Here at SPI, we talk a lot about how the riches are in the niches—and Victoria Moll of Contempo Coding is living, breathing proof of the power of niche marketing! Victoria has generated a steady six-figure income and a huge YouTube following in the niche field of medical coding, mainly through her YouTube channel.

Does it get much more niche-y than that?

Early in 2024, Victoria joined Pat on the SPI Podcast to share how she’s built a thriving business that’s allowed her to quit her day job—one she’s running on her own terms.

Big Success in an Unusual Niche: Medical Coding

When you think about potential side hustles, medical coding probably doesn’t come immediately to mind.

It involves taking patient diagnosis, procedures, services and medical equipment data and converting it into standardized codes used for billing insurance, tracking statistics, analysis, and more. 

While it may sound dry on paper, Victoria has turned medical coding into a successful focus for her business by injecting a healthy dose of life into the content she shares on her channel and her website. She taps into her background as a pop culture blogger to “bring this different spin” to medical coding topics and pep up what might be a snoozefest in lesser hands.

How YouTube Became Her Launchpad

Though she started creating videos in 2017, Victoria’s YouTube journey really took off during the pandemic, when she was working full-time as a medical coding auditor while running her YouTube channel as a side hustle. 

During lockdown, Victoria became a chat-box regular on Pat’s daily “Income Stream” YouTube series, soaking up tips and strategies for teaching, lighting, live streaming, and growing an online business through niche marketing.

“The Income Stream” provided Victoria with a great opportunity to focus on leveling up Contempo Coding.

She set up a proper home office and equipment and started researching how to build and engage an audience on YouTube and take advantage of tools like keyword optimization.

Live streams became a powerful way for Victoria to teach concepts, share her screen, and engage with her audience in real-time. She would often use a document camera—like a lightweight overhead projector—to walk through examples in medical coding books.

She also learned to lean into the “fun side” of her personality in her videos—which, along with her expertise and credibility, helped her channel quickly gain traction. Contempo Coding now has over 100,000 subscribers, and Victoria’s Silver Play Button award takes pride of place in the background of all her videos.

Building a Successful Product Line

While her YouTube channel provides a wealth of free medical coding advice and tutorials, Victoria also monetizes her expertise through online courses and programs.

She’s an instructor for the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) curriculum, which allows her to teach courses for different medical coding certifications. Though annual licensing and per-student fees were required (although she no longer licenses their material), it saved her from developing an entire curriculum from scratch.

On her website, Victoria offers her own specialty certification courses and continuing education programs to help folks advance their medical coding careers.

She’s also branched out into affiliate marketing by partnering with an education company that offers a formal program for people looking to get started in medical coding.

A Decision Filter for New Opportunities

With the success of her YouTube channel and product line, Victoria is regularly juggling ideas and opportunities for new books, courses, channels, live streams, and more niche marketing strategies. As a result, she’s found that it’s easy to become overwhelmed.

She briefly offered online coaching, but it started getting in the way of her content creation.

Eventually, she realized she needed a way to evaluate potential opportunities and pick the best ones—so she developed a simple three-point filter:

1. How interested am I in this opportunity?
2. How much time would it require?
3. How much revenue could it potentially generate?

“If there’s something that hits all three of them, yep, that’s the one I go for,” Victoria says. “If not, okay, what’s the closest thing I can do?”

This new approach has unlocked even more success for Victoria, allowing her to embrace new opportunities without overcommitting or losing interest. 

Delegating for More Magic and Less Overwhelm

Victoria brings a healthy dose of self-awareness to her side hustle. She knows she doesn’t want to manage a team and is cautious about scaling too quickly, preferring to keep her operation lean.

But she did hire someone to handle the time-consuming work of editing her videos, which has optimized her workflow immensely—and helped add even more pizzazz to her content.

“It was just so worthwhile to find someone who did it…I’ll make a point, and I’ll gesture my hand out, and, like, sparkles will fly out of my hand… I would have never figured out how to make that happen.”

Victoria’s fiancé, Chuoc, has even gotten in on the business, helping part-time with shipping, reporting, and running the household. As a result, Victoria can maintain her flow as a creator and instructor—without the overwhelm.

Advice for Building a Brand in an Unconventional Niche

Victoria’s success demonstrates that you can build a lucrative business, even in an unusual niche like medical coding. The key takeaways from Victoria’s success include:

• Inject your personality and find creative ways to engage your audience around your topic
• Do keyword research and optimize your content
• Explore different content mediums like video courses, live streams, and podcasts
• Find ways to filter and prioritize new opportunities without overextending yourself
• Outsource editing or other tasks that drain your time and creative energy
• Tap into your networks to find freelance support

Most importantly, Victoria’s journey shows the riches that can be found by serving an unconventional niche market. While medical coding may sound dry, her ability to energize the subject and build a rabid following proves there’s an audience for just about any topic if it’s packaged the right way.

You might say she’s cracked the code.

The post How Victoria Moll Built a Six-Figure Brand in a Small Niche appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

If you’re of a certain age—let’s say 35 or older — you probably remember the awe and immersion you felt the first time you spun up Netscape Navigator and visited your favorite brand’s business “website.”

Now fast-forward to this age of AI, Uber, Roblox, Meta, Snapchat, and so much more… And guess what? A website is still the best way to share your brand with the world.

That’s true whether you’re a mega brand or a humble creator, solopreneur, or small business owner. Decades on, a website still provides unparalleled creative flexibility and control over your brand. It’s a place where visitors can learn more about you on your terms. A great website helps you tell your story, build trust, and even create community and fans for life.

Today we’re sharing a primer on branding and website design for online creators and entrepreneurs. We’ll walk you through how to design a website for your brand, whether you’re a creator, solopreneur, or small business owner with a team of employees.

This article won’t function as a step-by-step guide to launching a website or go into too much depth on the topic of branding itself. (For that, The SPI Beginner’s Guide to Branding can help you define your brand’s mission, vision, and more, and decide if it should be a personal brand or a company brand.)

Rather, this is a field guide to designing a website that puts your brand front and center and connects with your target audience.

Why You Need a Branded Website

So why a branded business website? Along with your email list, a website is a must-have when you’re starting out building your brand. Like an email list, you have more creative and administrative control over a website than you do your presence on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Etsy. And with the exception of rare service interruptions or security breaches, your site is much less likely to disappear the way a social media account can be banned or suspended.

Your branded website is like your home base, a focal place for shaping your brand image and narrative. At SPI, we recently revamped our website to focus on our core focus of community building and make it cleaner and easier to navigate.

Here’s what a well-crafted small business website can help you do:

• Control your brand: A website gives you full control over how you show your brand to the world, without the creative restrictions of third-party platforms. It also diversifies your online presence, reducing dependence on any single platform.

• Build trust: A well-designed website lends an air of professionalism and legitimacy to your brand, instilling trust.
• Own your content: You own and control the content on your website, reducing the risk that algorithm changes or platform shutdowns will hurt your content’s reach and visibility.
• Make money: You can use your website to promote and sell products and services or run ads.
• Build community: Websites offer a dedicated space for building a community and a following. You can capture newsletter and email-list sign-ups, and even link to your own membership community.
• Showcase your work: Use your website to share case studies, testimonials, and portfolios of your work with your audience.
• Understand your audience: Website analytics provide valuable data on user behavior, helping you better understand your audience and optimize your content to reach them.

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Your Website Should Express Your Brand Personality

When a lot of people hear the word brand, they think logo. And true, a logo is a key part of your creator or online entrepreneur brand — but your brand is also a lot more than just a snazzy graphic. Since your website is your home base, it’s the best place to convey the essence of your brand through the following key elements:

• Clear purpose: Define your unique value and why you exist. At SPI, we’re upfront about our why — our mission, vision, and core values.

• Color scheme: Utilize a maximum of four brand-reflective colors. Align colors with professionalism; avoid mismatch. Explore color psychology—the study of how colors affect perceptions and behaviors—for guidance.

• Tone of voice: Beyond aesthetics, your branded business website needs a distinct voice — a tone that informs all your written content. Adapt your tone to your personality, niche, and audience, keeping it approachable and jargon-free.

• Tagline or motto: A concise, memorable tagline helps convey your brand identity and value in bite-size form. It’s a little detail that can matter a lot!

• Signature font: Choose one or two readable fonts that reflect your personality, for consistency across everything you write and to bridge your brand’s visual identity with its written one.

• Unforgettable logo: Last but not least, an eye-catching logo provides instant brand recognition. Consider enlisting a graphic designer for this one.

Optimizing the Visual Experience of Your Online Business Website

For the most part, visitors will experience your website visually, so there are a few more important considerations when it comes to your site’s visual assets. Make sure the images, background designs, and other visuals you use on your site are:

• Relevant to your brand and content: This may seem obvious, but your website visuals should make sense in the context of your brand and the surrounding content. Each visual asset should complement and enhance the content it accompanies and align with your brand's identity, reflecting its values, personality, and messaging. 
• Strategically placed: Place visuals purposefully to guide the user's journey and emphasize key messages. Consider the flow of the website and how visuals can enhance storytelling.

• Consistent in style: Maintaining a consistent visual style across all images creates a cohesive and harmonious look and helps with brand recognition. Use those brand colors!

• High quality: Use high-resolution, professional images; grainy or pixelated ones can detract from your brand's credibility.
• Accessible: Not all of your visitors will be experiencing your branded business website visually, so ensure that any visual assets are accessible by adding descriptive alt text to all of your images.
• Optimized and responsive: Visual assets should adapt well to various screen sizes, particularly on mobile devices. They should also be compressed to improve loading times (and search engine rankings).

• Legal: All images should be either original, properly licensed, or fall under fair use. Respect copyright laws, and get permission if you need to!
• Timeless: As much as possible, choose visuals that can evolve with your brand rather than trends that might become outdated.
• Human: Human faces and expressions can create a stronger emotional connection with the audience, so incorporate images that feature people.

By making sure the visual and written experience of your website is consistent, professional, and aligned with your brand identity and voice, you’ll foster a sense of familiarity and trust with your audience.

A Great Creator Website Needs a Great User Experience: Layout and Navigation

Your website isn’t just a static display; it's an interactive experience for your audience. Once you’ve established the key brand elements your website needs, from your brand’s purpose to its voice, tone, and visual identity, it’s time to start designing the actual site layout.

As you’re choosing a layout, think about what will best convey your brand identity and message while making things as seamless and intuitive as possible for your visitors to navigate and find what they're looking for. Here are some popular layout options to consider:

• Single-Column: Clean and straightforward, with a single column for easy navigation.

• Grid: Organizes content into a visually appealing grid structure, suitable for showcasing multiple items efficiently, like portfolios or product displays.
• Magazine or Blog Layout: Mimics a magazine or blog with multiple columns — well-suited for content-heavy websites.

• Hero Image or Video: Features a striking image or video at the top, capturing immediate attention and often used for product showcases or setting the brand tone.
• Split Screen: Divides the webpage into two distinct sections, providing a modern and visually appealing design with room for creative elements.
• Parallax Scrolling: Creates a dynamic scrolling experience with background elements moving at different speeds, adding depth and interactivity.
• Card: Presents content in modular and flexible cards, promoting visual hierarchy and easy organization, suitable for various types of information.

• Full-Screen Background: Incorporates a full-screen image or video background for a visually immersive experience.

A quick note on navigation: Whatever layout you choose, your users’ ease in navigating your site will determine how long they stick around and whether they’ll find what they need—or if they’ll get frustrated and give up. You can also help people navigate your branded website through careful placement and organization of menus and footers.

The Strategic Content Your Website Needs

You’ve figured out your brand’s visual identity and voice and chosen a layout for the site. Now you need to fill it with useful content that tells your visitors who you are, what you do, and how you can help them!

