Brand Voice Development for Values-Based Business

Photo by ky_olsen courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

A long time ago {like, back in June when I launched this site}, someone tried to tell me something. For the record, she’s someone I call Mom.

It was about my service pages. They were overly wordy, she thought, and made it really hard for people to figure out how to work with me.

Between then and now, my site’s gained traffic. My business has grown. My client list gets longer every month. But I had noticed that about half of my prospects emailed me saying, “I know I want to work with you, but I have no idea how. I don’t know what I need. Can you tell me?”

Strange, I thought. Why so indecisive? Couldn’t they just read my service pages?

Then, recently {like, two weeks ago this November}, during a website critique webinar in Creating Fame, Laura Roeder told me that my service pages were way too wordy. And she said — I quote — you’re making it really hard for people to figure out how to work with you.

Damnit.

Sometimes we don’t want to listen to the people who are closest to us. Their observation of our foibles stings {even when we shouldn’t take them personally}.

I betcha that right now, someone in your life — probably someone pretty darn close to you — is trying to tell you something about your creative business that you really ought to listen to.

This time, I listened. And I acknowledged to my mom that yep, she was right. {As usual.}

I’ve relaunched my service pages and you can check them out here via the You & Me page of my site. If you’ve studied my site before, you may notice that I’ve honed my service offerings way down. I’ve further nichified. {Apropos, no?} What remains are my very best and most powerful offerings that propel creative people further into their entrepreneurial dream.

Also, my rates have gone up. This is the first rate increase since I started Abby Kerr Ink back in February. I could feel that it was time — my schedule is fuller, my client filtering process is more finely honed, and I’m working on my first info product, which’ll be the first in a suite to come. I sense it’s important to point out this rate increase to other creative entrepreneurs who are in a growth phase. {And Dave Navarro says it’s important to raise your rates early and often in the life of your business, in case you need to hear it from a bigger guy.}

In other news…

Tonight I was interviewed by the lovely Rebecca Parsons and Lyna Farkas of Blog Talk Radio’s Artistically Speaking. They asked me about my entrepreneurial journey from high school English teacher to proprietor of an award-winning French-inspired boutique to niche-y business copywriter and coach. Lots of tips in there for creative people from all disciplines who are ready to find their niche, create an addictive blog and web presence, and do their Thing their way.

You can listen to my Artistically Speaking interview here.

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I’m thinking about what we, as business creators, decide to sell versus what we decide to share for free.

Free content versus paid content. How do entrepreneurs decide which is which?

You’re probably familiar with the recommended formula for wooing prospects on your email list with free content:

1. Create a valuable piece of content that visitors receive when they opt-in to your e-newsletter. Your piece of content could be a report, an e-course, a downloadable Mp3, a workbook, or anything else that you think would get your right people inspired and moving in the right direction. Key: your content should be closely related to the service you provide or the goods you sell. Design it as a taste of what it would be like to work with you. Brian Clark from Copyblogger says in the first episode of Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio that “the fundamental rule of content marketing is to give away what people want in terms of information in order to sell them something related.” And make it really good. But don’t spend ten hours on it. Maybe five. Maybe two.

2. Once someone has opted in to receive your free content, he’s also opted in to receive ongoing email communications from you. You can call this your e-newsletter or something else more rockstar. It’s your job to keep in touch with your list and give them reasons to stay opted in. Meanwhile, promote your free Thing {see No. 1 above} here and there as a way to market your e-newsletter to new subscribers. Tweet the link to your sign-up every once in a while. Weave it into a blog post every now and then. Definitely make sure your sign-up box is prominent on every page of your site, attractive, and user friendly.

3. Keep your list fed and they’ll keep you fed. You share great resources with them, they come to see you as an expert or a great editor, you help them solve their problems, they keep you posted on how their business grows, you make them offers, some of your list takes you up on some of those offers, your business grows, you share with your list how they helped you grow your business, they get new information and inspiration out of what you’ve learned. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

But one of the bigger questions that gets lost in the oh-my-god-I-have-to-create-something-free-for-my-list shuffle is

How do I decide what expertise I sell, and what I give away for free?

When you’re a knowledge worker, a coach, a consultant, a healer, or anyone else who delivers a somewhat amorphous product with widely variable outcomes, this can be especially hard to pin down. It’s all your knowledge, it’s all your wisdom, it’s all your understanding and experience — and therefore it’s all equally valuable in your eyes, so how do you arbitrarily segment out pieces you give away rather than charge money for?

Here’s how I divvy up the stuff I sell and the stuff I give away.

By “sell,” I mean charge good money for, either in the form of a service or a product.

