Setting Up Your Profile

In order to have a successful Twitter presence, you need to have a fully optimized profile. Let’s go through the main Twitter profile elements:

Your Username – Your username is the @username that people will reference you by on Twitter as well as the custom URL for your Twitter profile, http://twitter.com/username. Consider branding your Twitter handle with your real name for your personal account and with your business name for your professional account, as opposed to random keywords. (You will be able to keyword optimize your profile in other ways. Plus, people who are searching for you on Twitter will likely start with @yourbusiness vs. @yourkeywords.)

After all, you don’t want to end up like this on Twitter:

So be sure to capture and brand your Twitter handle for yourself and your business as soon as possible. Even if you don’t plan on investing in your Twitter activity for a while, it won’t hurt to reserve your name before someone else does.

Your Name – You should use the name field for your name or your business name – basically, whatever name you want people to be able to find you by – as it will show in search like this:

While you may be tempted to optimize your name field with keywords, don’t worry – you can do that in the profile bio instead.

Your Profile – To set up or modify your profile, go to the settings wheel dropdown at the top right of your Twitter screen. Click on Settings. Then go to Profile. Here you will be able to take care of a few things.

First, you can update your profile image. This should be a square image that best represents you or your business. It also should be one that you use across all of your social profiles so people will be able to recognize you easily from one network to the next, especially in spots where only your profile image is displayed:

Next, you’ll add your header image. This is the image that appears at the top right of your profile and is overlaid with your profile photo, username, bio, location, and website in white text. Vistaprint has a great header that represents their printing business on their Twitter profile:

Header images also come up when someone views your Twitter profile on their mobile, which makes them more important than the background image:

When it comes to your profile bio, be sure to include important keywords for yourself or your business, as these are searchable on Twitter itself. If you have room, also consider adding your URL here as well as in the website field. When people search for you on Twitter or see your Twitter profile in any list on Twitter, the only website that will show up is the one in the bio:

In the above example, you can see how Insightly includes their website link, which makes their Twitter profile stand out, thanks to the live link. It not only shows up on Twitter, but on other services that pull information from your Twitter account, like Klout:

You can add additional @usernames in your profile bio that will be live linked. This can be a great way to promote other accounts for your business. And it allows your employees to promote your business in their personal Twitter accounts. You can see this in action when you look at Twitter profiles used by Box.com and their team:

You also will want to add your location. Even if you serve customers worldwide, it may help you get a local edge when people are searching for businesses in their area. Socialbakers, for example, adds a few locations in their Twitter profile:
The last thing you will want to set up is your background image. You can find this under the Design section of your Settings. Background images must be under 2MB. Twitter backgrounds can be used for further branding of your profile, introducing the team behind your tweets, and sharing more information about your business. Note that backgrounds seem to be more optional now than the norm. The header image mentioned earlier should be your top priority. You can see some great examples of Twitter backgrounds and find some designers on theCrazyEgg blog.Basic Twitter LingoSince everyone has only 140 characters to work with, not everything is going to be spelled out for you. Here are some top terms and abbreviations you should know about when looking through the world of Twitter:

• Hashtags – Hashtags are #terms that categorize your tweets and help them go beyond your followers on the Twittersphere. For example, if someone uses the hashtag #SEO in a post, and another person clicks on it, all tweets with that hashtag will come up. Keep in mind that hashtags are optional. And it’s best to go with only one or two at most because you don’t want to distract people into clicking the hashtag instead of your link.
• Retweet – A retweet (RT) is when someone shares your tweet with followers. When you hover over a tweet in Twitter, you’ll see the option to retweet. Most Twitter management tools will allow you to retweet any tweets you see as well.
• Hat Tip – A hat tip (HT) is when someone gives another user credit for discovering something. For example, if you see a tweet by someone recommending a blog post and you decide to share that blog post without retweeting the original user, you still can give them credit for the discovery with a HT @username.
• Trends – Trends are the hot topics on Twitter based on keywords and #hashtags. If you can find a legitimate and relevant way to get in on a trending topic by tweeting something with the specific keywords or #hashtag, it’s a great way to get more exposure on Twitter.
• Via – When you see via @username, it usually means a link is from that user’s website or that user is the author. It is the way Twitter’s retweet button handles crediting a tweet from a specific page or website.
• Twitter Chat – A Twitter chat is a discussion revolving around one #hashtag. For example, on Sundays at 7:00 p.m., a large community of bloggers talks about a specific topic around the #blogchat hashtag. You can see the analytics of the last #blogchat here and a list of current Twitter chats in thisGoogle spreadsheet. There are many more Twitter chats out there. Unfortunately, someone erased the original spreadsheet, so they are back to collecting information again.
• Mention – When someone mentions you on Twitter, it means they have used your @username in a tweet.
• Direct Message – A direct message is a private message sent from one user to another. You can send direct messages only to those who follow you and receive them only from those you follow.
• Twitter Lists – Twitter allows you to create lists of up to 500 people for private or public consumption. You can view a Twitter list to see updates from just the people on the list.

Planning Your Twitter Content Strategy

Planning a content strategy for Twitter is easier than planning one for other social networks because each piece of content is only 140 characters. Start by remembering that 80% of what you tweet should be about others, and only 20% should be about your business. This varies by business and brand – some can get away with publishing a lot of their own content (see @masahble). Others need a balance.

To determine what variety you should do, think about how people will feel when they visit your Twitter profile for the first time and look through your latest status updates. Will they want to follow you based on those latest 5 – 10 tweets? Also, think about how people who are following you will feel. Do you believe your followers are interested in you for tweets about your sales, your content, or the content you share about your industry?

Another good way to plan your Twitter content strategy is by researching your competitors. You can scroll through your competitor’s tweets and expand them to see the number of retweets, favorites, and replies people have made toward them. You should get a feel for the types of tweets that get the most engagement.

Speaking of types of tweets, here are the ones you can use in your Twitter content strategy:

• Questions – Asking questions is a great way to engage your followers. You can include links to your content in a tweet with a question to encourage discussion on Twitter and your latest blog post comments.
• Quotes – If you can find quotes fitted to your industry, they tend to be retweeted often by followers.
• Links – Tweet links to content on your own site as well as links to industry related news. If you’re not sure where to find good industry news sites and blogs, try Alltop.
• Photos and Video – You can send tweets with photo attachments and links to photos and videos. Tweets with media gain extra visibility on Twitter. When someone does a search, some topics will allow searchers to view tweets, people, top photos, and top videos related to their query. Sometimes photos and videos will be shown in expanded view in search results.
• Presentations – Tweets with links to presentations on SlideShare are expandable so people can view the presentations on Twitter itself. If you have a pro membership on SlideShare, you can have a contact form embedded in the presentation so potential customers can contact you directly through your SlideShare on Twitter.

Why are media tweets like photos, videos, and presentations so important to incorporate in your Twitter content strategy? You can see how interactive media can be in the following example where GoToMeeting shares a SlideShare presentation on their Twitter profile:

Media also shows up in the sidebar of your profile…

And on mobile:

Even tweets have better photos when viewed on Twitter:

 
Hence media – photos and videos especially – should be making a regular appearance in your tweets.

Building an Audience

Once you have set up your profile on Twitter and tweeted at least 5 – 10 times (because no one wants to follow an empty profile), you are ready to start working on building your audience. The first goal is to get followers who already are connected with you on other social networks or are familiar with you, your business, or your brand. To do this, you will want to do the following:

• Add the official Twitter follow button on your website. This way, visitors can follow you without leaving your website.
• Use the official Twitter retweet button on your posts, and make sure it is set to recommend that people follow you after they tweet your content.
• Add your Twitter profile link to your email signature. You can do this with a simple URL or with a fancy signature using Wisestamp.
• Add your Twitter profile to your LinkedIn profile (Edit Profile > Edit Contact Info), Google+ profile (under Other Profiles on About tab), Pinterest (under Account Settings), and YouTube channel (Edit Links on channel photo).
• Add your Twitter profile link to profiles on forum and community profiles you participate in.
• Add your Twitter profile link to author bios on sites you guest post for.