These are some of the key pages to consider for your branded business website—some are must-haves, while others will depend on your business and offerings:

• Home Page: The home page should offer a snapshot of your brand, enticing visitors to explore further, communicating your unique value proposition, and guiding users to key sections of your website.
• Blog: Beyond promoting your products or services, blogs are still a popular way to share valuable content that positions you as an authority in your niche.
• Podcast Page: If you have a podcast, you should definitely have a dedicated page for it on your site. Although your podcast can technically exist without a website, a podcast page can promote your show and help listeners learn more about your brand and offerings.
• Credibility Section: Testimonials, case studies, and press coverage showcase the positive experiences of others, establishing your brand's credibility and reliability and building trust. This content can live on its own page or be placed strategically at different places on your site.
• Product/Service Pages: Each product or service page should provide detailed information, benefits, and a compelling call to action (CTA). 
• Brand Story/About Page: Your audience connects with the people and the story behind your online business. Use this page to communicate your mission, values, and the journey that led to the creation of your brand.
• Shop Page: If you want to use your site to sell things, you’ll need a shop page with easy navigation, clear product categorization, and a streamlined checkout process.

Examples of Online Creator and Entrepreneur Branded Websites

For a little inspiration, here’s a selection of great branded business websites created by online creators and entrepreneurs just like you! These folks all happen to be members of our SPI Pro community, which you can learn more about at SmartPassiveIncome.com/community.

Gnome Angel

Ange Wilson’s quilting-based creator business website has a strong, vibrant visual identity based around a palette of pinks and blues and a playful header font. The Gnome Angel value proposition greets you as soon as you open the home page, and as you scroll you learn about Gnome Angel’s resources and products via a “patchwork” design style that evokes a quilt. The “sticky” navigation menu persists as you descend the home page, providing easy access to the rest of the site.

Piscari

The Piscari site is a company brand website with a simple, clean, functional home page that serves as an About page for the company and its founder, Mike Lander, with a link to join the Piscari email list at the bottom. A top nav menu that displays on every page makes it easy to learn more about the company, its services, and other resources. The “Contact Us” button, framed in bold green, highlights the main call to action visitors are encouraged to take.

Jette Stubbs

Career and business coach Jette Stubbs’ site introduces her offerings right off the bat, followed by a friendly photo of Jette that humanizes the brand. The simple single-column layout reduces distraction and guides you down the page as you encounter a happy client’s testimonial and learn more about Jette’s services. Graphic elements and images are interspersed throughout, along with subtle font color changes to spark attention. The parallax scroll effect with Jette’s face in the background adds more human dimension and a bit of novelty. A simple top navigation menu is duplicated at the bottom, with links to an About page, Jette’s podcast, and testimonials.

Still on the Fence about Building a Website for Your Small Business? 

We’ll end with a few reminders — and by debunking a few common misconceptions about creating a branded business website:

• Yes, you do need a website. Websites aren’t just for big companies, and social media isn’t enough.
• Your website doesn’t have to be complex or aesthetically stunning. Simple, user-friendly designs often perform better, so focus on clarity and functionality above all.
• A website needs attention. Your website isn’t just going to attract traffic on its own. You need to promote it and regularly populate it with fresh, SEO-rich content.
• You don’t have to go it alone. There are plenty of great designers out there who can help you craft a logo and build a professional-looking branded website. (We worked with the good people at Rockbase for our redesign.)

If you’re feeling daunted, don’t! We’ve got all the support you need to start building your brand and designing a killer website to show it off to the world. Check out our site’s Free Resources tab, where you’ll find content for entrepreneurs at any level. If you’re ready to take the next big step in your online business journey, head to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community to learn about our communities for online entrepreneurs. You can learn from others like you who have built their own branded websites, gain access to our full library of courses, participate in live events, and more.

The post How to Design Your First Branded Business Website appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

The Story

2008 was the definition of a roller coaster year for me.

In March, I received a huge promotion and a raise at the architectural firm I was working for. Soon after that, I proposed to my girlfriend and got engaged.

In June, I was told I was going to be let go from my job and I moved back in with my parents to save as much money as I could. I also went into a little bit of a depression.

In October, after scrappily building my first website to help architects and designers pass an exam (the LEED exam), I sold my first product online – a study guide – and earned $7,908.55 in a single month.

In November, the revenue was closer to $9k, and in December 2008 I cracked five figures in a single month.

Things were looking good until May of 2009 when my world got turned upside down…again.

The organization that administers the LEED exam, the United States Green Building Council, decided to create its own study guide. They literally write the exam questions, so why would anyone purchase a guide from a regular person like me?

I remember being too afraid to check my email or sign in to my shopping cart that month to check sales, but eventually, I had to. And what I found surprised me:

I had the most sales I had ever had in a single month. Over $30,000 in revenue.

This totally went in the opposite direction that I thought it would, and I couldn’t understand why, but I needed to find out.

So, I sent a survey to my new customers asking them two simple questions:

1. How did you hear about GreenExamAcademy?
2. What made you decide to go with GreenExamAcademy over other study guides that are offered to you?

Soon, I understood EXACTLY what was happening.

The USGBC’s email blast about their new study guide prompted tens of thousands of people to get excited about taking the exam, and when researching what else was out there to offer help, my name and face came up. That’s how they found me.

But why did they decide to buy my product? I had to dive into the depths of my records to find these, but here are a few exact responses copied and pasted from survey question #2:

“I decided to buy The LEED AP Walkthrough because of you, Pat. You took the exam yourself and it almost feels like you were tutoring me.”

“You personally have first-hand experience earning your LEED credential, Pat. I think this is why I trusted you over the others.”

“I dunno Pat. I think it was the way you talk to me on your blog. You did it first and then you were gonna show me how to do it. It was encouraging.”

Almost every response that came in highlighted the same thing—a connection to the fact that I had taken the exam first. It made the material, me as the instructor, and the product more trustworthy. And back in 2008, this audience didn’t trust random sites selling things on the Internet.

This was the exact moment when I discovered the power and the value of leading by example. Doing the thing first, and then showing people how to do it.

If I’m teaching something but don’t have an example or an experience to share behind it, how could it be trusted?

When I started SmartPassiveIncome.com in late 2008 to teach online business, it was with a real-life case study of Green Exam Academy behind it.

When I started teaching search engine optimization, I used real examples from a website I built in the security guard training niche. Because people were seeing me do it first, not only did it encourage others to do the same, but clicks on my affiliate links for products I was using went through the roof!

I taught podcasting only after having a successful podcast. On YouTube, my how-to podcast videos over the years have been seen over 3 million times, and our podcast course is our #1 bestseller!

In today’s creator economy, where information is freely available and publishing content is easy, you MUST create your own unique experiences that no one else could have to support what you teach.

Your Call to Action

It’s a jungle out there. Are you going to be the person at the front of the pack with the machete clearing a safe path for everyone behind you, or are you going to be like most people who just use their platform to tell people what to do?

Your call to action this week is to choose to do something that you know your audience is interested in doing themselves and do it yourself first.

Document how it unfolds and what you learn along the way. What mistakes did you make, and what new things did you discover?

That experience can create multitudes of content, build more trust, and potentially turn into something much much bigger. Spend some time thinking about what it could be (or better yet, ask your audience what they’d like to see you try), and then…lead by example.

I hope you enjoyed this 5-minute read! To get more like it every week (again, totally free), sign up below!

The post The Most Powerful Way to Show Up Online appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

The Story

I had a friendly bet with my soon-to-be-a-teenager son Keoni today. I’ll paint the scenario so that you can play along too…

It’s the day before another school year begins and my wife April asks me if Keoni had gotten his haircut yet.

He did not.

So, I called our favorite haircut place to ask what the wait times were.

After I hung up, I called Keoni down and said, “Hey bud, OVER or UNDER on wait times for a haircut today?”

That’s code for “do you want to play a game where you guess ABOVE or BELOW a certain number I give you?”

He said, “Sure! What’s at stake?”

“A cheesesteak.” I replied.

“Yes!” he said with a smirk. “What’s the number?”

“2 hours. Over or under?”

After a curiously long pause Keoni finally replied, “Under. It’s got to be under.”

What do you think? Over or under?

Well, let me just say that the cheesesteak I ate tasted extra good, mostly because it was free.

The total wait time for a haircut today: 3 hours and 5 minutes. OVER, by a longshot.

As we sat there eating our cheesesteaks, I took the opportunity to do what I normally do in these types of situations: teach my son a lesson in how people think and behave.

Most people wait until the last minute to do and decide most things, just like how we (and the rest of the neighborhood) waited until the last day before school began to finally get a haircut.

Without a deadline and without something at stake, there will likely be no action or decision made.

For my son, the context was related to goal-setting, homework, creating self-imposed deadlines, using a calendar, getting ahead and generally just being prepared for having to step it up in the 7th grade this year.

For you, the creator and entrepreneur, the context is this:

This is a graph showing the revenue from a recent 7-day course sale in our company. Can you see when most of the sales came in?

Here’s the breakdown, income report style:

• Total sales: $102,400
• Total sales within the final 24 hours: $59,000 (57.6%)

Here’s another example from a recent 3-day sale we just ran, too:

The breakdown:

• Total sales: $47,200
• Total sales within the final 24 hours: $36,000 (76.3%)

This last minute pattern holds true for every single sale that we’ve done, and the more we highlight the deadline to decide the more sales we see right before the deadline.

Every. Single. Time.

Plain and simple: unless there’s a reason for a buyer to make a decision now…they won’t.

Here are three key takeaways from all of this:

1. Legitimate, authentic marketing is about helping people make a decision, one way or another. More specifically, it’s about helping people make the right decision for them.
   ​
   It shouldn’t be about trickery or over-promising, but being honest and upfront about what’s being offered, the transformation that’s on the other end, and giving them a reason to make a decision now. Even if they pass on your offer, that’s a good thing – that means they made a decision.
2. During a sales window, you must highlight (and repeat highlighting) when a decision needs to be made and what’s at stake. We may send up to 3 emails on the final day of our sales window to warm audiences, and each email converts progressively more.
   ​
   None of this will work unless you truly believe and know that your product or service actually helps people. Without that, selling will feel icky to you and to your audience. But, when you come from a place of service, the pressure you offer to make a decision shifts from “sales pressure”, to “service pressure” – the idea that you’re encouraging a decision because that’s the only way to begin and best serve your people.

Your Call to Action

If you’re stuck selling a product or service with little to no movement, insert a flash sale into the calendar within the next month. Provide a small window (i.e. 3-5 days) to take advantage of an offer that will go away, whether it be a bonus or even a discount. You could align this with a season or event (like a “Back-to-School Special”, if that makes sense for your brand), or just because.

If you don’t have a product or service yet, think about a reason to push a decision to join your email list. Perhaps there’s a special training you could offer, or even a limited-time lead magnet that relates to your audience that goes away or gets removed after a certain point. It can always come back later, but having the deadline will increase your conversions like crazy.

I hope you enjoyed this 5-minute read! To get more like it every week (again, totally free), sign up below!

The post I Made a Bet with My Son & Taught Him a Lesson appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

So you wanna build a website? Well, hold up because if you don’t go about it in the right way, you might end up wasting your time.

In this post, I’ll share the crucial first steps you need to take before you start building a website for your business—and a couple of amazing resources to help you get started building a brand and business you can be proud of. 

Picking a Purpose (Your Website Is Not a Business Card)

First, a quick story. When Pat was in high school, for whatever reason all the “cool kids” started printing little business cards.

Now, none of them actually had a business, so their cards just had their name on it and maybe the sport they played.

via GIPHY

The idea was to look cool. And Pat wanted to look cool, so he went to Kinko’s and printed out a bunch of business cards for himself. (To his memory, he was a black belt in karate.)

The Thing You Need to Do Before You Build a Website

Unfortunately, a lot of people want to have a website for the same reason Pat and his friends wanted business cards.

To look cool. 

They want to look like and feel like they have something they actually don't: a business.

So what does this mean for you, aspiring website-haver? It means building a website shouldn't be your first step.

The first step is figuring out what the purpose of your website is going to be.

