Brand Voice Development for Values-Based Business

Hello, again.

I’ve been away from my blog for a bit.

I’m sure you’ve been away from yours, too, at one time or another. How long were you MIA? Nine days? Five weeks? Fourth quarter 2011?

If there’s one thing we creative entrepreneurs intuitively understand about finessing an online platform, it’s the power of consistency in brand messaging. Not just consistency in terms of what you say and how you say it, but in terms of where and how often.

We’re wired to ascertain that a consistent brand message adds up to things like equity, integrity, safety, security, stability.

We make the leap that a consistently messaged brand is more likely to follow through on its promises.

In short, showing up is always good for business.

And so one of the biggest anxieties we face as online entrepreneurs is how to re-enter the flow of our brand conversation when we’ve been away for any length of time {ahemtwomonthsformeahem}.

Half the battle of reentering the convo is anxiety around what we think people have been making of our absence.  Where has he been? Has his business flatlined?What the heck is she doing? People are waiting to hear from her.

Well, yes and no.

The truth is: your brand, your business, is the center of your own universe. No one is more attuned to it than you are.

And your people’s business is the center of theirs. And so . . .

Your brand matters to people insofar as they derive value from it, or appreciate you as a person, your brand notwithstanding {which has very little to do with how successful you’ll be in business}.

Inevitably, unless you’re a Super Trudger Get It Done type of person, or you are brilliant about pre-scheduling or repurposing old content when you know you’ll be away for a while, you will step away from your blog at some point. For various and sundry reasons.

And then, if you’re serious about creating conversation with your people and using a blog as a tool to market the value you provide through your business, you’ll return to it.

And when you decide to return, you need a strategy.

How do you reconnect with an audience you’ve hidden yourself away from?

How do you step back into your self-ordained spotlight and start messaging the truth in your business again?

Worth Noting: We’ve all seen this I’m ba-aaaaaack thing done badly, with apologies, laundry lists of reasons both pedantic and dramatic, and vows to never disappear again.

I know you want a way to start back up that feels on-brand for you and positions you as purely and powerfully as you want to show up. {When you’re damn good and ready.}

First, though, there’s this: the fact is, there are many good reasons a blog convo might go AWOL. We all have lives behind these computer monitors, and only fractals of them get shared in the public online space {for good reason}. People go through stuff, stuff that sometimes has to take precedence over our business’s public convo.

And if you’re reading this post, you’re most likely an entrepreneur who is running a business, and as every entrepreneur knows, sometimes doing the work of your business precludes working on your business.

Truth: You can have your busiest months ever without ever blogging once. Love that magic. And make no mistake about it — your current busy-ness is due in part to the months you were faithfully creating free public content. {Brand equity, baby.} All this to say that while blogging is an excellent tool, a thriving business is not necessarily an end product of a busy blog.

So how do we pick up where we left off — or begin anew at a new point in the convo — when it’s been a while?

Here are 5 ways to gracefully re-enter your brand convo when you’ve been MIA.

1. Just start talking.

No need to explain your absence. Just get back on the blogging horse and ride. Open the gate and enter the pasture. Jump the fence and get into the game. Put your oar in the water and start paddling. [Insert your preferred metaphor here.]

In the long run, an absence of two weeks, two months, or even six months is no big whoop. If your brand conversation continues as promised and remains reasonably consistent over time, the collective effect of your messaging is what shakes out in the end, not whether you blogged weekly every Tuesday and Thursday, or seven times a month.

Your impact over time is measured more in being powerfully relevant and present with purpose and value, not just consistency. Consistency may get you Google juice, but Google does not make or break a business.

2. Share the fractal of your why-I-was-away story that is most relevant to your people’s growth.

Sometimes there’s a benefit to your readers and prospects in sharing part of your MIA story. But it’s all in how you frame it.

People can only hook on to the parts you show them, and again, that’s for good reason. There’s no need to intertwine your personal story with the journey you’re shepherding or modeling for your readers and prospects — any more than you want to, that is.

As a good friend recently shared with me, when she sees people online spouting disappointment or grousing indulgently, it gives her a reason to look for cracks in that person’s business. It erodes their brand integrity in her eyes, even if the subject of their grousing is totally unrelated to what they provide through their business. A crack is a crack is a crack.

Not saying you need to be a Pollyanna Sparkleface every time you push publish on a Tweet, but in general, successful entrepreneurs are hella mindful of where and how their public convo is landing at all times. And they are in control of what gets shared when and where and for what purpose, whether that means complete ‘transparency’ or strategic framing, or anything in between.