Essentially, look for any instance where you can add a link to your Twitter profile and do it!

Once you have added your Twitter link in all of the above applicable places, your next goal is to connect with people who have similar interests and engage with them. Here are some great ways to find the right people to connect with:

• Let Twitter find people you know by importing your contacts on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL.
• Use Followerwonk to discover people on Twitter with particular keywords in their profile (and/or located in specific cities, states, or countries if you operate only locally).
• Find out who is influential in your industry on Twitter by signing into Klout and going to http://klout.com/#/topic/keyword – replace the word “keyword” with those applicable to your industry. Alternatively, you can go to a specific Klout profile by going to http://klout.com/username – replace the word “username” with a Twitter handle. Then click See More next to that user’s topics to find related Klout topics and the people most known for them.
• When you read blog posts, tweet them and include Twitter handles for the main blog owner and the author of the post. Follow both accounts.
• When you interact with people on other social networks and forums, look at their profiles to see if they have a Twitter link. If you can sneak it in to your engagement, throw in an “I follow you on Twitter.”

As you follow new people, one trick you can use to make sure they notice you is to look through their latest tweets and see if there is one you can reply to or retweet. Or just let them know you follow them because of a shared hometown or similar interest. This way, they see that you follow them and engage with them.

Another great way to increase your exposure on Twitter, build authority in your industry, and gain followers is to follow questions that people ask on Twitter. You can do this by performing a Twitter search like keyword filter:-links -http? Replace the word “keyword” with a word or phrase relating to your industry. You also can add other question words like how, what, where, etc. Save these searches on Twitter or in your favorite Twitter management tool, monitor them, and answer questions whenever you get a chance. If you have content on your website that will answer the question (preferably in a blog post), you can share the link in your answer and drive traffic to your website while you’re at it.

Engaging with Your Audience

There are a variety of ways you can stay connected and engaged with your audience. The first and most important is replying to anyone who mentions your @username in a tweet or sends you a direct message. If you can’t do anything else on Twitter in terms of engagement, replying to people who talk to you on Twitter is the most important.

Of course, not everyone who talks about your business will include your @username. You will want to monitor tweets about your business by saving searches with your brand name, unique product names, and your personal name. This way, you can see when someone is talking about you and respond appropriately, regardless of whether the tweet is positive or negative.

Another great way to start engagement with your audience is by simply asking a question. While Twitter is a great place to get feedback about your products and services, you can spark a lot more engagement by asking your followers about the latest news in your industry, or even just general questions that everyone loves to answer, like telling their favorite part of the season premiere of Game of Thrones.

Answering questions that your followers ask can help you build even deeper relationships with them. For example, find your most influential followers and loyal brand advocates, add them to a Twitter list, and then monitor their tweets. If they ask anything that you can answer in 140 characters, do it. Chances are, if they were not a customer before, they will be soon when they see how involved you are with your community.

Enhancing Your Website with Twitter

There are several ways you can incorporate Twitter into your website to increase the growth of your Twitter audience and expand the exposure of your content on Twitter:

• Twitter Follow Button – Adding the official Twitter follow button to your website will allow people to follow you on Twitter without leaving your website.
• Twitter Retweet Button – Make it easier for people to share content from your website with their followers by adding the official Twitter retweet button. Best of all, this button (when configured properly) will add “via @yourusername” to tweets people send and recommend that they follow you on Twitter after they have tweeted you content.
• Twitter Hashtag Button – Trying to promote a branded hashtag? The Twitter hashtag button pre-fills the hashtag in a status update box so people can tweet with it.
• Twitter Mention Button – Want to encourage people to send a tweet to you? Use the mention button that will pre-fill your desired username in a status update box so people can tweet it.

If you have content that you want people to share, you also will want to look into implementing Twitter Cards. Twitter Cards will allow your content to be shared in an expanded view similar to Facebook shares with a title, description, and thumbnail image:

You can manually add the meta tags to your website, or use plugins like Twitter Cards for WordPress to make it easy to add the correct meta tags to your website. Then, you will need to validate your Twitter Cards.

Advertising with Twitter

If you want to pay for more exposure on Twitter, advertising with Twitter is the way to go. You can choose from three types of ad opportunities based on your budget.

• Promoted Tweets – Spread the reach of your messages on Twitter by promoting your tweets. Promoted tweets show up for targeted users in a variety of places, including the top of their tweet streams, above Twitter search results, and even in Twitter management tools like HootSuite. Also, Promoted Tweets are moved to the top of tweets on your profile. And any media elements you share, such as videos, are expanded automatically.
• Promoted Accounts – Grow your followers with Promoted Accounts. Promoted Accounts show up in the left sidebar on Twitter under suggested follows to your targeted users as well as in the suggestions Twitter offers when you follow a similar account.
• Promoted Trends – For brands with large budgets, Promoted Trends allows you to put a branded hashtag trend at the top of Trending Topics. This option is rumored to cost as much as $100K per day.

Twitter Ads have evolved quite a bit since they were first introduced. While the analytics are not that amazing, now you are now able to target your advertising campaigns to people with specific interests or to people who follow other users on Twitter:

To get started with Twitter Advertising, simply log in to the advertising platformwith your Twitter login. To learn more, see our post on Twitter Advertising for Your Business.

Analyzing Your Results

Like any online marketing strategy, you will want to make sure you are looking at your analytics to make sure Twitter is both driving you traffic and leading to conversions. Google Analytics Social Reports will help you track direct conversions – traffic that comes to your website from Twitter and, within the same visit, converts. KISSmetrics can help you track a visitor from Twitter who converts on your website, regardless of whether they convert on their first visit or later.

Exploring the Top Tools

The majority of social media management tools are made specifically for Twitter or include Twitter along with other social networks. The following are just a sample of tools that can help you grow your audience, manage your status updates, monitor your brand, and measure your results:

Followerwonk – Followerwonk (mentioned earlier) will help you find people to connect with on Twitter based on keywords in their bio and location. You can sort or filter results by number of followers, number they are following, and tweets (along with their authority score).

HootSuite – HootSuite allows you to manage your Twitter profiles (along with other social networks including Google+ pages) all in one place. With their tabs and columns layout, you easily can monitor a variety of Twitter searches for people talking about your industry, people talking about your brand, Twitter lists, mentions, direct messages, and your home screen.

Buffer – Buffer allows you to schedule updates for your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles. Simply create a schedule for when you would like your updates to go out and add the updates to your Buffer. Then Buffer will send them out to your selected accounts in the time slots you allotted. Best of all, you’ll get great analytics about each message you send to your Twitter accounts showing the number of retweets, replies, favorites, and estimated reach. This can help you determine the best times to tweet and the topics that get the most engagement from your audience.

Commun.it – Commun.it helps you discover the most valuable members of your Twitter community by categorizing brand advocates, influencers, and supporters. You can see your engagement history with anyone on Twitter, including a summary of the number of times they’ve engaged with you vs. the number of times you’ve engaged with them. It also can help you find people whose interests match those of your business.

Nestivity – Nestivity helps you turn tweets into threaded, manageable discussions so you can have rich conversations with your followers without losing track of them in the noise. The more discussions you have through Nestivity, the more you will see your Klout increase, as many people will reply to your discussions with your @username.

Twitter Grader – Get a quick, free analysis of your Twitter profile using this tool from HubSpot. Also, don’t miss the Twitter Elite lists by location.

Tweet Chat – Another great reputation and Klout booster is participating in Twitter chats. Tweet Chat allows you to easily monitor and jump into the chat.