If you have yet to nail that purpose, to figure out who you’re serving and how you want to help them, then that’s what you need to do first.

That’s what will determine what actually goes on your website.

If you're having trouble nailing that down, check out Pat’s book Will It Fly?. It’ll help you define your niche and understand who you’re serving. Before you start building a website for your business.

Figuring out the purpose of your business is a big step, and it can't be rushed. At the end of this post I’ll share another (free!) resource that’ll help you with that step.

Getting Started with Branding: Your Business’s Name 

Okay, let’s say you have an idea of who you’re serving and what your business is about. Where do you go from there?

This is where we enter the realm of branding. 

There's a lot to think about here, starting with the name of your business. The name needs to be catchy, but not so catchy that it doesn't make sense in light of what the business is about.

Is yours a personal brand? Then the business name should probably be your name, or a mixture of your name and something related to the space you're in. 

If you’re feeling stuck coming up with a name, the Post-it Note strategy is a fantastic brainstorming technique.

Here’s how it works:

The key to this approach is to get all the business name ideas—good, bad, it doesn't matter— out of your head so you can deal with them.

Once you’ve started narrowing the options, you need to find out if they’re fair game to use for your business. Pop those options into Google to see who else might be using them and whether or not they’re trademarked.

(We’re not lawyers here, so we highly recommend talking to one if you have any concerns about picking a name that won’t get you into trouble.)

How to Not Waste Your Time Building a Website

We’ve just been scratching the surface here, but if you’ve been thinking about starting a business and building a website, I hope this post has helped get the wheels turning for you.

For more on picking a name for your business and figuring out what kinds of content you should be creating for your website, watch Pat’s 8-minute video below.

Before we sign off, remember this: you’re not going to build a website overnight and make a million dollars tomorrow.

You’ve got to start somewhere.

And your website will always be a work in progress. It doesn't need to be perfect at the start. (Or ever. We're always working on improving ours.)

So forget about perfection, and get started creating something that will help people and get you results.

If you’re eager to do that, give the Build Your Own Brand course a look. Over just five days, it walks you through creating a brand and a website—and it’s completely free.

If you can answer “Yes” to these three questions, then Build Your Own Brand could be a perfect fit:

• Have you been thinking about starting a website for a while, but haven't because you didn't know how to start?
• Do you have an idea for an online business, but no place to showcase it?
• Is your entire business built on someone else's platform, like Facebook or Etsy?

The post Why You Shouldn’t Build a Website (Before You Do This) appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Editor’s note: This guest post by N.G. Gordon of Dear Mishu's Dad is on a topic we don’t talk about much here at SPI Media: influencer marketing. But if you’re in the physical product space especially, influencer marketing can be a key component of your marketing toolkit. N.G. provides some handy advice for getting started finding and working with influencers—to which we'll add, make sure that whenever possible, you're building relationships with the SMIs you want to work with and prioritizing your audience's trust in you. Long-term relationships over short-term wins, always. Enjoy the article!

Now that marketing through social media influencers is maturing, it’s time to take a wiser, more experienced look at it. But first:

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of guerrilla marketing! And when we talk about marketing via social media influencers (SMI), we mean someone who:

1. Owns a social media account (minimum 50 followers) on platforms such as on TikTok, Instagram, Linkedin and YouTube, and—very importantly—
2. Uses it for amazing relationship building with their followers AND/OR content creation.

Our social media accounts are our brand business cards now. It’s obvious to the post-business-card generation that when one talks about “influencers” they mean social media influencers. And so, marketing via endorsements from bloggers, famous authors, whitepaper composers, or podcasters isn’t really considered to be influential nowadays unless they’re using social media to get their message across.

At the same time, the public and the media tend to hate what they think the word “influencer” stands for. So if you’d like, use other names to refer to them: creators, testimonial advertisers, online cheerleaders, advocates, social media impactors, etc. But whatever you call them, it is generally agreed that there are four types of SMIs, determined by their follower counts: 

1. Celebs/Mega-Influencers (those with over one million followers) 
2. Macro-Influencers (between 100,000 and one million followers) 
3. Micro-Influencers (10,00 to 100,000) 
4. Nano-Influencers (5,000 to 10,000)

Only Mega-Influencers are usually famous. That means that all others—and there are millions and millions of them—are unknown to the general public but are very well-known to the communities they’ve built through their social accounts. And, as a result, they can move mountains through those communities.

Why Would You Use Influencer Marketing?

You work hard designing, innovating, and creating. Whether it’s a new product, your new design services, a new menu, a new app, or a new Amazon product, it takes time and sweat to give birth to that baby. But when you are done, and the product is ready to be released to the world, alas, crickets… It’s hard to break through—and most people know how to bypass ads via ad-blocking software or emotional blockers! Unless you can find someone who already has the eyes, ears, and trust of your potential audience to recommend your creation. 

And that is where hiring an SMI can be a great shortcut to speed your marketing efforts. If done right, you can get exposure, and so much more, including:

1. Feedback. You can save/earn a lot of money and avoid unnecessary work when your audience tells you whether or not they’re interested in your new idea for a business/product. This kind of feedback can be accessed through SMIs and their communities, because if you pick the right ones, they will become your target audience. Here’s a real-world example from my DearMishu, where she found that there was an issue with package closure of a sample she received, reported it to the brand, and saved them a lot of money before they launched to a mass market:

2. Access to new communities. By creatively working with influencers, brands can reach communities they never would have considered targeting. I always like to give the example of a new tennis racquet entering the market that happens to come in orange. Imagine that the brand worked with an SMI who leads a community of people who love anything orange!

3. Recognition. SMI’s are recognized as experts, and they transfer that to you. An SMI can bring you what we marketers know as “positive bias.” As a result, your brand will be “stamped” into their followers’ subconscious, and when they need to make a buying decision, they will remember the SMI’s recommendation.
4. Virality. If the SMI you work with is skilled, your message will become viral through their communities.
5. Great, reusable content. You need to have content—photos, videos, audio, etc. Even if you already have someone (yourself?) creating the content, after some time it can become repetitive and less creative than when you started your business. Most SMIs are very talented at story-telling, and you can use that to your advantage. 
6. Great consultant. SMIs “live” in your marketplace. They know exactly what your audience members want and feel, how they’ll react, and so on. Ask them to share their experience and recommendations—they can be great consultants.

How to Do Influencer Marketing

You’ll be able to access all those benefits of working with influencers, but only if you do it right…. The secret is to find someone on the social media channel of your choice who is:

• Not a criminal or operating unethically (but know that most influencers are ethical!)
• Has built a community that is relevant to what you do 
• Dominates search results for your category on the platform
• Their followers care about them, and care about what you do. An unengaged audience is a waste of your time and money.

• And optional but good to have—someone who can create amazing content.

Search for these kinds of folks, and your success rate will be high.

How to Approach Influencers

Approaching an influencer doesn’t have to be complicated DM them and say something like:

“Hi Johnny, I would like to pay you for promoting my ____ product. Is that okay, and what would be your fee?”

Once you do that:

1. Treat the SMI as a business partner. Know that they work hard, days and nights (like you), they have bills to pay, and this is how they pay them. They take their job seriously—and you should do the same. Therefore, just hire them using the same process you do with SEO experts, graphic designers, and software coders.
2. Don’t ask them to bring you instant sales. What they do is marketing toward sales, not sales right from the first day. Let them help you get your message out first and build a social media presence, trust, etc., and then sales will come.
3. Ask them to do at least two oro three campaigns/projects per year for you. Why? If someone has nothing to say about your brand 364 days a year and then suddenly starts singing your praises—would you trust them? 
4. Sign a Brand-Influencer contract. (The one I use is available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084SP1R7G.)

1. Once the campaign is on, don’t forget to be there, actively engaging on the campaign posts and getting involved with the SMI’s followers. You want to show your commitment as a brand to the SMI and their followers. 

How Much Does Influencer Marketing Cost?

First, should you pay a SMI for their work? The answer is YES.

What would you do if someone asked you to work and didn't want to pay you? Not so good, right? It's the same with SMIs—they spend their working hours on you, they introduce what you do to a community it took them months if not years to build, they put their reputations on the line for you, etc. They are right to expect to make a living from their social media activities. Paying is the right way to go!

When calculating how much to pay an influencer, you can use one of five methods: 

1. Pay the SMI 4% of their number of followers. For example, if Sarah has 30,000 followers, then pay her $1,200.
2. Pay $120 per post for every 10,000 followers the SMI has (e.g., $360 for Sarah’s 30,000 followers).
3. Pay by the hour, when the rate can be from $25 to $950/Hour, usually based on the SMI’s talent at story-telling, design, and marketing performance.
4. Pay by project—as above, but an agreed amount per project. For example, a project may be defined as “Sarah creates 2 x 50-second YouTube videos recommending Brand X and posts them to her followers with 2 hashtags that Brand X provides. The work will be owned by Brand X. In return, Brand X will pay $900 upon contract signing and $1,400 after the posts go live on Sarah’s YouTube’s channel.”
5. Pay by KPIs, such as number of tags, comments, or reshares. This is a mix of results-based payment forms, for example: “When KPI X is reached, you’ll get $__, and when KPI Y is reached, you’ll get $__.”

Each method has its pros and cons. Some of them are easier to calculate and work off already existing business models (project contracting or pay by the hour, for example). However, just like with paying other contractors, there are flaws and room for suspicion sometimes, as you don’t know your new partner well. For example, what if the number of hours Sarah reports looks inflated by the brand that ordered her work? There are also issues with the accuracy of numbers—it’s difficult to measure KPIs scientifically, and platforms don’t give access to all of their data.

Also consider that many SMIs see themselves as real artists and creators. They may not have a huge number of followers, but they are still highly successful through their art and content creation and charge accordingly:

I charge based on my time & effort (& the time of year at some point). I leverage my fees on my metrics and my engagement rates based on the average in my bracket. I can also tell you there are a hell of a lot of others in my bracket who would laugh a brand into the river at $100 per 10k per post.

—Anonymous

Examples of Successful Influencer Marketing

Downsides of Influencer Marketing

There are several downsides to relying on influencer marketing. If you are aware of them, you will be able to deal with them more effectively.

Choosing the wrong SMI means choosing the wrong partner, which can cost your brand in reputation or in trouble with organizations such as FTC or with communities, and the ROI will be negative.

1. Measurement is a problem. Marketing, branding, and feedback are all hard to measure. ALso, social media platforms limit access to the data you need to measure performance (and that won’t change any time soon because of user privacy protections). 
2. It takes a few tries to find the right SMI.
3. It's easy to make a wrong decision—mistakes can include:
   • Looking for the most popular accounts instead of someone who cares and can influence or create content really well. 
   • Confusing a high follower count with big influence or big results.
   • Not allocating enough budget to hire the right SMI, and ending up with a “universal-do-all,” cheap ($5, anyone?) but horrible quality SMI who targets irrelevant markets and countries.

4. Competition with the SMI’s brand. Some SMIs offer their own products, which could be in direct competition with yours. 

Avoiding Influencer Marketing Mistakes

Luckily, most problems can be avoided if you prepare well. And there is nothing like a good interview to know if your candidates are the right pick or not. Here are some important questions to ask them: 

1. Do they like what you do? Why?
2. Have they promoted other competitive products recently? How did it go?
3. How much do they usually charge? Why?
4. For their past successful campaigns, what day or time were they posted?
5. Will they provide a 60-day snapshot of their social media insights? See how their engagement went (calculated as quantity of followers divided by likes and comments on posts—anything above 2% is great).
6. Can you keep and reuse the content they create for you?

Here are some tips about which SMI to never hire:

Good luck, heroes. You can do it! (And don’t forget to sign a brand-influencer contract with all the above precautions!)

About the Author

N.G. Gordon is the creator of Dear Mishu, a dog character that gives underdog advice to humans on social media. He originally built the account to learn about influencers and how they work. Over time, the account grew and Dear Mishu became a real social media influencer with a community of followers who ask her for advice. Gordon uses this experience, and his 20 years of B2B and B2C marketing experience, to help brands understand how to reach their goals through influencer marketing and social media branding.

