Brand Voice Development for Values-Based Business

Illana Burk from Makeness.com and ZipandRuth.com

In this sixth episode of the Creative Solopreneur Podcast, I’m chatting with Illana Burk from Makeness. I first became aware of Illana via this in-post shout-out from Naomi Dunford. Part of Illana’s credo is that business is art, and art is business. She holds an MBA in Sustainable Enterprise and runs her own successful accessory design business, Zip & Ruth. After a career in international marketing and communications, Illana finally decided that putting her no-bull business acumen to use in helping other creative types make businesses that make sense — and cents {corny pun mine, not Illana’s}.

Here are some of the lovely people and things mentioned in our conversation:

• Pace Smith and Kyeli Smith, The Usual Error book, plus an audio interview with {who else?} Naomi Dunford called The Usual Error in Marketing

• Illana’s pay-as-you-go One-On-One Coaching for creatively entrepreneurial types, as well as info on her upcoming Group Un-Therapy

Three blogs Illana mentioned that she always reads:

• Naomi Dunford, IttyBiz
• Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity
• Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

Listen in as Illana gives us the lowdown on:

the faulty assumption she made as an early blogger that led to the birth of Makeness; what being a “maker” really means; the irreverent voice she writes in versus the voice she speaks and consults in; how and why she’s built her crafting business on sustainability; her take on whether everybody has a creative business inside them, and the mistakes she sees creative types making when they first go into business.

If you’re a creative person — especially one with a handcrafted business — you need to listen to this interview.

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

P.S. The Creative Solopreneur Podcast will soon be syndicated to iTunes and RSS so that you can subscribe if you like.

P.S.S. Illana will be available for a couple days after this post goes live to respond to comments and questions. Then, word has it she’s being whisked off on a vacation!

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Naomi Niles from Intuitive Designs

In this fifth episode of the Creative Solopreneur Podcast, I’m chatting with the lovely Naomi Niles, one-half of the design prowess behind the custom website and illustration agency Intuitive Designs {the other half is Naomi’s husband, Koldo Barroso, who didn’t participate in this interview but was with us in spirit.} Intuitive Designs creates custom websites from the wireframe out — never using templates or themes — and their client base is made up of businesses and organizations who are already through the beginner phase of their journey. {Listen in and you’ll hear why.}

Here are two highly trafficked sites from Intuitive Designs’ portfolio, as mentioned in the podcast intro:

• Alexis Neely’s site, Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Truth
• Naomi Dunford’s site, IttyBiz

And here are two of Naomi’s latest creations, which can help creative solopreneurs with their own businesses:

• Filtering & Attracting Your Right Clients and Projects — Naomi’s latest e-Guide for designers, which I found perfectly suited to my business as a copywriter and recommend to all creative service professionals {psst…it’s just $7!}. And yep, that’s my affiliate link up there.
• Conversion Rate Optimization — Naomi’s latest service, which helps people turn more of their site visitors into buyers.

Listen in as Naomi reveals:

how long it takes for site visitors to form an impression of your website; when it’s the right time to invest in a custom website; the most crucial question she asks her clients to tap into their desired brand identity; the challenges of attracting your right clients and projects; how she structures her creative workday, and the secret to a good creative partnership.

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

P.S. The Creative Solopreneur Podcast will soon be syndicated to iTunes and RSS so that you can subscribe if you like.

P.S.S. Naomi will be popping up here to respond to your comments and questions. Lucky us!

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Juicy content. Do you know it when you see it?

It’s one of the hottest buzz phrases around the blogosphere right now:

Juicy content.

I want to know: what does juicy content really mean to you? How do you know, viscerally, that a blog post or a video or an audio download or what have you is juicy?

And don’t give me “provides tremendous value” or other catchphrases like that.

I want to know stuff like this:

• Content is juicy when I feel like I’m reading the blogger’s secret diary.
• Content is juicy when I know the blogger could be charging top dollar for this advice.
• Content is juicy when there’s nothing else of quality like it anywhere on the web.

Okay, your turn. The more nakedly honest and non-party line-ish, the better.

What makes content juicy?

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Three lessons from brick-&-mortar business, three graffitied doorways in a brick facade.

Before Abby Kerr Ink, I was a brick-and-mortar retailer. I owned THE BLISSFUL in Canton, Ohio {my hometown}. It was a funky, French-inspired lifestyle boutique. In four short years, we managed to win some national attention, as well as lots of nice local press.