SumAll – SumAll is a free analytics tool that lets you connect your Twitter account with many others (Facebook, YouTube, Google Analytics, Shopify, Paypal, and more) to see if / how your Twitter engagement affects other areas of your online marketing and, ultimately, your business’s website traffic and bottom line.

In Conclusion

Congratulations if you made it through this guide! If you apply everything you’ve learned, you should have a great Twitter profile and be well on your way to building a targeted Twitter following, engaging with your audience, managing your account with terrific tools, and seeing the results of your Twitter activity. What else would you like to know about Twitter marketing? Please ask your questions in the comments and share your own great Twitter tips, tools, and resources.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing for personal, professional, and business bloggers. You can follow her on Google+, Twitter, andFacebook.

Source: Kissmetrics Blog

With three Sites of the Month in conjunction with other studios, the Awwwards jury has chosen to bestow the award for best Agency of the Year 2012 on

For years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving its vital statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. In his 1904 study of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30; had mothers younger than 25 and were usually sickly as children. Other scholars reported that many were celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless (Dickens) or motherless (Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated nothing.

Academics also tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But intelligence is not enough. Marilyn vos Savant, whose IQ of 228 is the highest ever recorded, has not exactly contributed much to science or art. She is, instead, a question-and-answer columnist for Parade magazine. Run-of-the-mill physicists have IQs much higher than Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius (his IQ was a merely respectable 122).

Genius is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering fourteen languages at the age of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an extraordinarily high I.Q., or even about being smart. After considerable debate initiated by J. P. Guilford, a leading psychologist who called for a scientific focus on creativity in the sixties, psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than he or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative.

Most people of average intelligence, given data or some problem, can figure out the expected conventional response. For example, when asked, “What is one-half of 13?” most of us immediately answer six and one-half. You probably reached the answer in a few seconds and then turned your attention back to the text.

Typically, we think reproductively, that is on the basis of similar problems encountered in the past. When confronted with problems, we fixate on something in our past that has worked before. We ask, “What have I been taught in life, education or work on how to solve the problem?” Then we analytically select the most promising approach based on past experiences, excluding all other approaches, and work within a clearly defined direction towards the solution of the problem. Because of the soundness of the steps based on past experiences, we become arrogantly certain of the correctness of our conclusion.

In contrast, geniuses think productively, not reproductively. When confronted with a problem, they ask “How many different ways can I look at it?”, “How can I rethink the way I see it?”, and “How many different ways can I solve it?” instead of “What have I been taught by someone else on how to solve this?” They tend to come up with many different responses, some of which are unconventional and possibly unique. A productive thinker would say that there are many different ways to express “thirteen” and many different ways to halve something. Following are some examples.
6.5
13 = 1 and 3
THIR TEEN = 4
XIII = 11 and 2
XIII = 8
(Note: As you can see, in addition to six and one half, by expressing 13 in different ways and halving it in different ways, one could say one-half of thirteen is 6.5, or 1 and 3, or 4, or 11 and 2, or 8, and so on.)With productive thinking, one generates as many alternative approaches as one can. You consider the least obvious as well as the most likely approaches. It is the willingness to explore all approaches that is important, even after one has found a promising one. Einstein was once asked what the difference was between him and the average person. He said that if you asked the average person to find a needle in the haystack, the person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on the other hand, would tear through the entire haystack looking for all the possible needles.)

How do creative geniuses generate so many alternatives and conjectures? Why are so many of their ideas so rich and varied? How do they produce the “blind” variations that lead to the original and novel? A growing cadre of scholars are offering evidence that one can characterize the way geniuses think. By studying the notebooks, correspondence, conversations and ideas of the world’s greatest thinkers, they have teased out particular common thinking strategies and styles of thought that enabled geniuses to generate a prodigious variety of novel and original ideas.

STRATEGIES

Following are thumbnail descriptions of strategies that are common to the thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art and industry throughout history.

GENIUSES LOOK AT PROBLEMS IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS. Genius often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken. Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain knowledge about the form of problems, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He felt the first way he looked at a problem was too biased toward his usual way of seeing things. He would restructure his problem by looking at it from one perspective and move to another perspective and still another. With each move, his understanding would deepen and he would begin to understand the essence of the problem. Einstein’s theory of relativity is, in essence, a description of the interaction between different perspectives. Freud’s analytical methods were designed to find details that did not fit with traditional perspectives in order to find a completely new point of view.

In order to creatively solve a problem, the thinker must abandon the initial approach that stems from past experience and re-conceptualize the problem. By not settling with one perspective, geniuses do not merely solve existing problems, like inventing an environmentally-friendly fuel. They identify new ones. It does not take a genius to analyze dreams; it required Freud to ask in the first place what meaning dreams carry from our psyche.

GENIUSES MAKE THEIR THOUGHTS VISIBLE. The explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to the recording and conveying of a vast knowledge in a parallel language; a language of drawings, graphs and diagrams — as, for instance, in the renowned diagrams of daVinci and Galileo. Galileo revolutionized science by making his thought visible with diagrams, maps, and drawings while his contemporaries used conventional mathematical and verbal approaches.

Once geniuses obtain a certain minimal verbal facility, they seem to develop a skill in visual and spatial abilities which give them the flexibility to display information in different ways. When Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as possible, including diagrammatically. He had a very visual mind. He thought in terms of visual and spatial forms, rather than thinking along purely mathematical or verbal lines of reasoning. In fact, he believed that words and numbers, as they are written or spoken, did not play a significant role in his thinking process.

GENIUSES PRODUCE. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. He guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted. Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music. Einstein is best known for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers. T. S. Elliot’s numerous drafts of “The Waste Land” constitute a jumble of good and bad passages that eventually was turned into a masterpiece. In a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Kean Simonton of the University of California, Davis found that the most respected produced not only great works, but also more “bad” ones. Out of their massive quantity of work came quality. Geniuses produce. Period.

GENIUSES MAKE NOVEL COMBINATIONS. Dean Keith Simonton, in his 1989 book Scientific Genius suggests that geniuses are geniuses because they form more novel combinations than the merely talented. His theory has etymology behind it: cogito — “I think — originally connoted “shake together”: intelligo the root of “intelligence” means to “select among.” This is a clear early intuition about the utility of permitting ideas and thoughts to randomly combine with each other and the utility of selecting from the many the few to retain. Like the highly playful child with a pailful of Legos, a genius is constantly combining and recombining ideas, images and thoughts into different combinations in their conscious and subconscious minds. Consider Einstein’s equation, E=mc2. Einstein did not invent the concepts of energy, mass, or speed of light. Rather, by combining these concepts in a novel way, he was able to look at the same world as everyone else and see something different. The laws of heredity on which the modern science of genetics is based are the results of Gregor Mendel who combined mathematics and biology to create a new science.

GENIUSES FORCE RELATIONSHIPS. If one particular style of thought stands out about creative genius, it is the ability to make juxtapositions between dissimilar subjects. Call it a facility to connect the unconnected that enables them to see things to which others are blind. Leonardo daVinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water. This enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves. In 1865, F. A. Kekule’ intuited the shape of the ring-like benzene molecule by forcing a relationship with a dream of a snake biting its tail. Samuel Morse was stumped trying to figure out how to produce a telegraphic signal b enough to be received coast to coast. One day he saw tied horses being exchanged at a relay station and forced a connection between relay stations for horses and b signals. The solution was to give the traveling signal periodic boosts of power. Nickla Tesla forced a connection between the setting sun and a motor that made the AC motor possible by having the motor’s magnetic field rotate inside the motor just as the sun (from our perspective) rotates.