The post Influencer Marketing 101: The What, Why, and How Not To Go Wrong (with Examples) appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Are you just getting started with your online business and building your brand? We know how difficult it can be to navigate learning the mountain of information in front of you. All the new terms and information thrown around can quickly become overwhelming! 

If you’re trying to learn the basics of branding, you probably have a ton of questions buzzing around your head. Like, what is branding, exactly? Why does it matter? What does the branding process look like? And so on.

But don’t worry, in this article we’re going to cut straight through the noise with all the need-to-knows about branding, and we’ll provide you with some added resources to boot. 

Sound good? Let’s get going then!

Contents

• What is a Brand?
• What is Branding? Everything You Need To Know
• Understanding the Importance of Branding
• Branding Resources for Beginners

What Is a Brand?

Product definition

Before we can understand what a brand is, we’re first going to need to establish what products are.

Simply put, a product is anything offered to a market—a good, service, property, etc.—to satisfy that market’s wants and needs. 

To state the obvious: there are a ton of products out there. But have you noticed that many different companies sell the same, or very similar, products? 

So, what differentiates them? Why are some more likely to buy a Starbucks cup of black coffee over some other company’s coffee?

The difference is in the brand. 

Brand definition

So, what is a brand, anyway? 

Frankly, the definition for “brand” is pretty conceptual; a brand refers both to the unique identity of a company and the overall perception—or gut feeling—consumers associate with that company.

Sounds pretty abstract, right? Let’s break this down a little further. 

Basically, the concept of a brand is created through a series of elements, altogether serving to distinguish a company and its products from its competitors.

So, a brand isn’t just a company’s name, logo, and tagline. More so, it’s the sum of these (and many more) strategically-constructed features that come together to create a unique experience for consumers. 

And when done correctly, the concept of a brand is magnetic and enduring. A good brand is an asset that provides a competitive edge over other similar providers in a market. 

So, how do you put together a brand that consumers prefer to shop from? 

You’ll need good branding. 

What Is Branding? Everything You Need To Know

Branding definition

Now that we’ve established the definition for “brand,” what does branding mean exactly? 

To put it simply: branding is the strategic action that goes into shaping a brand. 

But let’s expand on that definition a little bit; branding refers to the process of creating a distinct reputation for your company, service, or products that will live in your consumers’ heads. 

This process involves the research and creation of consistent elements, like your brand name, mission, recognizable visual aspects (logo, design, symbols, etc.), tone and voice, copywriting, and more. 

These elements need to be carefully developed based on extensive market research to create a strong brand presence that positively speaks to target consumers. 

Extensive and frequent research—both quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (feedback, interviews, etc.)—is crucial for the branding process. It’s important to intimately know and understand the people you’re trying to reach.

Only with this foundation of research can you begin to develop the branding elements that will create a powerful reputation—evoke that positive gut feeling—for your brand. I’ll touch more on this down below.

The elements of branding

The process of branding involves building a cohesive identity for your brand: that’s who your brand is, what you offer, and who your product is for. 

Brand identities are composed of many different elements. It’s essential to understand what these elements are and how they’re used to shape perceptions in order to create an effective brand. 

The elements of your brand need to be clearly defined, too, to create an authentic and dependable experience for your customers. Altogether, each element will work together to create your identity—and further, your reputation. 

So, what are the elements of branding? Here’s a look for you:

• Brand targeting
• Brand mission and values
• Brand persona and communication
• Brand visual elements 
• Brand presence 

There they are. But how do these look in practice? Let’s go over the branding process, covering each of these elements in depth, one by one. 

An overview of the branding process

Brand targeting

The first step to branding is defining who your target audience is. Basically, before you can attempt to communicate and build a lasting impression with your customers, you’ll need to figure out who you’re even trying to reach and who will benefit from your product.

So, do a lot of digging and determine what your ideal customer looks like; what are their demographics (age, gender, location, income, and more), what do they like/dislike, and so on.

This step is crucial to shaping your brand. 

It’s necessary to understand your target audience thoroughly in order to create a brand they’ll love to shop from. If your brand identity doesn’t resonate with your audience, it won’t reach their head, heart, or wallet. Simple as that. 

Brand mission and values

Now, with your target audience in mind, it’s time to do some reflection on your brand’s purpose. 

Your brand mission and values are the bedrock of the brand’s unique identity. These will affect every other element of your branding, allowing you to build a cohesive identity that sets your business apart from its competition. 

Establishing a mission is important to provide clarity and direction for your business. The mission is your overarching goal and commitment to that goal; what purpose are you seeking to fill in your market? Your market research will come directly in hand here. 

Similarly, your brand values will be a compass for your brand’s decisions. These are the principles that will shape your brand’s behavior and overall messaging. Determine how your product benefits your audience over your competitors’—what sets it apart?

It’s worth noting that as many as 89% of consumers reportedly stay loyal to brands that share their values. With a stat like this, it’s apparent that defining clear values in line with your audience research is crucial to your brand’s lasting success. 

Brand persona and communication 

Next, it’s time to create a persona for your brand. This will include its personality traits, voice, language, and more. Your brand persona will be directly inspired by your intended audience and will frame how you communicate with them.

To form your brand persona, ask questions like, what language does my audience use? And what tone of voice will attract them? Part of making your brand persona involves treating your brand as an actual person; basically, what would your brand sound like if you talked to them?

It’s important to establish these elements thoroughly to ensure consistent and authentic communication with your audience. 

Let’s go over some of the key types of brand communication:

• Brand name: As you can imagine, the brand name is incredibly important. It’s how people will identify your company and products, and therefore, a key part of your brand’s identity. 

Think about the brands with names so powerful, we now collectively refer to the general product by that brand’s name: Band-Aid, Google, Kleenex, and so on.

Your brand name needs to be easily memorable. 

• Tagline: Likewise, your brand’s tagline has the power to be incredibly influential! 

Think: “Just do it” by Nike or “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” 

Effective taglines can set you apart from the competition and stick like glue inside consumers' heads. As such, the tagline is a crucial part of your brand’s identity and brand advertising. 

• Advertising, website, email, and social media copy: Brand copywriting plays a huge role in how people perceive your brand. Your copywriting will appear in your ads, across your website, in your email campaigns, and on social media. 

This is where customers can get a feel for your brand’s voice, which reinforces your overall brand personality. 

• Customer service: Your brand customer service should reflect your established brand voice and language too. 

Some companies, like Chick-fil-A, even provide branded interactions as a part of their customer service experience. Thank a Chick-fil-A employee, and they’ll respond with “my pleasure” every time. 

Throughout your brand communication, consistency is key to building a familiar relationship that comes across as authentic to your customers. Take note that 86% of shoppers stated that authenticity is a deciding factor for whether they’ll support a brand or not. 

Make sure you have a brand communication strategy so that your communication efforts align fully with your brand’s identity. Good brand communication helps you engage with your customers effectively, creating loyalty and making sure you win out over your competitors. 

Brand visual elements

Your brand’s visual elements remain a crucial part of your brand’s identity. As visual creatures, we rely on visual aspects to help form our perceptions of brands; it plays a key role in defining how we interact with and feel about them. 

A brand’s visual elements are so important, in fact, that many see them as synonymous with the term “brand” itself. 

What are the visual elements of a brand you need to know? Here they are:

• Logo: The logo is easily one of the most important parts of your branding. It represents the face of your brand; it’s the main image that consumers will think of and recognize your brand by.
• Colors: Did you know that having a signature color increases brand recognition by up to 80%? Yep, there’s a whole psychology to color choice, and choosing the right colors will play a critical role in your branding. 
• Typography: Your typography is another defining feature of your brand’s identity. There are many typefaces to choose from, and it’s important to carefully select ones that will represent your brand’s personality well. 
• Graphics: Your brand’s graphics are another great opportunity to provide memorable visuals for your audience. Your graphics will need to keep your brand’s colors in mind, allowing your brand to maintain a consistent presence in consumers’ minds. 
• Images: It’s no secret that images are powerful—they say a picture is worth a thousand words! Let your images speak for your brand with photos that portray the styles, ideas, and emotions that effectively communicate your brand’s personality and values.

The visual identity of a brand remains the most widely-recognized part of branding, making it an incredibly influential tool when done right. 

It’s important for brands to create a style guide to ensure consistent visuals that their audiences can immediately recognize and seek out time and time again. 

Brand presence 

Last but not least, your brand presence represents the space your brand occupies in the physical and digital worlds. Your newly established brand strategy and identity will be reflected in these spaces, providing a cohesive experience for consumers across the web, their phones, and in real life. 

Let’s take a look at some key places where you can optimize your brand’s presence:

• Website: Your website is the digital home for your brand; place your logo, brand colors, and fonts throughout your website for a strong digital brand presence. 

As consumers are increasingly shopping online, your website will often serve as the first and main interaction point for consumers with your brand. Because of this, your website needs to be well-designed both functionally and visually. 

You’ll also want to use your brand voice in your web copy, with compelling calls-to-action to drive sales. At the end of the day, what good is great branding if you’re not pulling in revenue?

• Social media: Social media is a primary communication tool in our modern world and is becoming an increasingly important space for brands to interact with their audiences. 

Your social channels should look and sound like your brand. When used right, social media is a great place to boost your brand’s awareness and grow its presence. 

• Physical store: Though eCommerce has become prevalent over physical locations, a physical store provides an opportunity for you to win customers over in a tangible setting. 

Provide a unique experience that aligns with your brand, both through your store design, layout, and your in-store customer service. 

• Packaging: Physical packaging is another opportunity to create a positive experience that fits in with your brand’s persona. Make the most of your packaging with easy-to-use designs, your logo, brand colors, its feel, and more.

What is brand marketing?

Brand marketing refers to the tactical process of promoting your product in line with your brand’s established identity. Your brand’s marketing strategy should constantly be evolving to raise your brand’s awareness, encourage loyalty, create engagement, and, of course, bring in sales. 

You may have noticed that branding and marketing tend to get grouped together; but, even though branding is often referred to as a marketing practice, they’re still two distinct processes. 

Below are a couple of ways that marketing and branding differ.

Branding vs marketing

• The process of branding comes first, then marketing the brand is second. Basically, branding is the creation of your brand’s identity and presence, while marketing is the spreading of it. 
• Marketing is about promotion. Its aim is to attract people to your brand. Ideally, once you’ve attracted a customer with marketing, your strong branding will keep them coming back. 
• Marketing is directly sales-driven, whereas branding is more about creating a positive perception and customer loyalty. 
• Marketing campaigns are typically short-term and evolve at a much quicker pace, but branding is long-lasting. 

Though the goals of marketing and branding often overlap—both working together to create and grow your business—it’s important to understand their differences to wield them effectively.

Naturally, you can’t exactly market a brand that doesn’t exist yet. So, branding comes first. 

And after you’ve established your branding, learning to market your brand online and off will be the next step to gain recognition and start making sales. 

Plus, thanks to your branding research and determined guidelines, you’ll already have a strong sense of direction for your marketing plan. 

It remains apparent that strategic branding, coupled with strong brand marketing, has the power to make brands withstand the test of time. 

Learn more about the differences between branding and marketing in our in-depth post here!

Understanding the Importance of Branding

Let’s dive into why branding matters so much and go over what good branding looks like. 

Why business branding matters

Branding isn’t just important for businesses; it’s necessary. It plays a critical role in how your business is perceived and its long-term success. 

When you think of a major brand, such as Amazon or Apple, you quickly begin to see the importance of branding in terms of being readily and easily recognized, uniqueness from competitors, overall value, and more. They’ve achieved their high degrees of success largely thanks to their branding. 

Here are some of the top reasons branding matters.

Branding provides value

Brands are incredibly valuable for companies and individuals. In fact, even more so than the product or service they sell. 

