The Upward Path

your message matters

personal branding

What is branding? It’s not ink and cardboard

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speech bubble climber image

A lot of people think branding is logos and business cards. But those are just channels and products that reflect your branding.

The oft-repeated quote when people talk about personal branding for small businesses comes, ironically, from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

To put it another way: when people call you to mind, what impressions come along with that?

I often talk about foreground and background messages. Foreground messages are what you tell people explicitly, like an introduction/pitch at a networking event or points you make in a blog post. Background messages are impressions people pick up about you, often with little or no conscious awareness they’re doing it – for instance from the colour scheme and layout of your website, or your writing’s tone of voice.

So branding is the process of getting clearer about what messages you want to attach to yourself in people’s minds, then using tools and channels to implement that.  [Read more…] about What is branding? It’s not ink and cardboard

How to make great word graphics for social media sharing

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Word graphics image

Images like the one above are a great way to share little pieces of your message. If you get them right.

You can spread them on social media. They’re like message sweeties that people can share with their own contacts. Images like these are also good for putting in web pages, to show up when people share that page. (And you can’t share a page on Pinterest if it has no images.)

The point of these ‘word graphics’ is to be visually attractive, with a message the reader can take in quickly. Then they can have a smile, or a pause and think, and then carry on with their day. You might even change someone’s life, if they’re in the right place for your message to go in deeply.

A lot of us have discovered tools that make it easy to create these graphics: choosing from a selection of backgrounds and text styles and outputting the final image, without having to use full-blown graphics software. I use an iOS app called Wordswag that someone introduced me to. There are lots of other apps too. Some people use Canva, an online design tool.

But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean the software will automatically make good graphics. That’s down to you.

Remember: attractive, and easy to absorb. If the reader’s brain decides that processing your text will be too much like hard work – or if it threatens to hurt their eyes! – they’ll move on to the next thing and never absorb your little nugget of wisdom.

So here are some tips.   [Read more…] about How to make great word graphics for social media sharing