Blog

Beliefs Are Holding You Back

Get Results: breaking beliefs
Get Results: breaking beliefs

The BELIEFS we hold so dear, are often, indirectly holding us back from chasing down our goals. The way we use beliefs to make decisions, and to interpret the world around us, can result in, both positive and negative consequences for us as individuals.

Our beliefs are the core of how we evaluate the world we live in. They determine, often on a subconscious level, who and what we pay attention to, or ignore. They influence what we do, or don’t do. They shape how we interact with others. They inform our choices about what groups we decide to join, or not. They affect who and what we are drawn to and who and what we avoid, who and what we disagree with and whether we take action or stay put.

I like to think about beliefs like bullet points that form the backbone of a story we tell ourselves, which we believe with some certainty, that we use to navigate the world around us.

For instance if you believe the following…

  • The world is a dangerous place – The news is full of horrible, violent events, I can’t remember it being this bad when I was younger
  • People are more violent these days than they used to be, I can’t remember all this knife crime and shooting I hear about now
  • People only care about themselves, and are less likely to help others, than they used to be
  • Community spirit is long gone, people aren’t as friendly as they used to be

So these beliefs form the backbone of a story that depicts the world as a lonely, scary place, with danger at every turn, where people are out to get you or rob you.  – okay I’m exaggerating for effect here, but you get the point. The stronger you hold these beliefs, the more powerful the resulting emotions you will fear.

So how do you think this thought process is going to shape your behaviours? You might go out less particularly at night, or avoid certain places altogether because you see them dangerous. For instance, you might turn down the opportunity to go on holiday to somewhere you’ve heard has had problems in the recent past.

You might be less trusting of strangers when you interact with them, coming across as unfriendly and uncaring from their point of view. This impacts how they react to you in return. You can see how we can easily get the wrong opinion of someone and vice versa.

If you see someone in distress you might rush by, for fear of falling into a trap. It might well be a trap, it does happen, but it might also be someone that desperately needs your assistance.

You might prefer to keep yourself to yourself, rather than seek the company of others in social situations, making you seek aloof and unfriendly.

It’s not hard to see that these underlying beliefs are impacting the way you might make decisions, how you interact with people and places and how others see and interact with you. This shapes your relationships and directly impacts the quality of your life.

Life’s experiences are a combination of interpretations, emotions,  behaviours, reactions and interactions which act like a feedback loop; all of which, are built on top of our core beliefs.

So what can we do about beliefs that are spoiling the quality of our lives? Surely we can’t just change our beliefs to suit us, after all, they are based on truths and reflect how the world actually is, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t be our beliefs in the first place, would they?

Well, let’s consider what a belief is. My definition of a belief is ;

“It’s a thought (which is a mind constructed abstraction) we hold with some certainty to be true.”

The dictionary definition is;

“An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.”

The directory definition is interesting because it adds “with proof” at the end. Yet I’d bet few of us consider our beliefs not to be based on proof, we might not even contemplate this possibility.  When in fact, many beliefs we hold are based on nothing more than assumptions, inferences, and the testimony of other people.

Beliefs are absorbed through social conditioning.  We learn them from people around us, from the media, from influential people like teachers, parents, authority figures, experts, from peers, work colleages and friends. Increasingly we are strengthening such beliefs through social media algorithms that are designed to feed us more information that we have “liked” in the past.

Okay our personal experiences shape our beliefs to some degree, of course, but consider than our beliefs are underpinning how we even interpret our experiences.

We see or hear something and almost instantly give is some meaning. This meaning is based on our beliefs. At the same time we are filtering out incoming stimuli and data that we aren’t interested in. For instance we buy a red Mini, we suddenly start seeing red Minis everywhere. Where there no red minis around before we purchased one, or were they always there but we just didn’t notice? Check out this video, follow the instructions, and see the power of our minds to filter out unnecessary stimuli.

So beliefs are core to what we pay attention to and what we filter out.

Changing beliefs

Something else that’s important to understand about our beliefs are they are often invested with our sense of self. This means we psychologically attach to them. They become our belief, we and the belief become one. Because we do this particularly with strongly held beliefs we fall into a couple of traps.

The first trap we fall into is we notice evidence that supports the belief, and ignore anything that contradicts it.  This is known as confirmation bias.

The second trap we fall into is we find it hard to change a belief because we’re invested in it. To change the belief we must first accept we were wrong to begin with, and this can be unacceptable for our fragile Egos.

The way to avoid these traps is to avoid investing our sense of self in them. How? Well, use a scientific approach, consider beliefs like a best guess (hypothesis) that you actively try to disprove. That way you don’t fight for them, instead you’re open to hearing contradictory evidence. You suddenly stop trying to be right, and instead try to find the truth.

So the question becomes, which beliefs should we keep and which should be abandon? In truth, we should, as I’ve said previously, turn all beliefs into best guesses. But specifically it’s the beliefs that are holding us back from going after our goals we should target first. If it’s not serving you, drop it or change it.

Beliefs that hold you back tend to be self-confidence focused. Consider these common beliefs…

  • I’m not capable of doing [blank]
  • I don’t have the experience/resources/skills/ talent to do [blank]
  • You need to be [blank] to succeed at doing [blank]

We often allow these beliefs to put us off even trying to make progress, due to fear of things like disappointment, failure, loss, embarrassment, etc.