Let me illustrate what I mean. Take Coca-Cola, for example. There are many cola products on the market that are very similar, but consumers still pick Coca-Cola over them because of the warm and fuzzy, deep-rooted feelings the brand brings them. 

Another example of the value of brands falls in the “brand name product” vs “generic product” phenomenon. 

Often a brand name and generic product will be precisely the same or with negligible differences, but consumers prefer the brand name. Well-established brands provide a feeling of status for buyers, even for something as basic as ketchup. 

On an additional note, as a business owner, your goal is to provide value to the market and to be profitable for doing so. It’ll be beneficial for you to view branding as an asset for your company. Depending on your exit strategy and whether you plan to sell your company in the future, your branding will be a big part of how your company is valued.  

Branding increases recognition and distinguishes you from competition

One of the most important factors of branding is the recognition it can bring your business. Building the right branding elements creates a lasting, positive impression in consumers’ minds. 

In fact, our brains can register the elements of popular brands in an instant due to past experiences and frequent exposure to their carefully-planned branding. If I were to ask you right now what the Starbucks logo is, chances are you could instantly tell me. 

In a market of fast things that go faster, you want to be able to stand out and have instant recognizability so that your target customers can find you quickly and easily. 

Your branding also highlights how you’re unique in the marketplace. This gives your products their own distinct identity by connection, too. With branding in place, none of your competitors will be exactly like you, even if they sell a very similar product.

Branding helps bring and keep customers

Plus, as we’ve established, marketing your business is so much easier when you have good branding in place. Solid branding research and development is not only the first step of the two; it also causes your marketing to take shape. 

Not to mention, effective marketing brings in more customers, and with your strong, established branding at its side, you’ll be able to win their loyalty. 

A common mistake that businesses make is to over-promote and over-sell, especially through social media. But having strong branding makes these unnecessary. You can let your customers know the value of what you provide without always having your sales hat on. 

When you give your customers value on a regular basis, they can easily see what your company is about through the authentic personality that your brand conveys. 

Branding establishes trust and credibility 

Good branding also tells your audience that you’re a company with credibility. 

One way it does this is by bringing clarity to your messaging. It’s pretty easy to share exactly how you serve the marketplace when you’ve got your branding in place. 

There’s a saying that a confused mind doesn’t buy. When consumers frequently see your branding, along with your clear and consistent messaging, it establishes trust, making them feel safe to purchase what you’re offering. 

Once you wrap your mind around the importance of branding and understand that your brand tells people who and what you are, you can get creative in sharing your company’s established personality to bring your value to the marketplace. And the cool thing is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. 

Now, let’s take a look behind the curtain at some great brands! 

Examples of good branding

When we take a look at what’s working in the world of branding, many brands might come to your mind (further reiterating the power of their branding)—Apple, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Netflix, etc.; yep, there are a ton of brands doing it right.  

This is awesome news for us because it provides a lot of inspiration. What better place to get some branding tips than from the world’s most successful brands? You can see what they’ve done and how they’ve done it, which can help you model your own brand for success. 

I’ll go over each of these iconic brands and discuss some of the ways that their branding works. 

Apple

Apple is certainly one of the most powerful modern brands around. Their branding is clean, simple, and memorable. 

Perhaps most importantly, their elements have stayed consistent and cohesive, establishing an insane brand presence, authority, and consumer loyalty worldwide. 

Their brand name, “Apple,” was a strategic move right from the start. Steve Jobs came up with the name because “Apple” would sit ahead of their competitor, “Atari,” in the phone book. 

The logo, an apple, is already a universally familiar image, too, requiring no extra brainpower to recreate their logo image in your mind. 

Starbucks

Starbucks has a great story surrounding the name. And that story is now part of their branding. 

They’re an awesome example of how effective intentional branding is; they saw a need in the marketplace for a relaxed atmosphere where people could work, converse, have a coffee and have a strong community experience and reflected this throughout their branding.

By thoroughly understanding and filling this market need, they were able to shape an incredibly effective brand from the start. And by staying consistent with their brand mission, values, visuals, and messaging from there, their brand took off.

McDonald’s 

Of course, McDonald’s branding is iconic. Everyone knows their logo—even across 100 countries. And as they evolved to modernize their architecture and menus, they’ve stayed globally uniform, with their golden double arches remaining ever-present. 

Even if you’ve never heard of Ronald McDonald, chances are you can spot those double arches from a mile away. And thanks to their consistent, iconic branding across their stores and product branding, your brain might just “smell” their hot, salty french fries, simply in association with seeing the double arches. 

Netflix 

Netflix is a good example of a brand that has outpaced its competitors by being willing to change. When their competitors (RIP Blockbuster) weren’t adapting to the needs of the marketplace, Netflix conducted effective market research and paid attention to what consumers were saying. But, more importantly, they made this value a part of their branding. 

“Netflix and chill.” 

I’m sure you’ve heard it. With Netflix’s online streaming, people no longer needed to leave their homes to pick up a DVD rental. Their brand is convenient, modern, and comfortable. They also know their target audience extremely well and aren’t afraid to banter with them over social media, keeping customer engagement alive and well on a massive scale.

Altogether, the sum of their effective branding elements has made Netflix a cultural powerhouse. 

There you go, these represent some of the best company branding around. 

Let’s recap a bit: some things that these great brands have in common are consistent branding elements, memorable imagery, strong values reflected throughout their branding, and their own unique identities.

Each of these companies put in place strong branding strategies in response to what the marketplace wants and needs, continuing to evolve with the world while staying committed to their brand’s core positive traits.

Taking note from these great brands, it’s worth mentioning that while getting branding right from the start is incredibly important, you don’t need to feel stuck in stone with it; your branding can and should evolve over time. You just don’t want to make too many changes too fast. 

The fact is, the more effort you put into laying an excellent foundation for your brand, it’ll actually make it easier to change and grow effectively over time.

Branding Resources for Beginners

Ever since the world started opening up again this spring, we’ve been hearing from a ton of folks who are excited—and nervous—to start building a business now that they’re seeing light on the horizon.

In fact, Pat’s told us that his inbox has been flooded recently with emails that go something like this:

“Pat, I want to finally get going on my idea and get a website up online, but I have no idea where to start. Can you help?”

We can definitely help.

In fact, we’ve had an amazing resource just for this purpose for a while—our Build Your Own Brand (BYOB) course!

In the rest of this post, I wanted to share a few resources from the SPI archives to help you get started branding and building your new online business. Check them out, then sign up for BYOB. 

Below are a few goodies from the archives of the SPI blog and AskPat and SPI podcasts that'll help you get started branding and building an amazing business.

SPI 286: How to Build a Brand that Stands Out from the Crowd

In this episode of the SPI Podcast, Pat goes over how to start building a brand from the ground up, how to understand your audience better so that you can better serve them, and some ways that you can follow through and build a great community. 

AP 0035: When Starting Out, How Broad or Specific Should Your Niche Be?

It should come as no surprise that, here at SPI, we’re biiiig fans of niching down. But we get that the idea of picking a smaller audience can seem scary and counterintuitive. Pat goes over the rationale for targeting a more focused market.

Primal Branding by Patrick Hanlon: SPI Book Club Issue 60 | April 2019

Patrick Hanlon’s Primal Branding is an exploration of why some brands work and thrive while others don’t. Hanlon delves into human nature to describe why brands outperform others, including our need to belong to something, our love for creation stories, and our fascination with memorable icons like logos and jingles, and the importance of having a creed.

AP 1156: How Do I Best Describe and Position My Business and Work to Others? What Do I Say?

In this episode of AskPat 2.0, Jay wonders how he can best describe and position his business and work to others. How do you fine-tune your messaging? How do you know when you've nailed it? Pat and Jay cover this in their coaching call.

How to Launch a Brand New Website (With a Bang!) – The Ultimate Guide

For many (most?) brands today, a website is a crucial piece of how you present yourself to and interact with your audience and customers. Our ultimate guide walks you through each step in launching your brand new website with a bang, from creating your viral content to creating launch-day buzz.

AP 1020: How Do I Stop the FOMO and Start Making Money?

Pretty much all of us have experienced fear of missing out (FOMO) in some form or another—and it happens when it comes to starting a business, too! 

Anand has had an amazing weight transformation in his life—losing 125 pounds and maintaining his weight loss over six years—and wants to share it with the world, but his FOMO is distracting him. He needs a little help finding focus and direction and monetizing his business.

AP 0270: Should My Brand Be Me or My Company?

To create a personal brand or not? This question can stop some solopreneurs in their tracks when they’re just starting out. Is it disingenuous to create an impersonal brand if you’re the only person in your business? Or are you actually doing yourself a disservice by thinking that way? Pat shares some guidance with Bill, who’s trying to reboot a brand that used to include employees but now is a solo project. 

Branding and Marketing: What's the Difference?

Branding… marketing… they’re pretty much the same thing, right? Not so fast. Before you start your own online business, you need to understand how branding and marketing differ and how they work together. Here’s our primer.

That should do it for now!

Final thoughts

At this point, you should have a clear picture of what branding is and why it’s so important. 

Brands are so much more than just your business’s name and logo (though those are important, too!); it’s that gut feeling customers get when seeing and interacting with your brand. Learning the ropes of good branding is key for your business’s success; it’ll help you to create a lasting positive perception for your business and its products. It may sound like a lot, but I’m here to tell you that you absolutely can achieve this, and you’re not alone in the process! There are tons more resources for getting started in the content archives on smartpassiveincome.com, including our Beginner’s Guide to Branding. And don’t forget to sign up below for BYOB!

The post What Is Branding: Definitions and Why It’s Important appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

If you’re thinking about starting a business, you’ll need your own brand, and you'll also need to market your products or services. But figuring out the difference between branding and marketing can be tricky. There’s definitely overlap between the two, but they’re not the same—and you need to know the difference if you want to build a successful business.

In this post, I’ll talk about how branding and marketing differ, and how they work hand-in-hand!

What Is Branding?

Before we can discuss the difference between branding and marketing, we need to lay some groundwork—and we'll start with branding.

So what exactly is a brand? It can be a tricky thing to define, but think of it as your business’ unique personality combined with the way the world perceives that personality.

As Pat writes in the SPI Beginner’s Guide to Branding: A brand is the idea, image or feeling that people have when they use or think about specific products. It’s who you are, who you want to serve, and what people perceive you to be.

Your brand is the foundation of your company. It’s who you are.

We live in a world of brands, whether we’re always aware of it or not. And some brands stand out above others, occupying a special place in many people’s minds. (You may even have a few favorite brands of your own!)

Think of iconic brands like Nike, Toms Shoes, Trader Joe’s, Disney, Tesla, and LEGO. These are brands that immediately bring to mind specific ideas and images. Most of us could probably readily identify what makes these brands stand out and what they stand for:

• Nike = Empowerment (“Just do it!”)
• Toms Shoes = Altruism (“We ‘stand’ on issues that matter”)
• Trader Joe’s = Good food that’s fun to buy (Cookie Butter, anyone?)
• Disney = Quality family entertainment (Creating happiness through magical experiences)
• Tesla = Innovative electric cars with great design (that will save the environment)
• LEGO = Innovative building blocks that encourage creativity in kids (and adults!)

Each of the products we use every day has a distinct brand “personality.” When we use those products, it conjures certain ideas and emotions, whether we realize it or not.

But creating this kind of impact with your brand isn’t automatic. Cultivating a brand personality that resonates with your target audience doesn’t just happen on its own. A company or person has to establish and cultivate their brand, to find out what their audience wants and how their products or services stand out from the competition’s.

We’ll talk more about how to start creating your brand identity in a moment. But let’s first cover the crucial difference between branding and marketing, so you can conceptualize how the two work together.

What’s the Difference between Branding and Marketing?

As we’ve discussed, your brand is foundational. It’s who you are. As a result, everything you do as a company should grow out of your brand. That includes the language you use to talk to your customers, to the way you interact with potential clients, to (yes) your logo and website design, and much more.