GENIUSES THINK IN OPPOSITES. Physicist and philosopher David Bohm believed geniuses were able to think different thoughts because they could tolerate ambivalence between opposites or two incompatible subjects. Dr. Albert Rothenberg, a noted researcher on the creative process, identified this ability in a wide variety of geniuses including Einstein, Mozart, Edison, Pasteur, Joseph Conrad, and Picasso in his 1990 book The Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science and Other Fields. Physicist Niels Bohr believed that if you held opposites together, then you suspend your thought and your mind moves to a new level. The suspension of thought allows an intelligence beyond thought to act and create a new form. The swirling of opposites creates the conditions for a new point of view to bubble freely from your mind. Bohr’s ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the principle of complementarity. Thomas Edison’s invention of a practical system of lighting involved combining wiring in parallel circuits with high resistance filaments in his bulbs, two things that were not considered possible by conventional thinkers, in fact were not considered at all because of an assumed incompatibility. Because Edison could tolerate the ambivalence between two incompatible things, he could see the relationship that led to his breakthrough.

GENIUSES THINK METAPHORICALLY. Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius, believing that the individual who had the capacity to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together was a person of special gifts. If unlike things are really alike in some ways, perhaps, they are so in others. Alexander Graham Bell observed the comparison between the inner workings of the ear and the movement of a stout piece of membrane to move steel and conceived the telephone. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, in one day, after developing an analogy between a toy funnel and the motions of a paper man and sound vibrations. Underwater construction was made possible by observing how shipworms tunnel into timber by first constructing tubes. Einstein derived and explained many of his abstract principles by drawing analogies with everyday occurrences such as rowing a boat or standing on a platform while a train passed by.

GENIUSES PREPARE THEMSELVES FOR CHANCE. Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. As simplistic as this statement may seem, it is the first principle of creative accident. We may ask ourselves why we have failed to do what we intended, and this is the reasonable, expected thing to do. But the creative accident provokes a different question: What have we done? Answering that question in a novel, unexpected way is the essential creative act. It is not luck, but creative insight of the highest order. Alexander Fleming was not the first physician to notice the mold formed on an exposed culture while studying deadly bacteria. A less gifted physician would have trashed this seemingly irrelevant event but Fleming noted it as “interesting” and wondered if it had potential. This “interesting” observation led to penicillin which has saved millions of lives. Thomas Edison, while pondering how to make a carbon filament, was mindlessly toying with a piece of putty, turning and twisting it in his fingers, when he looked down at his hands, the answer hit him between the eyes: twist the carbon, like rope. B. F. Skinner emphasized a first principle of scientific methodologists: when you find something interesting, drop everything else and study it. Too many fail to answer opportunity’s knock at the door because they have to finish some preconceived plan. Creative geniuses do not wait for the gifts of chance; instead, they actively seek the accidental discovery.

SUMMARY

Recognizing the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them will make you more creative in your work and personal life. Creative geniuses are geniuses because they know “how” to think, instead of “what” to think. Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman published an interesting study of the Nobel Prize winners who were living in the United States in 1977. She discovered that six of Enrico Fermi’s students won the prize. Ernst Lawrence and Niels Bohr each had four. J. J. Thompson and Ernest Rutherford between them trained seventeen Nobel laureates. This was no accident. It is obvious that these Nobel laureates were not only creative in their own right, but were also able to teach others how to think creatively.

Source: Creativity Post

When Metro Trains — the metropolitan rail network for Melbourne, Australia — wanted to raise awareness of the inherent dangers surrounding railways they turned to advertising agency McCann Melbourne to deliver something a little different.

Dumb ways to die

Founded exactly 100 years ago, McCann is part of the world’s largest advertising agency network. They boast amongst their clients L’Oréal, MasterCard, Coca Cola, and Xbox 360.

McCann’s Executive Creative Director, John Mescall and Creative, Pat Baron devised the concept of a song that would cutify Metro’s message, making it more appealing to their target audience. The resulting song; with lyrics by Mescall, music by Ollie McGill and vocals by Emily Lubitz; was released on iTunes, hitting the Australian top ten in just 24 hours, with top tens in various Asian countries following shortly after.

The song was animated by New Zealander, Julian Frost using Abobe Flash and After Effects. It was released on YouTube at the same time as the song. In the last ten days it has been viewed nearly 28 million times.

Some of our favorite ‘dumb ways to die’ include using your private parts as piranha bait, selling your kidneys on the internet, and scratching a drug dealer’s brand new ride. The video ends with the three dangers Metro were looking to highlight: standing too close to the edge of a train platform, driving over closed level crossings, and running across railway tracks.

Why has this video gone viral?

Writing for mUmBRELLA John Mescall posits several reasons for the success: firstly he feels the basic idea was good; secondly, that the video is honest; thirdly that it has a great title (how well would it have performed he asks, if titled ‘Be safe around trains’).

Mescall argues that there five things that go viral: violence, sex, awesomeness, funny and cute. With violence and sex off the table for most corporate clients, and being unable to think of anything awesome, they opted to combine funny and cute.

The decision to mix a morbid subject matter with saccharine levels of cute is what ultimately made it funny I think…Ultimately, it’s an ad that doesn’t feel anything like an ad. It’s happy and silly and joyful and clever and more than a little odd; the intangible things that are so hard to rationalise, but so very important. - John Mescall

Finally the team worked hard to ensure that the campaign was easy to share — an obvious point perhaps, but one that is often overlooked — animated gifs were produced for Tumblr, the song is available on iTunes and comments are enabled on YouTube.

How can I go viral?

It seems like simple advice, but there is one key element of this project that is surprisingly hard to duplicate: the client was fully onboard.

Metro decided to take the ‘risk’, of trusting the creatives it hired, to do their jobs. In fact it seems they embraced the project with open arms; writing on his blog, Julian Frost reports that Metro’s feedback during production included “make it more violent!” and “add a piranha to his private parts please”.

There’s no predicting zeitgeist, but if your client asks you to help them go viral, point them to the ‘Dumb ways to die’ video and tell them that’s what might happen if they let you do your job.

Original post by Ben Moss.
Source: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2012/11/how-to-go-viral/

In this article I’d like to delve a bit deeper into the topic of branding illustrations. I’ll provide a few examples for each point and hopefully you can follow along with these ideas. Not everybody is a talented illustrator and so not everybody has the ability to create these potential brands. However you can always partner with another talented illustrator to make your ideas into a reality.

Why Use Illustrations?

People tend to be more attracted towards illustrations for a number of reasons. They are often very cartoon-like in nature with softer edges and a wide color palette. Because of this you will notice there is an almost unlimited amount of ideas you can put into design. This makes your branding appear more “fun” than with icons or symbols.

Illustrations are also quickly recognizable as objects connected to your product. A logo is just text with some creative design. But coupling text with an illustration is how you may capture interested followers over the years. People will recognize your illustrations and immediately connect these to your website – even if they see your illustrations somewhere else on the web!

I think a great example is FreelanceSwitch which has grown tremendously in just a few short years. Their blog is constantly updating with fresh new content and readers love their topic ideas for creativity and inspiration. The main logo illustration is a freelancer-type person who can be seen in various positions around the website.

If you can find a talented illustrator to create many different viewpoints this will improve your branding tenfold. Just a single illustration is often enough to draw in attention. But after years of the same pictures it can get stale(but not always). Having some alternate illustrations in place to switch up your layout from time-to-time is never a bad idea. These alts could also be used in advertising banners, videos, avatars, and other unique branding graphics.

Giving Some Background Ambience

I wouldn’t always classify illustrations as a useful background effect unless you are skilled at building such websites. Often background illustrations require a tremendous resolution since you will be supporting people from all different browser sizes. But just like other ideas, a powerful background illustration will captivate your audience time and time again.

The web design agency Fator Criativo exposes a wonderful background illustration effect which can be seen in all areas of the website. As you navigate through the different links you’ll be panned up and around the layout to many different positions. I love how their effect feels very real in the sense that you’re on the Earth and rising up into space.