3. Come back bearing gifts.

A nice touch when taking up your virtual pen for a longtime-no-talk audience? Make something for them. A new freebie. A report on 50 Things I Learned While Not Blogging {That I Only Could Have Learned This Way}. A video of you highlighting some of the cool things you did while you weren’t blogging.

Caveat: See Idea No. 2, above. Make sure the gift you’re offering connects to the material you teach through your brand, to the value you provide, to the services you sell. For instance, a new autoresponder series to get people primed for the next thing you’ll launch {speaking of, see Idea No. 4, below}.

And please do not offer your products or services for free as a ‘compensation’ for your absence. This only elevates the significance of your absence and puts you in the position of ‘owing’ your audience, which, when it comes to free content, you don’t. Ever.

4. Re-engage with a refreshed direction.

Chances are your time away from blogging has given you a fresh perspective on your industry, your work, your platform, your message, your future direction. Perspective-taking — either voluntary or involuntary — is a common reason for entrepreneurs being MIA from their blogs. Also, being in a heavy content-creation season for new products, programs, and services can be all-consuming, as can working on client projects, and sometimes it can feel as if there’s no creative energy {or time} left for your blog.

When you’re in a season of refreshing your direction, hold fast to the belief that everything is in divine and perfect order when it comes to when you rejoin your brand convo. You’ll come back when it’s time. When the situation is most favorable. When all the elements are ready and in place. And the people who are there to receive you will be your right people.

If you are returning with a refreshed brand direction, share it with your people! Remember, share with them only the fractal they need to get clear on where you’re taking them next and why, so that they can make a decision about coming with you {or not}. You don’t need to download the fullness of your huge epiphany with them in your return post. {It’ll be too much for them to take in.}

5. Redefine what blogging is for you & your audience.

In my work with my clients, I often hear that you feel pressure to be the ideal blogger, to turn out perfect posts three times a week plus a startlingly compelling e-newsletter, all while running your business, doing most of your own admin, working with your clients, planning your next group coaching retreat, and creating paid digital content.

You wear beaucoup d’entrepreneurial hats. {The feathered fedora you adore, as well as the vintage birdcage your bossy sister swears looks amazing on you, plus all the other ones you’re supposed to wear.}

This is a lot. And it’s understandable that the pressure inherent in your stack of hats makes you want to run and hide from your own blog.

The solution here? Reclaim blogging for your most righteous self, in your own purest and most powerful voice, by redefining it for yourself and your audience.

You’ve read all of the best blogging practices advice — any online entrepreneur worth her salt’s been schooled and steeped in it.

How about writing your own best blogging practices manifesto? No need to share it with the world {unless it’s on-brand for you, and you want to}. Your blog, your audience, and your strongest voice deserve to get this down on paper {or onscreen}.

In it, capture what works for you and your brand about blogging. Blogging less frequently? More frequently with shorter posts? More images with inspirational quotes, fewer treatises? More treatises, losing those pesky photos you hate sourcing? List posts only? Personal anecdote-driven posts with big, overarching themes and a lesson snuck in at the edges?

You already intuitively know what works for you. Lean into it, own it, and trick it out.

My blogging hiatus? So needed.

It gave me time and space to tend to clients in a particularly project-heavy season, to participate fully in a high level Mastermind, to move across the country, to celebrate the holidays, to remember what works for me and my brand when I use my voice to fully come forth, and to plan with faith and fervor for 2012.

And — have to say it — it feels soooooooo lovely to be back.

Talk to me. How do you reengage with your blog convo after you’ve been MIA? How have you redefined blogging to make it work for you and your audience? Leave a comment and let me know.

Photo by The Retronaut.

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Hi! This post is part of a 12-part video series called YOU: Ruling Your Realm — 10 Declarations for Savvy Entrepreneurs who want to rule their entrepreneurial realm and up their addictability factor. You can catch up on the whole series beginning here with the Intro. While you’re at it, be sure to download your free copy of my primer on the mindsets needed to rule your realm. It’s the perfect complement to what I’m sharing with you in each video.

Here’s the 8th Declaration in the 12-part series, YOU: Ruling Your Realm: I’ll interact widely with warmth and sincerity, but I’ll affiliate only with those who can help me up my game and support me in being my best self in my brand.

At the time this post is being published, 771 people have downloaded YOU: Ruling Your Realm. {Haven’t gotten yours yet? Click here.} And the 8th Declaration is the one I get the most vociferous feedback on. In short, you’re telling me you’re glad to hear someone in the online entrepreneurial space take a stand for consistently high quality interactions with peers, friends, and possible joint venture partners. And you’re glad to know it’s not only possible, but optimal for your brand, to eliminate low quality interactions.