We’ve talked a little about what a brand is, but let’s get a little more granular. Your brand is your (or your company’s) unique personality. It:

• Helps customers identify you or your products 
• Helps distinguish your or your products from the competition
• Influences how people perceive you or your business
• Increases the value of you or your business

Marketing, on the other hand, is a set of tools and strategies that will help you promote your products and services, including your:

• Website
• Social media accounts
• Email campaigns
• Online advertising
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content creation and design
• YouTube videos
• Events
• Etc.

Everything your company does flows from its branding. Your marketing tactics and materials, your customer service, and even how you treat your employees should reflect your brand’s personality.

How Do Branding and Marketing Work Together?

Your branding and marketing should work hand-in-hand. Marketing is the way you deliver the message of your brand personality to your audience. To help demonstrate this relationship, we’ll turn to another iconic brand, Southwest Airlines.

Branding and Marketing in Harmony: The Southwest Story

Southwest Airlines, founded in 1967, branded itself as the “love” airline in the early days. Its brand personality is empathetic, fun, and casual—and this personality comes across in everything the airline does.

While the airline is basic (no assigned or premium seats), people love to fly Southwest because they still get a great experience. Flight attendants may sing happy birthday to a passenger, offer free drink coupons, or sing the flight announcements. So the whole experience is fun, and passengers feel cared for. There are no baggage fees, and it’s free to change your flight. They also treat their employees well. (They’ve never laid off a single employee.)

Everything Southwest does, from customer service to marketing and advertising (“You Are Now Free To Move About the Country”), to how it treats its employees, reflects its brand personality. 

Similarly, your brand should be the foundation of your marketing strategy. Every piece of marketing collateral, whether it's your website, emails, social media accounts should reflect your brand's personality.

Let’s go back to our Southwest Airlines example. The core of their brand is “love.” They want to exude empathy and connection with their target audience. How do they convey this through their marketing?

• The Southwest logo includes a heart symbol
• A heart is painted on the underbelly of each plane
• The letters LUV are the Southwest Airlines stock market symbol
• Ads include copy like “Luv a Fare” and “Luv is Never Out of Reach”

You get the idea! Of course, Southwest Airlines is a big corporation, and you may be a solopreneur, or maybe you haven't even started your business yet! 

Still, it’s a good idea to get a grasp now on your branding: Who are you serving? What problem are you helping those people solve? And how is your company different/better than the competition? If you’re clear on those three things and keep them in mind when you market your products, you’ll be well on your way to finding success.

Is all that easier said than done, though? Maybe. Getting your brand right is a big deal, so if you need a little help, read on.

How Do I Create (Or Discover) My Own Brand?

Southwest Airlines is a case study in how to succeed at branding. The company created an identity based around serving passengers who didn’t want to spend much money but wanted some fun and humanity in their flying experience. Southwest knew who they were serving, and what would make them stand out from the competition.

But many business owners struggle to create an authentic brand identity that resonates with their target audience. If you’re starting your own business, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed at the thought of creating a brand for your business. How are you going to get your branding just right?

Never fear! We’re here to help out.

First, remember that your branding grows out of three things:

1. Who your business is serving.
2. What problem you’re helping them solve.
3. How you can help your customers better and differently than anyone else.

Putting these three things front and center will help keep you on the right track!

Next, here’s a quick video where Pat will walk you through an exercise to help you determine who you’re serving, and how you’re helping them better/differently than others.

I hope you find this video helpful! It’s from the first lesson of Build Your Own Brand, our completely free course that will help you get your brand up and running in just five days. You can also read the SPI Beginner's Guide to Branding, to get a more in-depth understanding of branding.

Looking for Marketing Resources?

Last, but not least, if you’re looking for marketing resources, we’ve got you covered too. Visit our Digital Marketing Done Right page to find a wealth of resources on digital marketing, from in-depth guides on using webinars to build your business, to workshops and courses, plus marketing blog posts and case studies.

The post Branding and Marketing: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Webinars are amazing tools for online business owners to teach and inspire their audience, and make a few sales along the way. A webinar gives you a chance to:

• Build your audience and engage with them
• Teach your audience something
• Validate an idea for a product or service
• Make money through the webinar itself

With all that potential, how do you make sure you’re getting the most out of each webinar for your business and your audience? Here are five tips to keep in mind for your next webinar that sometimes fly under the radar.

Key #1: Invest—but don’t overinvest—in your webinar tech

There are four important pieces of technology you’ll need for a successful webinar:

• A webcam
• Good lighting
• A fast, stable internet connection
• Audio equipment (a good microphone)

Some of these items will require a monetary investment—but you shouldn’t have to break the bank, either. Here’s how to make sure you’ve got what you need to deliver a smooth, pleasant audio and video experience without ditching the avocado toast.

Webcam

For the webcam, you can definitely get away with the built-in camera on your laptop. But I do recommend investing in something a little nicer if you can afford it. My favorite high-quality entry-level webcam is the Logitech C920. If you’re willing to spend a little more, let me point you to the Logitech BRIO 4k.

Lighting

Lighting is another area where you can easily drop a loooot of money—but you don’t have to. See what you can do with what you’ve got on hand first. You’d be surprised how much improvement you can get just by working with the way you position yourself in your room and using your windows strategically.

Check it out:

And if you’ve maxed out what you can do with window light, camera placement, etc., you can get to the next level of lighting improvement with a basic ring light.

Internet Connection

The quality and speed of your internet connection is another crucial component for a successful webinar. The bandwidth demands of a webinar can be intense, and nobody wants to tune into a webinar with choppy audio or glitchy video. But before you call up your internet service provider to upgrade your plan, make sure you’re making the most of your current service level. First, run an Ethernet cable directly from your router to your computer for a more reliable connection. Then quit all unnecessary apps and make sure no one else on your network is using a ton of bandwidth during your webinar (like watching a streaming video).

Microphone

Last but not least, you’ll want to invest in a decent microphone. Thankfully, you can get a whole lot of mic for not a whole lot of cash. Our recommended model is the Samson Q2U, and it’ll run you about $120. It even comes with a desktop stand, pop filter, and cables.

Key #2: Nail the webinar registration page

Marketing your webinar effectively is crucial, obviously. And there are lots of ways to market your webinar—email marketing, Facebook ads, blog posts, etc. But however you promote the thing, you’re going to want to direct people to a landing page to register for it—making your registration page one of the most important assets in your webinar marketing arsenal.

So what should your webinar registration page look like? Here are a few pretty good examples (if we may say so ourselves):

• Podcasting the Smart Way
• Double Your Downloads
• Affiliate Marketing Masterclass
• Free Podcasting Webinar with David Siteman Garland

These landing pages have a few key elements in common:

• The title of the webinar at the top, followed by subtitle or value proposition (i.e., what you’ll learn).
• A picture of the presenter (plus any additional hosts), because people connect with faces and want to see who they’ll be learning from.
• Some bullet points that go into more depth about the content of the webinar and what people will get from it.
• The presenter’s bio, which provides an extra boost of credibility.
• Registration buttons at multiple points on the page so people can easily click to sign up. 
• If you like, a countdown timer to create a little urgency.

The final key to an effective registration page—which may not be as obvious as a countdown clock or presenter headshot—is that it uses the language of its target audience. Whether you’re marketing your webinar on a landing page, on social media, via email marketing, through Facebook ads, or any of the above, you need to address your audience’s needs and problems using the words and phrases they use. You need to speak their language.

Key #3: Use pattern interrupts to keep people engaged

Your job as webinar emcee is to keep your audience tuned in—and one of the best ways to do that is by using pattern interrupts.

The concept is simple: you just need to mix things up every once in a while. Pattern interrupts are a fantastic way to break up monotony during your webinar and keep people engaged. Here are a couple different ways to use pattern interrupts to keep people alert throughout the show:

• Change up what’s on screen. Switching back and forth between slides and your webcam is a great way to interrupt the pattern. If you have multiple cameras, you can even switch between camera angles to keep things interesting.
• Take a breather once in a while and check in with the audience. After each section of your presentation, switch from professional presentation mode and into engagement mode by saying things like, “Hey everybody, let me know what the most relevant or most surprising part of the last section was for you.” You can even mention names and thank people. This gives everybody a chance to settle before diving back in.

It’s important to use pattern interrupts in a way that’s not jarring. Practice your webinar a few times beforehand (with a small audience if possible) to figure out the timing of your transitions.

Key #4: Planning to pitch? Be upfront about it

As you learned earlier, webinars are a great way to educate your audience, build relationships, and promote a premium product. For a lot of entrepreneurs, the idea of selling on a webinar might be scary. And I get it. You don’t want to feel slimy or sketchy.

Thankfully, there are ways to get around these fears and sell on your webinar in a way that your audience will appreciate. The most important one is to make sure that your webinar is packed with value. Nothing’s going to make your webinar attendees more frustrated than wasting their time and then trying to take their money.

What else can you do to make sure your webinar pitch lands on welcome ears and eyes? There’s another maybe less obvious strategy, and it’s to simply tell people what’s coming. Be upfront that you’ll be selling something! Expectations are your best friend—if you mention early on that you’ll be selling later on, you won’t catch anybody by surprise. You can deliver the rest of your webinar more relaxed and confident in the knowledge that everyone knows what’s coming.

Key #5: Don’t disappear as soon as the webinar’s over

You just wrapped your webinar, and it was a hit! Your work's not done—but neither is your opportunity to reach more people. You have a valuable resource in hand you can use for ongoing marketing and audience building, which is your webinar replay. You did record your webinar, right?

You can use that recording to continue:

• Educating your audience
• Selling your promoted offer
• Growing your email list

At SPI, the bulk of our sales typically happen after the webinar is over. That’s right—the post-webinar phase is just as important as (and arguably more important than!) what happens before.

That’s why your webinar planning process should include building a follow-up sequence, a series of emails and messages you send after the webinar that will let you put that webinar replay to its best use. You can use the webinar replay as a bonus training resource that people get access to for joining your email list. And of course, you can use it to guide people to take action on the offer you promoted in your webinar.

You can also use your webinar replay to create what’s called an evergreen webinar—taking a one-time event and turning it into something you can promote throughout the year and that people can access anytime. This saves time and energy and helps you deliver an amazing educational experience—and more consistent sales—throughout the year.

There you have it—five ways that might be a little less than obvious to improve your chances of a successful webinar. If you’re itching to learn more, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Our newest course, A to Z Webinars, gives you a complete framework for creating, promoting, and delivering engaging webinars that help you grow your business.

The post 5 Underappreciated Keys to Webinar Success appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

So you’re here because you want to know how to launch a brand new website (with a bang!). That’s exciting, and you should feel proud! This post will show you exactly how to do that and will cover a wide range of website launch tips, including:

• What an ideal launch day website looks like.
• How to maximize your reach and website traffic on day one of your launch.
• Why you need to be able to pitch your website in seven seconds.
• What content to choose to be live on day one of your launch.
• How to create your viral piece: a beastly resource page and a round-up post.
• Why I also recommend having how-to content, case studies, and more.
• How to create a well-designed website people want to stick around for.
• Why you should create a Google Alert for your brand.
• What is a Share Page, and why do you need one, too?
• How to build a pre-launch coming soon teaser website landing page.
• What you can do to build relationships and buzz for launch day.
• And the connections, promotions, and content building you will create after launch.

Before we jump into how to launch your new website, I first need to share some personal context:

I’m often asked about the biggest mistakes that I’ve made while starting and running my online businesses. I typically answer with the following:

• Not starting sooner.
• Thinking about money before serving an audience.
• Trying to do everything on my own.
• Not immediately starting an email list.
• Using a trademark in a domain name.

I learned a lot about how to launch a website through trial and error with my Niche Site Duel project back in 2010. I was challenged by a friend to create a niche website, and within 73 days I was earning $700 per month and was able to propel the site to #1 on Google search results for my target keyword. That site I built eventually became SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com.