Some people may be annoyed by this type of layout. It can take a little while for animations to load between pages, and the scrolling effects do not entice everybody. However if you really like the design and you feel it accompanies your website then definitely keep it. Always be true to your own sense of design and don’t cave into the opinions of everybody around you. Illustrated backgrounds can be a cornerstone to recognizable website layouts.

The Models of Consistency

I have mentioned that changing up your design over time will help to keep things fresh. But it’s also true that keeping your brand in the same vein together will make your layout instantly recognizable for decades. This will work best when you are not looking to scale onto a viral market, but just hold your company accountable for years into the future.

Perhaps my favorite example of this trend is Ten24 Media. If you have ever seen their website layout before then you probably recognize the site almost instantly. You may not remember exactly what the company does, but just having some familiarity with their layout is important. This is why designers will not often change things too much when going back to redesign.

Ten24 has been online for years and their website is featured in countless inspiration showcases. Because of this so many people will see their design on a daily basis. More and more people remember their layout with the classic circus tent illustration in the header. If this company stays online for 5 or 10+ more years that classic illustration is a folding point for marketing.

Now this idea doesn’t always pertain to background illustrations. You could do just as well using a logo illustration like Template Monster. Their eCommerce system of website templates has been using the monster head for years. Professionals within the industry immediately know to recognize Template Monster for their rock-solid templates and fantastic customer service.

Design for All Products

I don’t want to assume that illustrations only work best for company websites and blogs. There are some great examples of other websites and even software companies who use illustrations for their branding. The inkFINDER App website is a really cool example of custom branding.

Their website is more of a landing page selling their iPhone app. It includes some illustrations of an octopus and a shopping basket, plus some other cute icons towards the bottom. These designers know how to tie together a slew of themes into one branding which really works. There is no doubt in my mind that these illustrations have aided in the sale of their application numerous times over.

The reason is because cute illustrations draw attention almost every time. Even if people aren’t necessarily interested in your application, they will spend a couple extra seconds checking your impressive branding. Sometimes this may ironically lead to a sale. These illustrations are instantly recognizable and fit the bill perfectly for marketing potential.

Touch-Up Aesthetics

This final piece of design illustration comes from a small portfolio Allure Graphic Design. They also have a shop and online blog for articles which brings in plenty of attention.

You will notice their website isn’t built around a single illustrated character or vector animal. Instead the layout is wrapped in some warm vines, leaves, flowers, and other nature-themed elements. All these illustrations add to the aesthetic effect of the website layout which creates a very warm and inviting brand. This is one of the easiest effects to replicate because you can focus on a number of different themes.

I can immediately imagine website illustrations based around snow, autumn, summer, oceans, cooking, practically anything! And you don’t even need illustrations to repeat if you can build the layout to scale with your design. Allure does sport a fairly complicated design, but there is a lot to be learned from their professionalism and ultimate simplicity.

Final Thoughts

To understand the power of branding you’ll need to spend time going through other websites for inspiring ideas. Check out our other articles on custom branding for more design tips in this area. Illustrations are not the only solution, but they are a creative one and difficult for copycats to mimic on their own website.

I do hope these tips can get you thinking about how custom branding can affect your product. Over time you should try to reiterate and come up with catchy new ideas worth implementing. It is always a struggle, but designers learn best through the most difficult hardships. If you have any similar ideas or suggestions on illustrated branding feel free to share with us in the discussion area below.

Source: Web Design Ledger

After thinking further, I realized that most people actually assume the opposite—CEOs are born not made. I often listen as other Venture Capitalists and board members rapidly evaluate a founder and conclude that she’s not “CEO material”. I am not sure how they figure these things out so fast. It generally takes years for a founder to develop the CEO skill set and it is usually extremely difficult for me to tell whether or not she will make it.

In athletics, some things like becoming a sprinter can be learned relatively quickly because they take a natural motion and refine it. Others, like boxing, take much longer to master, because they require lots of unnatural motions. For example, when going backwards in boxing, it’s critically important to pick up your back foot first, because if you get hit while walking backwards the natural way—picking up your front foot first—often leads to getting knocked cold. Learning to make this unnatural motion feel natural takes a great deal of practice. If you do what feels most natural as a CEO, then you may also get knocked cold.

Being CEO requires lots of unnatural motion. From an anthropological standpoint, it is natural to do things that make people like you. It enhances your chances for survival. Yet to be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run. Unnatural things.

In fact, even the most basic CEO building blocks will feel unnatural at first. If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say: “Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the build up then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it and present it to me again tomorrow.” Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do. If she doesn’t, then the more complex motions such as writing reviews, taking away territory, handling politics, setting compensation and firing people will be either impossible or handled rather poorly.

Giving feedback turns out to be the unnatural atomic building block atop which the unnatural skill set of the management gets built. But how does one master the unnatural?

The Shit Sandwich

A popular and sometimes effective technique for feedback beginners is something that experienced managers call The Shit Sandwich. The technique is marvelously described in the classic management text, The One Minute Manager. The basic idea is that people open up to feedback far more if you start by complimenting them (slice of bread #1), then you give them the difficult message (the shit), then wrap up by reminding them how much you value their strengths (slice of bread #2). The shit sandwich also has the positive side effect of focusing the feedback on the behavior rather than the person, because you establish up front that you really value the person. This is a key concept in giving feedback.

The shit sandwich can work well with junior employees, but has the following challenges:

• It tends to be overly formal. Because you have to preplan and script the sandwich to make it come out correctly, the process can feel formal and judgmental to the employee.
• After you do it a couple of times, it will lack authenticity. The employee will think: “Oh boy, she’s complimenting me again. I know what’s coming next, the shit.”
• More senior executives will recognize the shit sandwich immediately and it will have an instant negative effect.

Early in my career, I attempted to deliver a carefully crafted shit sandwich to a senior employee and she looked at me like I was a little kid and said: “Spare me the compliment, Ben, and just tell me what I did wrong.” At that point, I thought that I was definitely not born to be a CEO.

The Keys

To become elite at giving feedback, you must elevate yourself beyond a basic technique like the shit sandwich. You must develop a style that matches your own personality and values. Here are the keys to being effective:

• Be authentic. It’s extremely important they you believe in the feedback that you give and not say anything to manipulate the recipient’s feelings. You can’t fake the funk.
• Come from the right place. It’s important that you give people feedback because you want them to succeed and not because you want them to fail. If you really want someone to succeed, then make her feel it. Make her feel you. If she feels you and you are in her corner, then she will listen to you.
• Don’t get personal. If you decide to fire somebody, fire her. Don’t prepare her to get fired. Prepare her to succeed. If she doesn’t take the feedback, then that’s a different conversation.
• Don’t clown people in front of their peers. While it’s OK to give certain kinds of feedback in a group setting, you should strive never to embarrass someone in front of their peers. If you do so, then your feedback will have little impact other than to a) cause the employee to be horribly ashamed and b) cause the employee to hate your guts.
• Feedback is not one size fits all. Everybody is different. Some employees are extremely sensitive to feedback while others have particularly thick skin and often thick skulls. Stylistically, your tone should match the employee’s personality not your mood.
• Be direct, but not mean. Don’t be obtuse. If you think somebody’s presentation sucks, don’t say: “It’s really good, but could use one more pass to tighten up the conclusion.” While it may seem harsh, it’s much better to say: “I couldn’t follow it and I didn’t understand your point and here are the reasons why.” Watered down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient. But don’t beat them up or attempt to show your superiority. Doing so will defeat your purpose because when done properly feedback is dialogue, not a monologue.

Feedback is a dialogue, not a monologue

You may be the CEO and you may be telling somebody about something that you don’t like or disagree with, but that doesn’t mean that you’re right. Your employee should know more about her function than you. She should have more data than you. You may be wrong.