And by “give away,” I mean explore in a blog post, share in regular e-newsletter communications, make a video or audio about, mention in an interview, Tweet as a tip, divulge in a casual email to a prospect.

Stuff I Sell: knowledge stemming from anything I spent lots of time, money, or energy learning; understandings that are not easily accessible through surface research; stuff I’m über-talented at, way more so than the average person; stuff I teach that aligns with a perspective that very few others are teaching, or teaching well; advanced learning that extends from my evergreen content.

Stuff I Give Away: knowledge about anything that’s not one of my core competencies; knowledge about stuff that’s better handled by another creative professional than by me; knowledge that I know people can easily find by Googling; other knowledge that is widely accessible; entry level evergreen content, such as my fabulous {if I do say so myself} free e- course on Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche. I put a lot of time, thought, and passion into my e-course because A} like a manifesto, it helps spread my message and enhance my brand platform, and B} it’s good, grounding stuff that I wish all my clients could understand coming into a project with me.

Keep in mind that your thoughts about what is worth selling and what is more effective when given away will evolve over time, the more clients you work with and the more you recognize where the true value in your business proposition lies. Watch your Inbox. What do prospects, fans, and clients email you about most often? Is it what you’re currently selling, or what they want to buy from you? Remember those right people? They know a thing or two.

How do you decide what to sell versus what to give away?

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It’s Day Ten of NaNoWriMo and I’m behind word count — by about half as many words as would be advisable at this point if one were hoping to make it to 50K by the end of November. Which um, one is. Making time for novel writing amidst all the other stuff I have going on this Fall is teaching me a lot. There are lessons here — if I only look up long enough to see them!

On playback, realized that the “certain people” I refer to are probably in my head. :)

Right click here and select Save Link As to download the audio to your hard drive, or left click to play in-browser.

If you’d like to join the #NaNoLove Twitter community, tweet me @abbykerr and ask to be added to the list.

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So six of my last ten blog posts were, in fact, audios.

I’ve found via my Creative Solopreneur Podcast that I have an insatiable love for audio interviews. I like asking the probing questions, ruffling the layers, plucking out the underpinnings, and I enjoy throwing in a bit of entertainment here and there, too. {This explains my high school award-winning Speech & Debate tenure, my first career as a very animated high school English teacher, and my secret fantasy of being a Saturday Night Live cast member.}

My recent audio fascination has led me to wonder, will I ever blog again?

There are many reasons to blog, faithfully and intentionally and passionately. Blogging is great for SEO. Blogging is the vehicle of choice for people who don’t like audio. Blogging is [buzzphrase ahead] participating in the conversation.

But for the past several weeks, I’ve been excusing myself from really pressing into what I’m thinking and turning that outward in the form of a blog post. Sure, lots of people go through this. Lots of my clients struggle with maintaining a blogging schedule. Many of them aren’t writers by nature, and many of them get caught up in second guessing their ideas. I know how to talk them through this. It’s a normal part of Becoming a Blogger.

Trouble is, essentially, wholeheartedly, unapologetically, I’m a writer.

And so I feel that I should always have something to put out there. And should understand that judging what I’m thinking about is not such a hot way to stay in the flow.

It’s what I do and who I am. I’m not sure there’s a single hour of any day when I’m not thinking of a fictional character, turning over a line of poetry, or composting ideas for a potential nonfiction piece. It’s just how I make my way through my life.

But I’ve only funneled my unfettered writerly self into this blog in fits and starts.

I’m pretty sure this is because I’m still picking through the jewel box, so to speak. Entrepreneurial lessons in this drawer, musings about the creative life in that one. A #NaNoLove Tiny Audio hanging from that hook.

I’m sure that what I’m hunting for is the through thread, that motif that unifies it all. And so I’ve been blog hesitant lately.

And I’m getting some really good help with that. No, not the blog hesitancy. The through thread. Because that’s, like, the underlying issue.

This has been my season of learning from great teachers, namely Dave Navarro in More Buyers Mastermind, Laura Roeder in Creating Fame, and Natalie Peluso and Sinclair in Action Studio. I’m got my entrepreneurial vision and intentions in grad school. So I’m doing these three intensive business programs concurrently while I’m crazy enough to be writing the first draft of a novel in thirty days. {By the way, I should be writing my novel right now. My protag is at a bar, waiting for me to show up and orchestrate a meeting with her love interest.} And — oh, yeah! — I’m running a business here, too. Abby Kerr Ink is alive and kickin’ and taking new clients.

So I know, indubitably, yes. I will blog again.

Whenever my through thread starts to gleam in the tapestry of everything my mind and heart and soul is in love with. That could be tomorrow. That could be next week.

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