While some of the content in my Niche Site Duel project may be a little dated, I bring it up because it was a revelatory and essential part of my online business journey. I learned so much, failed a lot, stumbled a bunch along the way, and now make my living online.

And so can you.

One of the mistakes I want to talk about today is one I made when starting each of my first online businesses:

Not creating a launch plan for my websites.

While you don’t need a launch plan in order to build a successful website or online business, without one you miss out on the opportunity to make the noise on Day One that could easily put you three to six months ahead of where you would be if you just started publishing content without a plan.

Without a launch plan, you’re publishing content for nobody.

When you first create a website, nobody knows about it but you. Your best content is wasted and eventually over time gets hidden in the archives. There are ways to bring new life back to old blog posts, but when you’re first starting out you want as many people to read those posts as possible. More readers = more sharing, and more authority right off the bat.

There’s no reason you should ever be writing for nobody.

Let’s explore how to avoid that.

An Ideal Launch Day: The Goals

On the day that you launch and share your new website (which is different from the day that you start it), the aim is to have lots of traffic coming your way. “Lots of traffic” is relative, of course (and for any brand new website, any traffic is something to be proud about), but there are ways to maximize your reach and traffic on day one, which we’ll get into in this post.

You’ll also want your new visitors to perform a number of different actions—as many of the following as possible:

1. Read your content (duh!).
2. Subscribe to your email list.
3. Share your content and website with others.
4. Engage on your website and leave comments.
5. Get excited about what’s coming next.

The main purpose of the launch, beyond getting maximum traffic and engagement on day one, is to truly establish you and your brand as a new authority in the niche that you’re entering—one that’s worth paying close attention to. If you want a little extra challenge to kick off your launch on steady footing, I created Build Your Own Brand, a FREE five-day challenge that’s designed to help you build a brand and website you can be proud of (click the logo below to sign up!).

Entering a niche late is actually an advantage because you can see what’s missing from an existing market, come in to fill those holes, and be the solution that has yet to exist. With a launch plan in place, if done correctly, you can definitely ride the “New & Noteworthy” wave.

Ideally, you’ll want people to think something along the lines of: “Finally! Where has this been all my life?”

What to Do Before You Launch

You’ll want to think of the launch of your new website like an event—something important that happens on a specific day, at a specific time, where your brand and everything it has to offer becomes available to the public.

Doing this puts the launch in the correct frame of mind—not just for you, but for those you’ll be contacting before launch day to help you promote, as well as those who visit your site on launch day. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed (believe me, I get it!), I created what I call the PAT Formula that helps you plan anything—even a website launch.

The specific date also helps you schedule what happens when, and gives you a target date or deadline to shoot for, which will help you avoid procrastination and putting things off “until tomorrow.”

Before you contact anyone, however, there are certain things you should have in place and figured out first:

1. Your Seven-Second Pitch

The first and most important thing to do is find the right way to quickly let people know what your brand is about and why it’s worth paying attention to. This exercise will become the foundation for everything else that happens in and around your launch.

If you can’t pitch your website in seven seconds or less and it doesn’t sound like a no-brainer for those you are pitching to, then you’re not ready to launch.

Therefore, a significant amount of time should be spent on your seven-second pitch and determining the right language to use. It will help you figure out your tagline and the copy to use on your website to get people to stick around and subscribe to your list when they visit, and it’ll also help you figure out how to send the perfect (and quickest to read) emails to people who help you promote.

Why seven seconds?

It’s sort of an arbitrary number, similar to the 30-second elevator pitch, but the fact of the matter is that it’s quick—really quick. It needs to be the MED (Minimum Effective Dosage) of pitches because online you only have a small window to make a first impression before people leave and look for a better solution. Or, in the case of an email, you only have a small window of time before people read it and think, “This isn’t worth my time right now.”

2. Content That Will Be Live on Day One

On launch day, aim to have multiple pieces of highly valuable content already available to consume—not just one single post.

If you don’t have a launch plan, it doesn’t matter. Hardly anyone is there to read that first post anyway. But if you plan a launch, you’re going to set yourself back if all you have is one piece of content to read.

I made a mistake like this when I launched the SPI Podcast in July 2010. I only created one introductory episode before submitting my podcast feed to iTunes, so when people listened to the new show, all they could possibly listen to was that first episode. I actually received a number of low ratings and comments from people saying that the show actually had very little value to offer, which was totally true at that point. All of the good value was to come, so if I were to do it all over again I would wait until I had three or four episodes already in my feed.

The same goes for your website. You’ll have one viral piece of content that you’ll be promoting heavily, but you also want other cornerstones, pillar-type content published on your site, too. Sometimes, it’s not that initial piece of content they read that gets them to buy into you and your brand, but those other posts that may actually be more relevant to them.

Plus, as a whole, your site will already look like a resource to serve that audience that will be worth subscribing too. Again, it should be a no-brainer for your new visitors.

So what kinds of content should you initially publish?

First, let’s talk about that viral piece that’s going to put you on the map and help you promote your site.

Your Viral Piece

All of the content that's initially on your site is important and should be of the highest quality; however, there should be one incredible stand-out post that you'll use as your promotional tool from day one, and it should help your site experience some viral qualities right off the bat.

In my eyes, there are two types of viral pieces that you can create. They take some work, but the work can definitely pay off. They are:

1. A Beastly Resource

In SPI Podcast session #67, Neil Patel from QuickSprout.com mentioned that one of the best ways to promote a new website and make noise in a particular market is to create a highly detailed guide—the ultimate one-stop solution for people in that particular market who are trying to learn something. This guide is not a downloadable guide, but rather something formatted within the website itself which will help promote sharing, as well as search engine optimization.

For example, I recently created a helpful resource for how to create and sell an online course. These types of pages are packed with value and really can be a powerful draw to your website if done well.

Not only that, it almost proves authority and expertise right away to new visitors.

This is how Trevor Page from SPI Podcast Session #55 got started so quickly. Within a year, he built and monetized a website with a published ebook and membership site, and it all started with a beastly resource for those getting started with Java programming. It was picked up on LifeHacker.com and things just started to happen right out of the gate for Trevor, which is awesome. Similarly, Lucas Hall from SPI Podcast Session #232, built and sold an “ultimate resource” blog.

A website could contain several of these guides covering many different topics within your niche, but when you start out, pick the one you know is just right for your target audience—the one they are probably already asking for or hinting at elsewhere on the web.

The resource doesn’t have to be a 45,000-word, book-worthy piece of content like what Neil typically creates, but something more substantial than a regular blog post can definitely do the trick. Of course, the length of the piece isn’t what really matters (although that can make an impression), it’s the quality and usefulness of whatever is provided.

2. An Expert Round-Up Post

An expert round-up post was first mentioned here on SPI when Corbett Barr from ThinkTraffic.net was a guest on SPI Podcast Session #08, and it's exactly what he used to launch ThinkTraffic.net back in 2010 and take it from 0 to 60 in a very short time period. [Editor's Note: Corbett no longer runs the ThinkTraffic.net site. You can find him at corbettbarr.com.]

Compared to something like a beastly resource, an expert round-up post isn't quite as instructional or step-by-step, but it can definitely be just as useful and impactful for the launch of your site.

Here’s a round-up post I created that compiles online course creation tips from students of my first year of creating online courses.

An expert round-up post is simply a post that's made up of answers to a specific question that other experts in your field have answered for you and your audience.

Here's how to do it:

• Determine the most important question that your target audience wants answered.
• Email other experts in your niche, asking them to answer that one specific question.
• Compile all of the answers into a single blog post, and you'll begin to see just how much of a resource this post will be for new visitors!

The beauty of this strategy is that not only will you be able to provide this massive resource to your audience, but you'll have made connections with several influential people in your niche. If you approach these people correctly and follow up with them after your blog post is published, you can easily have several of them sharing the post that they're featured in with their friends and followers.

If you'd like some help emailing influential people, check out Derek Halpern's video here.

So which one is better: a beastly resource or a round-up post?

It really depends on your niche, but one is better than none. They both take a lot of different kinds of work to complete, but like I said, you can be put on the map on day one if you do it right.

I'd avoid having both available on day one because they each deserve full attention and promotion.

Other Types of Content to Have Published on Day One

Besides a beastly resource or a round-up post, you'll want other pillar-style content published on your site as well. An additional three or four pieces can go a very long way.

The most important thing when it comes to all of the content on your site is this: Don't write about what you want to say, write about exactly what your target audience wants to read. This is always going to be the case, but it's especially important during the launch of your website.

It's also a good idea to mix up the types of additional content you have posted on your site. Very much inspired by the content pyramid, different types of posts will appeal to different types of readers. Touch on them all, and you'll resonate with your audience one way or another.

Forget your personal story—that should be reserved for your about page, and you can touch more on that later. (By the way, I recently created this video to show you how to write an amazing About Page!)

Forget current events and news articles—that stuff isn't evergreen material. Once you establish some authority, you can definitely tap into what's happening in the news if you want.

With whatever you write about, make sure to craft that content using three different variations:

1. Analytical or Rational Content: This type of content appeals to those in your audience who are left-brainers—people who are all about the numbers and analytics, reasoning and logic. An example of this would be if I were to write a post titled: How Much Does It Cost to Start and Run a Food Truck Business?
2. Philosophical or Theoretical Content: This type of content appeals to the right-brainers—people who are all about design and theory, intuition and emotion. An example of this would be if I were to write a post titled: 10 Reasons Why People Buy from the Food Truck Parked Next to Yours.
3. Case Studies and How-To Content: Case studies and how-tos are the backbone of the SPI blog, and it's what people enjoy reading the most. The niche site duel is an example of a case study, as is information about Green Exam Academy and FoodTruckr, for example. How-to content examples include How to Get More Email Subscribers (17 Lead Magnet Ideas) and How to Write a Book: The Secret to a Super-Fast First Draft. The common thread is that this content is made up of examples, experiences, and results) from real-life that people can learn from. An example of this would be if I were to write a post titled: How the Patty Flynn Food Truck Went From $15,000 in Debt to $50,000 in Profit in 6 months.

Putting all of these hypothetical posts together, we get:

• How Much Does It Cost to Start and Run a Food Truck Business?
• 10 Reasons Why People Buy from the Food Truck Parked Next to Yours.
• How the Patty Flynn Food Truck Went From $15,000 in Debt to $50,000 in Profit in 6 months.

That's a nice set of articles to initially have on a site and would definitely give first-time visitors a great first impression of the types of content to expect in the future.

3. A Well-Designed Website

Before you launch, you'll want to have a well-designed website in place to house all of the amazing content you're going to create and publish in the future. It doesn't have to be fancy or include all of the latest in website design and technology (and really, it shouldn't), it just has to accomplish a few major things.

All in all, it should leave a great first impression. Your content will help the cause, but before the content is even consumed people are going to make snap judgments about your brand and the website based on the design, and you want that judgment to be favorable.

A clean website that's easy to navigate and isn't too overwhelming (e.g., too many options, especially advertisements) is what you should be aiming for.

The branding elements including your logo, tagline, and any other graphical elements on the site should make it easy for new visitors to understand why the site exists and why they should stick around. Remember, people will be approaching your website asking themselves, “Why am I here and what's in it for me?”

The quality and design of how we present our content can mean the difference between:

• A new visitor staying or bouncing.
• A regular visitor reader getting excited or bored.
• A potential customer buying from you, or buying from your competitor.
• An existing customer being satisfied, or asking for their money back.
• You can have the best content in the world, but without good design, you might not make that lasting first impression.

First Impressions

Design and presentation are vital for first impressions. Online, first impressions mean a lot more than you think.

The average person spends about 7 seconds on a single website, which means you have about 7 seconds to make a good first impression on your new visitors, or else they’re going to leave.

This means having a strong visual impact right from the moment the page loads, especially when it comes to what your website is about and exactly what it can do for your visitors. Can you tell exactly what your site is about just from looking at the homepage?