As a result, your goal should be for your feedback to open up rather than close down discussion. Encourage people to challenge your judgment and argue the point to conclusion. Culturally, you want super high standards thoroughly discussed. You want to apply tremendous pressure to get the highest quality thinking, yet be open enough to find out when you are wrong.

High frequency feedback

Once you’ve mastered the keys, you should practice what you’ve mastered all the time. As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself.

This will have two critically important positive effects:

• Feedback won’t be personal in your company. If the CEO constantly gives feedback, then everyone she interacts with will just get used to it. Nobody will think: “Gee, what did she really mean by that comment? Does she not like me?” Everybody will naturally focus on the issues, not an implicit random performance evaluation.
• People will become comfortable discussing bad news. If people get comfortable talking about what each other are doing wrong, then it will be very easy to talk about what the company is doing wrong. High quality company cultures get their cue from data networking routing protocols: bad news travels fast and good news travels slowly. Low quality company cultures take on the personality of the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wiz: “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news.”

Making the CEO

Being CEO requires also a broad set of more advanced skills—I’ve written about many in this blog—but the key to reaching the advanced level and feeling like you were born to be CEO is mastering the unnatural.

If you are a founder CEO and you feel awkward or incompetent when doing some of these things and believe there is no way that you’ll be able to do it when your company is 100 or 1,000 people, welcome to the club. That’s exactly how I felt.  So did every CEO that I’ve ever met. This is the process. This is how you get made.

via: bhorowitz.com

What’s interesting is that a lot of that advice can be turned on its head or even ignored. I’m not knocking MBAs—I know they offer a lot of value. But while theory is good, old fashioned practice (learning by doing) really is the best method, and the real world marketplace is the best classroom.

So, what I want to offer you today are the lessons that I and other successful business owners and managers have learned through the school of hard knocks. These are lessons that will help you create a world-renowned brand that attracts leads, dominates competition and rakes in the cash.

Let’s take a look at ten branding lessons that you won’t learn in graduate school.

Lesson #1: Being smart isn’t enough to create a big brand

You also have to be a leader. That was the lesson that Drew Houston, founder of DropBox, discovered while still in college. He enjoyed his business when it was just him and his code. But then he came across a book that changed his perspective.

The book was Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. After reading it, he was convinced that if he wanted to build a big company with a big brand, then he needed more than intelligence and a degree.

That’s when he started to read books on business, leadership and management. He immediately put that knowledge to work by leading two organizations at college. That experience turned out to be a crash course in getting things done through other people.

Takeaway: Buy or borrow as many books as you can on leadership, management and salesmanship. Hook up with business mentors who are where you want to be. Even take some classes on management and leadership. And then hustle harder than everyone else.

Lesson #2: Build a cult…not a company

Apple is easily one of the most recognized brands in the world. And it has one of the most loyal fan bases, too. Why? Because Apple created a brand that is way more popular than any single product they create.

See, it doesn’t matter if it is a Mac, iPhone or iPad. What matters is that it is an Apple.

Compare this to Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the Blackberry. Their smart phone is vastly cooler and more popular than the company. In fact, ask people if they’ve ever heard of RIM, and most will give you a blank stare.

In fact, search Blackberry and RIM on Google Insights, and the volume for the product will be higher than for the company. Do the same thing with Apple and iPhone, and you’ll see that the spikes are always side by side, meaning people talk about the company as much as they talk about their products.

Takeaway: Create products and experiences that are based upon your brand and core message in order to cultivate that almost cult-like connection with your customers. Focus on building the killer brand, not the killer product.

Lesson #3: Start with why

Speaking of building the killer product—this is how many companies begin their branding journey. They look to create the product that changes lives and neglect the brand.

Let’s look at Apple again. They will never start with the common what-how-why advertising message. Instead, they flip that formula so it is why-how-what. They start off by promoting the reason why they exist. It’s as if they say something like this: “Apple exists to challenge the status quo. We emphasize gorgeous design. And we happen to make digital devices.”

The reverse of that is this: “Apple makes digital devices. They are gorgeously designed. We exist to challenge the status quo.” See how that can make a difference. The first emphasizes the mission, while the other emphasizes the product. Products come and go. A brand should last forever.

Takeaway: Get everyone involved in understanding the mission—the why you exist. This starts at the top and works all the way down to the bottom. Then everyone is working to create a meaningful way to get people to see your brand, not just your products.

Lesson #4: Burn your business plan

Attend any graduate school or course on being an entrepreneur, and you will eventually hear your instructor tell you that a smart entrepreneur needs a business plan.

The business plan is supposed to lead you and guide you. But you don’t always need it.

The founders behind Proof Wood, a maker of sustainable wood sunglasses, were told to write a business plan—but didn’t. Instead, they just ran with their idea.

As Inc reported, CEO Brooks Dame said “After the company launched, we finally wrote one for a business plan competition, in order to raise money. But the truth is, we’ve deviated from it so much, we never even refer to it.”

Dame goes on to say that a business plan can make you over think your product. So you spend endless nights re-tooling it to get it perfect. But once you get it to market, you may be too late.

Takeaway: When it is a race to the market, you may have to rely on nothing more than your idea—and then just run with it. Keep an eye on the competition. You can always create a business plan later on.

Lesson #5 Create your own market

It’s an uphill battle if you try to enter a market that is over-crowded. The same is true for a market that is shrinking. The only way to guarantee your success is to create a new market.

That is what Amazon did with the e-reader back when it was nothing more than a fuzzy concept. They gave the early adopters something they could play with while the rest of us caught up.

Amazon was criticized for taking such a risky move; but since they got to define that new market, they now own it and their critics are silent.

Of course Kindle Fire isn’t as great as Amazon had hoped, and Amazon is plagued by problems from publishers and libraries over privacy and pricing guidelines, but they still dominate.

Takeaway: Try to peer past the horizon and look for markets that are undervalued. Do they have promising growth? Launch a concept video to test the waters. Then quickly get to work.

Lesson #6: Rebrand to avoid confusion

Multiple product lines can cause headaches for a brand—especially when the brand name and the product name aren’t aligned.

This happened to Formspring when they started to attract a different fan base with a social media product. The problem is that they are known for a business-related, form-building product.

The company was causing confusion between the two products, so they decided to re-brand themselves. The task wouldn’t be easy because they had a lot of authority built up in their original brand.

They solved the problem by creating the perfect landing page infographic to educate their customers. On StumbleUpon alone, the infographic was shared over 100,000 times, bringing exposure to their new brand quickly.

Takeaway: Start from the top down. Start with the why. The brand. Then build products underneath that. Formspring is a classic example of a company that started with a product and not a brand. They also are a great example of how to overcome that hurdle. So, don’t be afraid to re-brand, especially if it will end brand confusion.

Lesson #7: Your customers aren’t who you think they are

Most companies are started by people who build products for like-minded friends and family. When they start a business, they think they know who their target market is.

That was certainly the case for Proof Wood founders who were creating their wood sunglasses for skateboarders and surfers. But a trip to a conference proved they were wrong.

Not only were the environmentally conscious interested in the sunglasses, but so were hip hop artists and housewives. The company realized the sunglasses had a mass appeal, and they eventually landed in 120 stores, including Nordstroms. The company sells over 1,800 pairs of sunglasses a month.

This has happened to a lot of companies like Vans, and even hip hop music itself.

Takeaway: Be adaptable. Try not to get locked into thinking you know who your customer is. Release your product and watch where it goes. Look for opportunities to exploit.

Lesson #8: Get edgy

There is a reason that Jim Beam, the 216-year-old whiskey company, is still around. It goes after profitable markets, even if it doesn’t make sense.