So often I see you interacting with peers and friends online in ways that are potentially hazardous to your brand equity. And I want you to get a heck of a lot more conscious about that.

In this video, I share online relationship strategies for being your own brand editor.

Please remember to read underneath the video after you’ve watched. At that time, I’ll ask you to click through to the Abby Kerr Ink Facebook page and share an awareness you’ve gained about your own brand.

***IF YOU’RE READING THIS POST IN YOUR EMAIL INBOX OR IN A RSS READER, YOU MAY NEED TO CLICK THROUGH THE POST TITLE ABOVE TO VIEW THE VIDEO ON MY SITE.***

Brand Editor’s Note: Please excuse the grammar typo in this caption: “There’s friendships . . .” Argh! Make that ‘There’s friendship. . .” A small thing, yes, but this is why I get paid to write copy professionally. I notice those things. ;)

Name two or three characteristics of people you’d like to affiliate your brand with online. You don’t have to name names — just get conscious about the qualities these people would have.

Click through to my Abby Kerr Ink Facebook page, Like it if you haven’t already, and share with me and the other emergent entrepreneurial leaders there. See you there!

Thanks for watching. See you soon with the 9th Declaration video!

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Hi! This post is part of a 12-part video series called YOU: Ruling Your Realm — 10 Declarations for Savvy Entrepreneurs who want to rule their entrepreneurial realm and up their addictability factor. You can catch up on the whole series beginning here with the Intro. While you’re at it, be sure to download your free copy of my primer on the mindsets needed to rule your realm. It’s the perfect complement to what I’m sharing with you in each video.

Here’s the 7th Declaration in the 12-part series, YOU: Ruling Your Realm: I won’t settle for web design or copy that doesn’t live up to how cool and powerful I really am.

As a creative entrepreneur with a digital platform, you know how important your online presence is to holding site visitors’ attention and signaling to your right people that your work in the world is for them.

This means that as a business owner/brand guardian, you should never settle for web design or copy that doesn’t live up to how cool and powerful you really are. Easier said than done? Many of my Lustermaker clients say yes, which is part of the reason why they come to me. They sense their big transition is on the make and they want a brand editor’s eyes on it before they make their next move.

So what frame of mind do you need to be in before hiring a web designer to translate your visual brand identity, or before signing on a copywriter to translate your voice into a brand language that’s sustainable for you?

In this video, I also share the truth about knowing when it’s time to move on from a creative pro you’ve been working with for a while.

Please remember to read underneath the video after you’ve watched. At that time, I’ll ask you to click through to the Abby Kerr Ink Facebook page and share a detail from your own brand.

***IF YOU’RE READING THIS POST IN YOUR EMAIL INBOX OR IN A RSS READER, YOU MAY NEED TO CLICK THROUGH THE POST TITLE ABOVE TO VIEW THE VIDEO ON MY SITE.***

What’s a detail or two from your own brand that a creative pro would have to understand in order to translate you accurately and vividly into your marketplace?

Click through to my Abby Kerr Ink Facebook page, Like it if you haven’t already, and share with me and the other emergent entrepreneurial leaders there. See you there!

Thanks for watching. See you soon with the 8th Declaration video!

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Yesterday I had a lively {per usual} Twitter convo with a friend of mine, a guy who used to shop at my now-closed indie retail boutique. Our topic: the closing of a trendy, upscale Vegan restaurant about 15 minutes from the town where we each live, owned by Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde. Businessweek even named her spot, VegiTerranean, one of the nation’s top 5 vegan eateries. The sub-head to the WKSU article my friend cited? Prolonged economic downturn convinces celebrity owner to close the doors.

But is that the whole truth? We know it’s not.

The truth, as I see it, is this: the area where Hynde planted her business {her hometown} is a lukewarm culture for upscale, trendy, progressive indie businesses.

If Hynde had opened a pizza parlor and kept the word ‘gourmet’ off the menu, she might’ve been in it for the long haul.

Because the area is quite a friendly culture for more middling brands that fall into these categories: tween apparel retail, burger joints, salons, craft emporiums.

My intent is not to slam the area’s demographic, but simply to notice what works and what doesn’t when serving a community.

Upscale and trendy works well in some locales. Just not in this particular one. The individualistic, high quality, bespoke-but-not-necessarily-bank-breaking brands that would thrive in Chicago or Soho or perhaps even half an hour north of Hynde’s restaurant in Cleveland are misfits here.

Still, people in the area say they want to support innovative, creative local business — the lip service faction is fairly audible. And yet the ones they keep in business are the ones that connect them to the traditional lifestyle they settle here for.