This means including something that makes you stand out from the other 200+ websites they visited that day. Why do things the same, when there is an unlimited number of things you can do to be different? Think of what makes your brand, and you (because you are your brand) unique. Implement that within your website design. Make it your own!

And you want your website to be effective at converting traffic into leads and subscribers, as Sarah Peterson, head of content marketing at Sumo.com, reminds us.

And lastly, you'll want to make it incredibly easy for visitors to do the following:

• Read your content.
• Subscribe to your email list.
• Share your content.
• Leave comments.

An entire blog post could be dedicated to just the design of a website for launch date. For now, these are the main elements to keep in mind:

4. Set Up a Google Alert for Your New Brand

Go to Google Alerts and set up an alert for keywords that match your brand name, your URL, and even your own name. The idea here is to have Google monitor activity on the web and send you emails the moment another site mentions your brand on their website so you can go there and thank them, but also capitalize on any PR that might be happening after you officially launch.

This is just preparation work for what happens after you launch.

5. Create a Share Page

After you launch, you want people to share your website in any way possible. So, you should create a page that makes it incredibly easy to share your website in any way that people desire.

Your share page should include:

• Embeddable videos
• Social images and website logos
• Screenshots of website pages
• Social messages
• Sidebar images with calls-to-action
• Interesting facts about the website launch

A great example of this comes from the website MyKidsAdventures.com. Click here to check out their share page. [Editor's note: This site is no longer active.] And here's a little taste of what that looks like:

6. Create a Pre-Launch “Coming Soon” Teaser Page

Before you officially launch your website, you can already begin the marketing process for your site by creating and promoting a pre-launch “coming soon” teaser page. People love to know in advance of the next big thing, so if you can convince people that what you're creating is worth paying attention to and you create an environment of anticipation, creating this page will be well worth the effort.

Once you launch, you can send an email to your list and immediately have traffic coming to your website, not to mention a list that's already greater than zero.

Furthermore, if you begin to notice a number of people getting interested in your website before you launch, that's a huge motivator for you to keep going and get things done.

On this teaser page, you'll want to make sure you:

1. Let your visitors know what you're doing.
2. Spark some interest.
3. Capitalize on that interest by capturing email addresses.

Think of these early subscribers as ambassadors. They will be the first to know when your new site is up and can be there to help you spread the word right from the start. If possible, give something away to them as a thank you for subscribing that will only be available before the launch.

So technically, how do you create this page on your site?

The tool I have experience with is LeadPages, an incredible landing page resource that makes it super easy to create a sleek, WordPress compatible, mobile-friendly and responsive landing page in just minutes. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for LeadPages.]

LaunchRock is another that I've heard people use and have enjoyed, but I don't have any experience with it myself.

Build Relationships and Buzz for Launch Day

Before you read through this section, first check out my YouTube video, FAIL-PROOF Launch? 5 Strategies to Launch Your Product or Business. In the video, I walk you through 5 unique strategies that will help set yourself up for success on launch day, including crowdsourcing a launch, running a contest, using “passive strategies,” and more. Check it out:

All of the previous sections of this blog post talked about stuff you create yourself, but unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where “if you build it, they will come.” Although it can happen sometimes, it’s never guaranteed and it never happens without the work and influence of other people involved.

You must get other people involved to help you maximize the effectiveness of your launch.

If you want to launch with a bang, it's important to start building relationships before you launch your website (or launch your book, like I did by creating a “street team” for Will It Fly?). Nothing else will help get your site off the ground more than other people talking about it, and if you have a relationship with other influencers and people with a similar target audience, you will have people on launch day who will genuinely want to help you, which is awesome.

To build the relationships, or that “street team,” you’ll need to build that buzz, here are a few essential tips:

• First, invite people to be a part of your street team or launch team. Create a simple sign-up form using Typeform, Survey Monkey, or Google Forms, and send that out to your audience via email and social media to ask them to sign up and be a part of your launch. You can also text your friends and ask.
• When you’re filling out your form, make sure to capture the following information: name, email address, social media channels. Also ask why they want to be a part of the launch team, what they could contribute, and ask them to share something unique about themselves.
• Make it fun. While your community may want to help you because you’ve built that authority and trust, it’s also important to make it fun for them. Engage with them, and make sure to treat them. If you’re launching a book, you can give them an advance reader copy of the book. For a website launch, create a Facebook group, ask them to be a part of your building process, ask for feedback on content, make sure they know that they are truly part of the process.
• Organize your launch team two months before your launch date. This will give you plenty of time to build up your team, foster engagement and excitement for the launch, and give you time to make adjustments and hone the product/website/book before your launch date.

Remember, always, that your launch team is a community comprised of individuals. Treat them well, engage with them, ask them questions, make sure they know how grateful you are for their support. Lean on them, and trust them.

@PatFlynn Connect with your industry and build community before launch. You'll have people eagerly waiting to visit and share your site.

— Casandra Campbell (@ccampb85) July 15, 2013

The 200-Outreach Program Spreadsheet

First, it's important to understand who you should be building relationships with. Taking advice from Neil Patel in SPI Podcast Session #67, you (or your virtual assistant) could organize a spreadsheet and follow the 200-outreach program.

Here's how it works:

On that spreadsheet, list the top 200 websites that are highly relevant to your topic who may be interested in what your site is about. Next to that column, add a space for either a contact form URL or an email address so you can easily contact the owners of these websites.

In another column, start listing the top 200 blogs.

In additional columns, list the top 200 Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter Accounts, Instagram profiles, and LinkedIn profiles.

I would also add as many relevant podcasts to that spreadsheet as possible.

This spreadsheet will become your go-to resource for who to reach out to and start building relationships with, and yes—you can start building these relationships before you officially launch your website.

It's really important to understand, however, that when you reach out, it's not about you. It's about who you're reaching out to and what's in it for them.

@PatFlynn Email people you don't know, that have an audience you want to reach, with something they feel compelled to share.

— Derek Halpern (@derekhalpern) July 15, 2013

The Round-Up Post Resource

If you're doing a massive round-up post as the featured post during your launch, your spreadsheet is exactly where you'll want to start. As Neil recommends, I would customize each email slightly so they don't read too “cut-and-paste.” Go to the websites you're reaching out to before you send an email to the owner and mention something they've been writing about recently on their site in the email.

To take it a step further, even before you email people, retweet their stuff, thank them on Twitter and Facebook, and have legitimate conversations with them so they at least notice you're there. Now is not the time to pitch your new website—that will come in a later email. Plus, if there's a relationship at all, less pitching will be needed. Then, when you eventually email those people, it'll feel less like it's out of the blue because you've at least attempted to make contact with them before via social media.

What this does is introduce you to these influencers in your niche, and if your teaser page is compelling, these influencers will not be able to ignore a new potential player in this niche who is obviously trying to work with them, not against them.

If you're doing a beastly resource instead, you can still reach out to these top influencers beforehand and even include them in your resource and mention that to them. Don't be afraid to share that resource and mention your launch plan, too. A few of them might show major interest in what you're doing and help you out in more ways than you can imagine.

Guest Posts

The old tried-and-true method of guest posting can definitely work before you launch your main site to help build buzz for your brand, kindle relationships with website owners, and build your email list at the same time.

Linking to your homepage before the launch in a guest post you publish on another site will drive traffic to the teaser page, which is exactly what you want. After launch, the teaser page will no longer exist and traffic will see your main site instead.

If you have a list of at least fifty potential posts to publish on your site over time, it's definitely worth investing some of those articles into other websites to make a big splash on launch day.

Build An Off-Site Audience

Just because your site isn't live doesn't mean you can't start building a community of fans and followers. You can create a Facebook Page and start to build a community there (and paid traffic is definitely a great option if you have the money to spend), but you could also go to where hordes of your target audience already exist.

Beyond other people's websites, which you can get in front of via guest posts, you can actually have a lot of influence on forums, too. Provide value, answer people's questions and don't pitch, and if you include a link to your teaser/homepage in your by-line, chances are you'll start to build a little bit of authority there which can easily transfer to your site on launch day.

Ask Your Existing Network

I remember a friend who launched a new iPhone app last year, and I did get an email from him about it, but it was on the day it went live!

He spent three months building the app, which was three months he could have used to build buzz and get people ready for its launch. I would have totally been down to not only help him develop a launch plan but simply be ready to mention the app to those who I thought it would be useful to on the day it went live. Because I didn't know about it I couldn't just randomly post about it and even if I did, it wouldn't be as effective as if I knew about it beforehand.

Don't be afraid to ask your existing network for help—like friends or family. If it's something you truly believe in, even if it doesn't 100 percent apply to those people, it's something they will be proud to share for you.

@PatFlynn Personally email close friends and/or peers asking them for support. It’s amazing how helpful people want to be! Ask kindly!

— Vicky Lyashenko (@VickyLyashenko) July 15, 2013

And Remember. . .

The launch of your website should be treated like an event, so build anticipation for it and keep people who have given you words of support up-to-date on your plans. Then, when the date comes around and you turn off that teaser page, celebrate what you've just accomplished, but realize that you still have a lot of work to do.

After You Launch

The moment you flick off that teaser page there are a number of things you should do:

• Email the list you've built. You already have an email list—awesome! Now it's time to email your subscribers and let them know you're live. Also, give them an easy way to share your new site by including a link to that convenient share page on your website. These are your ambassadors, and you're definitely allowed to ask them to share for you.
• Source your 200-outreach program. Beyond tapping into your existing list, send a quick, personalized email out to each website and blog on your 200-outreach program spreadsheet. You could even draft each of these emails beforehand so you aren't spending time on launch day writing them. A quick mention that you're live and a link to your ultimate resource can go a long way, and even if you get a two to five percent response rate, that's more than you'd get if you didn't send any emails at all. Don't force anything or be aggressive in your emails, and remember what's in it for them too.
• Thank those who have helped you. If anyone has helped you get to this point, email them to thank them. It can go a very long way. If you're thanking those in a round-up post, include a quick, easy-to-copy-and-paste link that they can share on their social media platforms. If you find people are retweeting your stuff or mentioning your new website on Twitter, reach out and thank them too.
• Reply to every comment. On launch day, if you do it right and you have traffic coming to your website, chances are you'll get a number of comments on each of the posts that you've already written. Respond to each one of them. You want to be as present on day one as possible because if new visitors see you're actually replying to comments and active on the site, they'll be more likely to stick around and share. You won't always be able to reply to every comment down the road, but it's one of the most important things to do within the first few months of a website's start.
• Reach out to local news. Local news stations are always looking for new stories, content, and events to share. There's no harm in reaching out to all of the local news networks and pitching them your new website and seeing if they'd be willing to cover the story. What's the worst that could happen? They'll say no. . . and that's not a big deal.
• Keep producing more content. If things are going well, you'll want to ride that “New & Noteworthy” wave as long as possible, and the best way to do that is to continue to provide more content frequently right from the start. Check out my blogging tips for a bunch of strategies for keeping your content train on the tracks.

Beyond those things, keep asking people (and providing easy ways) to share and subscribe to your list. Within the first week or two, you'll be several months ahead of where you would be if you just started dripping content to an audience of zero. Keep your eyes and ears open around the web about you and your brand, and over time make pivots to better serve your audience in the way that they want to be served.

I hope you enjoyed this post. It came out much longer than I anticipated but I couldn't shave off any of it because I want you to learn from my mistakes and have the best chance to make the most noise right from the start.

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And before I go, if you want to level up your presence online, we have comprehensive guides to getting started with email marketing, podcasting, affiliate marketing, and more!

• Email Marketing Best Practices and How-To Guide
• How to Start a Podcast Step-by-Step Complete Tutorial
• Affiliate Marketing – The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide
• Online Courses – The SPI Essential Guide
• Making of a Membership Community Workshop

Cheers, and I wish you all the best!

The post How to Launch a Brand New Website (With a Bang!): The Ultimate Guide—UPDATED! appeared first on Smart Passive Income.