They started by looking at markets ignored by their competitors. The most obvious one in the big spirits business is women. Even though women made up half of vodka consumers, no big spirits company focused on them specifically. In fact, the general strategy was to get the men in, and then the women would follow.

Jim Beam jumped on the opportunity and created products exclusively for women, like a margarita variety called Bethenny Frankel’s Skinnygirl Cocktails — which is a number one selling brand.

Takeaway: Can you find a lucrative market that your competitors are ignoring? What do they want? Can you give it to them? In Jim Beam’s case, women wanted flavor and lower-alcohol big spirits. And can you re-shape your brand to look edgy and relevant? It may be worth it.

Lesson #9: Attention to detail in the small stuff

Sometimes the best ideas are simple. Take the idea that founders, Richard Tait and Whit Alexander of the board game Cranium, used to get everyone on the same page about the brand.

What they decided to do was create a playful acronym: CHIFF. That meant clever, high quality, innovative, friendly and fun. This acronym became ingrained into the minds of every employee at Cranium.

It had such an effect on the brand that one marketing manager pulled a French Canadian packaging design that used the phrase “splendid talents” on the box and replaced it with “mind boggling.” The fear was that the wrong phrase on the box design might not register with potential customers. That’s a pretty intense level of attention to detail, but it has made the company a huge brand success, and it all started on a very simple idea.

Takeaway: When you sweat the small stuff, a lot of times it will take care of the big stuff. Create easy ways to get everyone on the same page about your brand. Then discipline yourself to pay attention to the detail of everything.

Lesson #10: Burn your ships

When you start a company, you may start off with one set of customers. Over time, you may realize that they are not the customers you want in the long run.

So you cut them off.

That’s exactly what Stormpulse, a storm tracking and alert service, did after five years of being in business. Founder Matt Wensing noticed that some of the consumer accounts that he had were owned by people who worked at the White House and FedEx. At that point, he realized he needed to focus on big business if he wanted to create a long-term brand.

The consumer accounts were paying him only $50 a year, and Wensing figured he could make 10 times that with the enterprise customers. It was a gutsy move, but it’s since paid off.

They now have 200 enterprise customers and hope to secure additional funding. Then they will be able to hire more people to improve UX and field all the sales leads they are getting.

Takeaway: Don’t be afraid to piss some people off—as long as you can make some other people really happy, and the move is lucrative.

Conclusion

Now, one of the greatest branding lessons that I have learned from the above experiences and my own is that you’ll never be able to build a great brand based on a formula. It just doesn’t work that way.

What works is creativity, hard work and the willingness to make mistakes—lots of them. The school of hard knocks will teach you some great lessons on building a brand that you’ll never get from an MBA.

So, get your MBA, but also get your experience.

What branding lessons have you learned (that you didn’t learn in school)?

Via: Kiss Metrics.

Well, I may be young but I have been an entrepreneur for over ten years. My first SEO consulting job was in high school where I built and ran a successful agency. And from there I co-founded a few software companies. Luckily for me, I was fortunate to grow up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I’ve heard a lot of great advice about what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

And I’ve also seen that all great entrepreneurs hold closely to a core set of beliefs. So what are those beliefs? Here are eight:

Belief #1: Make a decision and go!

This was one of the first lessons I learned when starting my first business and it was extremely hard to get used to making a decision and then taking action on that decision.

I was so afraid I was making a mistake. Since then I’ve learned that making a mistake is not a bad thing. You actually learn from those mistakes, which helps you make better decisions down the road.

You will struggle with hiring and firing people, project budgets, office space and advertising creative. When you first start off in business you will take days and even weeks to answer these questions.

This core belief actually came back to me when I lost a million dollar client. They were happy with the service I was providing, but they wanted to know what else I was going to do to take their business to the next level. I had a few ideas, but I didn’t make a decision on which idea I was going to act on. Long story short, I took too long to make a decision and I lost a $1.2 million client.

Belief #2: Show passion, not perfection

It’s a lot easier to work on a project for closed doors for years until you get it perfect and then ship, but that just won’t work these days.

Often when I talk to young entrepreneurs who are “working” on a project behind closed doors I realize they are afraid to ship because they don’t want to be ridiculed. But I always encourage them that what people don’t want a perfect product…what they want is a passionate person behind the project.

If you can show people you are passionate about creating a perfect product by releasing it, then getting feedback and iterating…then people will jump on board…especially if the product solves a real-world problem.

Don’t try to perfect anything because if you perfect something that no one wants to use, you will just end up wasting money.

At KISSmetrics we created 2 other versions of our product that are no longer live. We spent over $500,000 on the first version, trying to perfect it, instead of just getting it out there. Since then we have scrapped that product. If we used the minimal viable product approach instead of trying to create a perfect product, we probably would have saved that money.

Belief #3: Avoid the ugly baby syndrome

One thing that entrepreneurs are in the habit of doing is falling in love with their ideas…even if it is a bad idea. This is like parents who fall in love with their new baby, even though everyone knows newborns are ugly.

You need to be objective in your business, with your plan and your product. Everything on the table needs to be up for debate if you truly want to succeed.

Seek out mentors to help you, and get advice from them on a regular basis. Listen closely to what they are saying. Listen closely to what you partner is saying and more importantly your customers.

This doesn’t mean you have to surrender every idea, but sometimes you may have to make drastic changes.

The CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, tells a story about how they were going down the wrong path and brought in the founder of Costco, Jim Sinegal for advice. Jim said, “You know, I don’t want to be rude but this is exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Schultz listened, realized Sinegal was right, and shifted their strategy.

One way to protect yourself from falling in love with your idea is to train yourself to fall in love with solving people’s problems. It doesn’t matter what you create to solve their problems, but as long as you do it in a simple, easy, and ideally an affordable way, you will be fine.

Belief #4: Find the sweet spot, then scale it

Once you have reached product market fit, there will come a time when you need to figure out how to scale your product.

If you scale your product before people fall in love with it, you’ll tarnish your brand. What I mean by this is that people won’t be happy with your product so they will say negative things about it. This will cause churn, a decrease in sales, and a bad brand that will be hard to fix. Once people think negatively about your product or brand, it’s hard to change their perception… even after you fix your product.

When I first started Crazy Egg we spent thousands of dollars on marketing before we launched the product. We had a ton of churn in the beginning, as there were a lot of product issues we faced when we launched. The marketing spend had a negative ROI and if I had to do it all over again, I would scale the business once I fixed the major product problems.

Belief #5: Don’t think about taking a leap, just take it

Speaking of perfection, there is never a perfect time to become an entrepreneur. Though being young and without a family is certainly a better time than when you are older and have a family.

Once you take the leap though…you are committed. You need to quit your job and become your new business. That’s a huge risk for sure, but if you don’t take the risk what’s to encourage a partner or investor to take the risk on you?

This commitment needs to infuse everything you do…and never think of minimum amounts. Never think that you need to secure just 4 clients a month to succeed or you just need to make 200 calls before the money pours in.

That never happens. Your projections will more than likely fail. This means you need to have a mantra that says there is no failure…just wild success! So stop wasting time and take the leap.

One of the most common emails I get is from people asking if I would invest in their business idea. When I ask them how far they have gotten, most people tell me that they are still at the idea stage and don’t have the time to go further as they have a full time job. If you can’t take the leap into entrepreneurship, investors won’t fund you because it shows that you don’t believe in what you are doing if you aren’t willing to quit your job.

Belief #6: Entrepreneurship isn’t a war, it’s about solving problems and turning a profit

Some entrepreneurs treat business like it’s a war that you need to defeat and destroy your competition. But even if you can actually do that and become number one in your market, you will still fail if you aren’t turning a profit.

For instance, at KISSmetrics we don’t focus on killing our competition even though they copy our features and steal our designs, instead we focus on solving our customers’ problems and growing our revenue.