Now, to be fair, because I don’t want to diss or downplay former supporters, like my friend above, for one: some shoppers actually put their money where their mouths are. For instance, my relatively progressive lifestyle retail boutique turned a profit three out of its four years of existence, the first year being the only one we didn’t. But thriving in this lukewarm culture was, realistically, years of toil away, and I didn’t have the stomach for it. Call me a freedom-lover, but I didn’t sign up to suffer for my entrepreneurial dreams. Did you?

So yes, it’s possible to survive during an economic downtown. Small businesses are doing it everyday. I look around at the 27-varieties-of-hot-dogs places, the lightly used clothing resale shops, and the pizza joints that clutter my current homebase’s strip malls and I see that it’s the case.

But survival is not a sustainable life phase for any business, least of all a creative one fronted by a passionate entrepreneur who wants a healthy non-business life, too.

There’s a culture that indie business needs to sup on to truly thrive. The culture has a climate, a marketplace, a right people profile, values and mores, advocates and tastemakers, and a community-defined trajectory for emerging businesses to take flight and wing their way to success. {Note: Trajectories are not blueprints.}

My caveat to today’s brick and mortar businesses: plant thyself in a lukewarm culture — read, a town or neighborhood that lacks the rich, indie-supporting elements listed above — and subject thyself to a life of sheer survival. Thinking you could do well because ‘there’s no one else doing this here’ is not a sign of potential. If you want a brick and mortar to thrive, get thee to a richer culture. {Note: ‘Richer’ does not necessarily mean a higher tax bracket. Customers/clients with thicker pocketbooks can certainly support your thriving, but remember that even economically depressed communities are keeping some businesses hopping — the ones they need or rely on. Right-size your business and you can always turn a profit.}

Now, let’s talk about our reality as online entrepreneurial realm builders.

Online, we accept that the culture is by definition lukewarm. And we work with it.

Barring a shopping compulsion, people don’t come to their computer with credit card in hand, searching for something to buy.

As a creative entrepreneur selling ‘non-essential goods’ like jewelry, handmade children’s toys, or organic goat’s milk soaps, or services like life coaching, virtual prenatal yoga, or fiction writing workshops, you are automatically carted into the Better Win Me Over category in your prospects’ minds.

Yes, your right people’s lives will be enhanced by your soap. Yes, they and their work will be richer for investing in a workshop with you.

But the culture of being online — at least the way most people use it — is lukewarm by design.

Distractions abound: ads tickertaping, a song on Pandora Radio that must be thumbs-upped, fifteen other tabs open in her browser, instant coffee dinging in the microwave. Online is not a climate that supports focus and falling in deep.

Fortunately, we know that once they land on your site, we can create a mini culture that supports the conversation you want to have with your people, those people you adore and know just how to serve, for those who are ready to have it with you. {Those would be your Right People: not just Likers, but Wanters and Needers.}

And we know a thing or two about getting those people to your site because we study the culture of Google.

And we know that branding is a suite of signals that tells people look over here, keep looking, I’m talking to you, I want to understand you better.

You rule the realm of your own mini culture, as told through the suite of signals your brand presents, one of them being the copy on your site, and your voice through it.

You and me: we’ve got a lot of smarts, savvy, and inborn sensitivity to work with around here.

Let’s start creating that mini culture for your right people on your site together.

For the past several months, I’ve been working with new clients exclusively via my Lustermaker brand editing service, a signature experience that includes decoding, translating, and luster-ing up your brand to ready it for market and your next big move. It’s for entrepreneurs who are primed for what’s next and who want to get it right before they get on with it. ;)

There’s an unanswered piece, though, that you’ve been asking me for. It’s your voice, your brand language, the words that alight off your web pages.

Yes, while I stopped accepting new copywriting clients some months back, I’ve still been writing copy for a number of my already-established clients on the side, while referring out new inquiries to other writers. You know this if you’ve been hanging with me for a while.

Now with six months of Lustermaking to bring to the table, I’m opening my schedule for a new wave of copywriting projects.

And my new wave of clients will get the full benefit of my brand editing experience.

Brand editing is the perfect complementary asset to the work I do for you when I write on behalf of your business. The approach I offer is voice-centric, visionary, and all about a conversation with your right people. The copy I write for you couldn’t possibly belong to anyone but you. {As one client told me upon seeing her 1st Draft, “Ummm, this is more me than I sound when I write for myself!”}

Take a look at what I’m talking about here. Let’s warm up your site’s culture.

Let her coffee get cold in the microwave. {She can always reheat it.} Your most powerful voice, as fully expressed through your conversation, can be that compelling.

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