach with your audience would love to hear from you!

There is no question that the nature of the Information Age has changed the face of marketing forever.  Businesses big and small finally understand that having a website isn’t an option – it is necessity.  There isn’t a potentially successful business plan created today that doesn’t include a budget for building a website.  The vast majority of business owners have also begun to understand that simply having a website isn’t enough and that a sound Internet marketing plan is just as important as the existence of the website itself.

The landscape of Internet marketing, and search marketing in particular, is changing.  These days just optimizing your company’s website to perform well in search results isn’t sufficient.  Repetition is the key to success in the search results these days in much the say way it is in traditional marketing.  With respect to the search results, that means having multiple results on the page that correlate to your brand.  For instance, a search result for “athletic shoes” that includes multiple references to Nike is a search marketing success.

The way to accomplish that is by publishing content that references your brand or what you offer (i.e. the keywords used to find your products and/or services) on multiple sources, rather than relying solely on creating content for your website alone.  The fact is that the more sources upon which you create and publish unique content, the greater chance you have of monopolizing multiple results in the SERPs for your target keywords and successfully building your brand online.

Squidoo – Search Engine Friendly Content & 400,000+ Visitors Per Day

Perhaps one of the most well-known user-generated content sites is Squidoo.  Founded in 2005 by Seth Godin, best selling author and blogger, Squidoo boasts nearly 1 million user-generated “lenses” – the term Squidoo uses to reference to its user’s pages – and is among the 300 most popular sites in the United States.

With that popularity comes an enormous opportunity to connect with Squidoo users via your own personal lenses.  Not only that, Squidoo touts a search engine friendly format that increases the chances that someone doing a keyword search in search engines like Google and Yahoo! will find your lens in their search results.

Unlike many user-generated content and Social Media sites that use “NOFOLLOW” links, the links within your Squidoo lenses are “FOLLOW” links.  That means linking to pages of your website in a Squidoo lens will help to build link popularity.  If you’re going to create content for a user-generated site, getting the bonus of some added link popularity for your own site certainly helps to kill two birds with one stone.

eHow – 2 Million Pages & 16 Million Unique Visitors Monthly

The nature of eHow is a bit different than Squidoo, in that the entire site is essentially dedicated to “how-to” and tutorial type content.  That said, eHow is the most highly trafficked user-generated content site we will mention here.  In order to appeal to the eHow audience, it is important that your content follow a “how-to” approach.

For instance, if you sell headphones, creating an article for eHow entitled “Choosing The Best Headphones”.  If you sell cars, writing an article entitled “How To Improve Your Gas Mileage” would be applicable both to your industry and the format of eHow.  Unlike Squidoo, eHow does not provide users with the added bonus of “FOLLOW” links.  Any links you include within your articles will provide an avenue for users to find your website more easily, but it will not have a positive impact on your link building efforts.

HubPages – Search Friendly Infrastructure & Revenue Generation For Contributors

It’s important to note that the vast majority of user-generated content sites, including Squidoo and eHow, provide revenue generation opportunities for their contributors, but HubPages was the first to begin paying its contributors up front for articles they believed to be of particularly high quality – rather than paying them based on ads clicked by visitors to the articles alone.  They elected to do so in part because of the increase in exposure such well-crafted articles would bring to HubPages in the search results.

Why is HubPages so focused on quality articles?  It turns out that quality vs. quantity is the very motto of HubPages.  HubPages set out to overtake their closest competitor, Squidoo, in what – at the time – was considered someone radical and unconventional.  First, they removed all adult content from the site.  They also decided to force publishers who were using HubPages primarily to promote individual products and service to revise the articles to be more information in nature and reduce the excessive linking that had previously occurred.  Personal HubPages, duplicate content copied from other sources and pages that linked out to questionable sites (like known phishing sites, excessive pop-up ad sites and URLs that redirect were unpublished.

In the short term this reduced the overall traffic to HubPages enormously.  In the long run, though, the increase in the quality of the site content won out.  HubPages is now comparable, if not equal, to Squidoo in terms of traffic – despite the fact that HubPages continues to focus on quality information that does not include adult or promotional/marketing content that typically generates a lot of traffic.

Other User-Generated Content Sources

Squidoo, eHow and HubPages may be among the most popular user-generated content sites today, but they’re not the only games in town.  Other user-generated content sources to check out include:

Associated Content
Suite101.com
Bukisa
Today.com
Xomba

These user-generated content sites are among the most underutilized mediums for online reputation management and branding.  Sites like eHow, HubPages and Squidoo provide site owners with a unique opportunity to create content and publish it using their search engine friendly platforms.  Doing so not only gives you another information source that may be found in the search engines, but user-generated content sites also have an audience of millions of visitors on a monthly basis.

Remember – if you’re working to build a brand or maintain a company’s online reputation, the more sources you use to publish and promote content, the better.

Creating a consistent brand, whether its for personal or corporate branding, can be a key feature to making you or your company stand out as a reputable source of information. For this article I’ll be taking a look how one search engine conference uses this for, all of it’s visual branding.

In December of 2006 Danny Sullivan announced his SMX Search Engine Conference series, would be starting in 2007. While everything wasn’t in place at the time of the announcement, the site did come to life a few weeks later with this logo.

The logo used the same color palette as the existing Search Engine Land to help the audience make the mental association.

The SMX conference series used a similar but not identical image as a favicon for the website:

If you aren’t familiar with a favicon it’s a small square graphic that appears in the address bar of newer browsers. It also appears as the icon for a URL if you have bookmarked it. This is often useful if on toolbars where the name has been removed to save space, see if you can identify the links from just the favicon images on my toolbar shown below.

Another very similar but not identical version is used by SMX for off-site avatars. This logo can be found on the Flickr Profile, Twitter Profile, and Youtube profile.
Here are some tips on how you can apply this to your website:

• Use a consistent color palette, using red on your website, but blue on your Youtube page, and Orange on your blog can create brand confusion.
• Most website logo’s or mastheads are horizontal, talk with your designer to see if you can get a square version or use a isolated section of your logo that can be cropped into a square.
• Favicon’s are really small (usually 24 pixels by 24 pixels), try to use something that is still readable or will have a visual impact at that size. Here’s a free tool I use to convert graphics into favicon format.
• Keep a list of all the places you have a profile or use the logo, if you change or update you want to keep everything as in sync as possible.
• Try to get a print or high res version of your logo, you can use it for your business cards, but you can also put it in a press section of your website. Go through the effort of creating a few different sizes (small, medium, large) in both horizontal and vertical orientations. Not everyone knows how to create, reduce and sharpen graphics, if you do it for them you have a better chance of controlling the quality if they do use it and link to you.