The truth is that if you can find a way to differentiate yourself from your competition in a meaningful way, your revenues will go up. Plus if you are in a new market that is big enough, it doesn’t matter what your competition is doing, as there is enough room for both of you.

Belief #7: Hire slow, fire fast

The single most critical part of running a successful business is to hire the right people…and fire the wrong ones fast.

A lot of people spend a lot of time and energy trying to select the right person based upon past performance, but I’ve often found that what you learn in an interview with somebody doesn’t equal good performance down the road.

I like to see people get their hands dirty and how they adapt to stressful situations. When I interview people, I rarly talk about what they have done or even look at their resume, instead I ask them questions related to what they would do for my company and how they’ll get that work done in a timely fashion.

And if you happen to hire a few bad people, keeping them hurts your business as it will probably do more damage then good. Mark Zuckerburg famously fired people who were loyal to him but couldn’t handle the growth. And Zappos even paid people to leave the company if things weren’t working out to make the transition easy.

Belief #8: Learn from your first, earn from your second, give back with your third

If you are a serial entrepreneur…or you’re on your first business but think you have two or three more in you…then you will likely get a lot of experience, business wisdom and wealth out of those ventures. It will take years before you get there, but if you keep at it, sooner or later you will do well.

Your first business is going to be full of mistakes and lessons learned…that’s a good thing! You can apply those lessons learned to your second where you should get it right and become successful. Then on your third business you can give back.

You can give back money to other startups but you can also give back experience and help out other entrepreneurs or volunteer for charities. Don’t ever expect anything in return, but instead just give back like your mentors did with you.

Conclusion

Now, do you have to have all of these core beliefs in place on day one as an entrepreneur, you are going to become extraordinary, right? The answer is no. The thing about starting and growing a business is that you will grow as a person yourself…and that is one of the best educations an entrepreneur can get!

So take a minute to re-read the core beliefs I shared above, then print them out…and start working on becoming the next Bill Gates or Larry Page.

What other core beliefs do you believe that extraordinary entrepreneurs have?

Via: Quick Sprout.

If you’ve ever come across a client (or 20) who refuses to pay you what you know you’re worth, you might start to think that there’s no one out there who knows the value of good design. And you’re definitely not alone – so many designers compete on price that those who want to compete on quality often feel left out.

(Image Source: WebDesignerDepot)

Many non-designer clients just don’t see what the big deal is about design, and they’ll often go for the cheapest, rather than the best. In this article, we’ll explore a few theories on why that is, and what designers can do about it.

Designing the Unknown

The good news is that people love design. According to the results of this design attitudes research done by MarketingWeek, people know that good design is effective and necessary, yet for some reason, they don’t personally feel it’s worth paying for.

There are several reasons why that might be, but, arguably, the most important has to do with psychology. People, at large, like to believe that they are creative on some level, even if their profession has absolutely nothing to do with design whatsoever.

(Image Source: Oatmeal)

As long as designers are up against this kind of overconfidence, they will always encounter non-designer clients who will not only try to intervene in the design process (the dreaded “design by committee”), but who will also insist that your services aren’t worth as much as you say they are.

The Paradox of an Awesome Design

Design isn’t like accounting or IT. There is no consensus on what constitutes a “good” design, thus we don’t really know how to objectively value it. Also, since design is a lot more creating than accounting, people are often at awe yet still skeptical of a designer’s ability. They may think ‘Wow, what a great design,’ while simultaneously thinking ‘it can’t be that hard to do, can it?’

(Image Source: les chansons d’amour)

This is the dark side of creating simple, clean and elegant designs. They look so easy, and yet a non-designer has no idea how much blood, sweat, and tears went into coming up with them.

Misplaced confidence

When people think they can do your job as ‘well’ as you can, they aren’t going to value it as highly, no matter how much you explain the process. Of course, it isn’t all the clients’ fault. The design community has a well-known problem with designers undervaluing and underpricing their own work, and by consequence, decreasing the market value of design in general.

mage Source: FreelanceSwitch)

Pricing has a lot to do with how much people value something. The more designers are able to charge, the more seriously they will be taken by their clients. Unfortunately, a lot of clients simply aren’t able to pay for quality design.

Many times, the people in charge of the design budget have no idea what actually goes into creating good design. They rely on the opinion of marketers or managers (again, non-designers) and end up underfunding the design because no one has any idea what design really is. Making design less of a mystery to clients is key to explaining exactly why they should be paying your standard rates.

Stand your ground

Standing your ground as a high-value designer is essential, especially when everyone else around you is caught in a bidding war for the cheapest prices. It might seem like common sense to simply give in and start offering your services for less than they’re worth, but this is actually the worst thing you can do.

(Image Source: Nakanishi)

Long-term Prices

Sure, you might pick up few clients over the next few months if you charge less than your worth, but in the long run, you might pigeonhole yourself into a pay bracket that you’ll never get out of. Once people know they can get your services fairly cheap, they’ll always want to get them for cheap, even if you’d like to raise your prices in the future.

Dead End

It’s virtually impossible to go from being a low-priced designer to a high-priced designer while working for a client (or a certain type of client). If you suddenly begin charging your clients your standard rate after they’ve become used to a heavy discount, they’re going to laugh in your face, and possibly stop working with you.

Client Expectations

Low-paying clients can be some of the most difficult to deal with, and the less you charge, the more demanding they seem to become. And no client is ever going to call you – their discount designer – when they have a high-budget project they need finished. They’re going to turn to someone who’s not afraid to charge top dollar for the highest-quality work. You can avoid this sad scenario by starting out at the top, rather than the bottom.

Get Your name Out There

Designers who focus on value over price are not only competing with those who are willing to work for cheap or even free, they are also being obscured by these designers’ superior marketing skills. In a dynamic and ever-changing market for design, clients will almost always hire the designers they have heard of, versus the ones they haven’t.

(Image Source: Fotolia)

If you’re a developer who design software that can boost user efficiency by more than 200%, you can still be outsold by an inferior competitor if your promotional strategy isn’t up to speed. In this case, pricing isn’t even that important – the right market for your product will probably be willing to pay a premium for what you can offer them – if only they knew you existed.

How to Increase your Worth

Ask for it – if you’re one of the many designers who are uncomfortable increasing their prices, I challenge you to try it just once. If you’re confused about how to go about it, here’s a method you can use to increase your value as a problem-solver.

First, find clients who are willing to pay for quality (no more cheapsters – you can only haggle so much with low-budget clients). Never be afraid to ask for what you know your work is worth. Next (and this part is important), check out their company backgrounds and their target audiences to find out what kinds of marketing problems they have. Interview people if you have to. The more you know about your clients’ markets, the more detailed and valuable a solution you can provide them.

The Bonus

Of course, this means you’ll probably have to specialize in one or two markets, but that’s a good thing. Why? Because it lets you focus only on the clients you know best, which in turn lets you advance up the client ladder and increase your salary much faster. People are always looking for a personalized solution to their specific problems; provide them with one and you’ll have more work than you’ll know what to do with.

Wrap Up

Have you had bad experiences with skeptical or low-paying clients? What methods have you used to resolve those issues? Share your experience with us.

Via: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/paying-for-good-design/

The best landing pages follow a basic structure that informs the user efficiently and gets them to take action in the shortest possible time. This is the AIDA formula – which is attention, interest, desire and then action. The best sites use this formula in a variety of different ways but all of them seem to get it right for their own goals.

Below is a compilation of the best bootstrapped startup landing pages that you can use to guide you in the making of your own landing page, they all (though in different spaces and with different conversion goals) follow a basic format that gets the user to take the action that they’d like them to take. Proof of their effectiveness is in their revenue performance (which I have also included in this post – based on estimates, from information that is freely available around the web).

And I chose bootstrappers because I figured, who better to learn from than self funded entrepreneurs?! They NEED to get this right!