At the risk of ticking off some of my competition — oh, what the heck, I’ll risk it — I’ll tell you that we were hands down the coolest shop in town. {Admittedly, one of very few indie shops in town.}

We had a gorgeous online presence {site no longer live} and a blog whose archives you can still check out here. We sold and shipped internationally through our online boutique, though the great majority of our business was done through our brick-and-mortar storefront.

When I voluntarily closed the shop in February 2010, we left a lot of customers, friends, and fans wanting more. {I say, that’s the only way to make an exit.}

In the new landscape of my online business, I’m often asked how the lessons I learned in four years of successful offline biz apply to the online biz world.

Here are the 3 best lessons I learned in brick-and-mortar business and how they translate into doing business online.

Brick-&-Mortar Business Lesson 1:

Once you’ve found an advertising venue that works for you, it’s impossible to spend too much on advertising. Every spare penny you throw at a good advertising venue {in the form of a well-crafted ad} will pay off.

Translation to Doing Business Online:

Find a marketing venue — or two, or three — that work for you, and work them for all they’re worth. It’s better to be absolutely stellar in TWO places than to be mediocre in six places.

The Big Difference:

Invested dollars. I can think of no reason why an online business would have to spend as many dollars advertising as their offline counterparts would have to when there are so many free social media marketing tools {Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.} you can use. However, you could look at the time you’ll spend marketing your online business as a form of investment.

Brick-&-Mortar Business Lesson 2:

Brand proposition is ev-ery-thing. If you lead with a strong brand identity from the very beginning and put the protection and elevation of your brand at the forefront of every move you make, you will always be absolutely memorable and to your right people — addictively compelling.

Translation to Doing Business Online:

This lesson totally translates to online biz. A well-conceptualized brand identity that extends through all facets of an online business — visual design, copy, USP/brand promise, etc. — signals to site visitors that their time spent on-site may be worth it somehow. Plus, a strong brand identity automatically makes a business memorable. No matter whether the visitor’s memory is positive or negative — it’s most important to be remembered at all!

The Big Difference:

Human, face-to-face interaction in a brick-and-mortar setting puts a brand proposition constantly at risk. An employee might say something or do something or even wear something that compromises brand integrity. When a business is operated solely online, it’s much easier to monitor interactions, track site visitor/customer experience, and run blind surveys.

Brick-&-Mortar Business Lesson 3:

Satisfied customers are your best marketing and PR team. Keep a core of key customers happy and your business has a good chance of being successful — even wildly so.

Translation to Doing Business Online:

This all goes back to the right people thing. You’ll never please anybody or ring all the bells just right no matter whether you’re doing business offline or online, but the fact is, you can please some of the people most of the time. And those people are your right people. Focus on optimizing their experience and you’ll get it right enough.

And the really cool thing about those right people are the friends and family they talk to about your business, some of them who are also your right people.

Remember: everybody loves to talk about themselves, and if you can situate your brand as part of your right people’s lives and ideal selves, you’re on a quick path to something good.

The Big Difference:

The biggest difference is that in the brick-and-mortar world, you very often don’t get to choose your customers the way you can when you work mostly online. You can’t choose which prospects get to walk in the front door of your brick-and-mortar business, but neither can you choose which visitors land on your site and decide to click around.

However, with an online business, you can build in a more intentional filtering system like the one Naomi Niles describes in Filtering & Attracting Your Right Clients and Projects, her latest guide for designers and other creative service professionals.

With a brick-and-mortar business, you can position your brand all day long to attract your Right People, but in the end it’s much more difficult to stay focused on them as opposed to whomever’s standing in front of you yapping the loudest that day.

In the comments, I’d love to hear what lessons you’ve learned from doing business in a brick-and-mortar setting and how you compare or contrast them with your experience of doing business online. Also, feel free to take exception to any of the insights I’ve posed here. I’m interested in your thoughts.

P.S. The link above for Naomi Niles’ latest guide is an affiliate link. One read-through of Naomi’s sales page for Filtering & Attracting Your Right Clients and Projects and I knew this work was for me, even though I’m not a graphic designer! With a price that hard to beat, it’s tough to think of a reason why you wouldn’t want to turn more of your Right People into paying clients. Think about it.

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