Changing such beliefs or incorporating new beliefs that empower us will help us to overcome such limiting beliefs

  • The best way to learn is by doing
  • Failure is a necessary part of learning and making progress
  • I am capable of doing this, I might have to learn something new or develop a skill further, but I can do it
  • If I lack a particular skill, I can find  someone who I can hire to help me
  • Where there is a will, there is a way…always
  • I can only truly fail if I give up completely – I will not be beaten
  • You are never too old to learn new tricks
  • If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

These are empowering beliefs, but they are also very true, and more grounded in reality than simply saying “I can’t do this”. Why can’t you do it? Who says so? Based on what, the past? Remember the past doesn’t equal the future, how’s that for a belief.

If you’d like to learn more about beliefs, subscribe to our newsletter for up-to-date notifications and exclusive content not available on the website.

Use Fear as Motivation

Get Results: overcome fear and get results
Get Results: overcome fear and get results

Fear holds most people back from chasing down their goals and dreams.

They fear failure,

They fear disappointment,

They fear discomfort,

They may even fear success; getting so committed they can’t easily back out of it,

They fear loss, financial or otherwise.

But Fear is a double-edged sword, you can harness it to propel yourself forward.

FEAR a mediocre life,

FEAR regret,

FEAR missing out on a better future.

Use Fear as motivation, don’t be a victim of it.

Use fear to drive you towards your goals and dreams and kill fear that holds you back.

Get Results: fear stands for
Get Results: fear stands for
Get Results: without fear
Get Results: without fear

Check out our motivational guide here.

Beliefs Shape Your World

Get Results: Quit investing sense of self in beliefs
Get Results: Quit investing sense of self in beliefs

Beliefs….
Drive your actions,
Your choices,
What you do,
What you don’t do,
What interests you,
And what doesn’t,
What you enjoy,
What annoys you,
What you’ll do,
What you won’t,
What turns you on,
What turns you off,
What you say and how you say it,
They choose your friends,
Where you live,
What you do for a living,
If you drive or not,
Where you holiday,
If you holiday,
What you buy,
What you throw away,
They are your focus,
Your filter,
They colour your world,
They make you liberal or conservative,
Leave or remain,
Kind or mean,
Social or reclusive,
They make you fat or thin,
Successful or not,
They determine if you’ll give up or soldier on,
They are your path to freedom or your prison.

So what are beliefs?
They are rigid thought forms invested with sense of self. Formed from assumptions, inferences and the testimony of other people. They are a consequence of our social conditioning. Our thoughts are largely given to us by others.

What they are not, is fact or truth. They can be changed, reformed, manipulated to serve you better. They can and are manipulate by skilled persuaders to get you to do things for them, so be warned, be vigilant. Bring awareness to your beliefs, if they are hiding from scrutiny, observe your behaviours and emotions and ask why? What belief is driving this?

Get Results: beliefs share your world
Get Results: beliefs share your world
Get Results: Quit investing sense of self in beliefs
Get Results: Quit investing sense of self in beliefs
Get Results: beliefs become your destiny
Get Results: beliefs become your destiny
Get Results: what customer thinks is what matters
Get Results: what customer thinks is what matters
Get Results: don't argue with someone who believes their own lies
Get Results: don’t argue with someone who believes their own lies
Get Results: use thought don't be use by it
Get Results: use thought don’t be use by it
Get Results: opinions are the greatest deception of man
Get Results: opinions are the greatest deception of man
Get Results: fewer facts stronger opinions
Get Results: fewer facts stronger opinions
Get Results: don't argue with someone who believes their own lies
Get Results: don’t argue with someone who believes their own lies
Get Results: change the way you look at things
Get Results: change the way you look at things
Get Results: seek the truth
Get Results: seek the truth
Get Results: Love and do what you will
Get Results: Love and do what you will
Get Results: Overthinking is the biggest cause of unhappiness
Get Results: Overthinking is the biggest cause of unhappiness
Get Results: fear stands for
Get Results: fear stands for
Get Results: open to wonder
Get Results: open to wonder
Get Results: don't be a prisoner of your past
Get Results: don’t be a prisoner of your past
Get Results: beliefs are lies
Get Results: beliefs are lies
Get Results: bother each other with opinions
Get Results: bother each other with opinions
Get Results: spend too much time in your head
Get Results: spend too much time in your head
Get Results:at peace in the present
Get Results:at peace in the present
Get Results: change perspective
Get Results: change perspective
Get Results: Truth is where you are
Get Results: Truth is where you are
Get Results: Only Present
Get Results: Only Present
Get Results: Never ASSUME
Get Results: Never ASSUME
Get Results: Eckhart Tolle quotes
Get Results: Eckhart Tolle quotes
Get Results: Perspective
Get Results: Perspective
Get Results: Successful present moment
Get Results: Successful present moment
Get Results: Self Awareness
Get Results: Self Awareness
Get Results: Perspective
Get Results: Perspective

The Essentials of BRAND Development

Get Results: Essential elements in brand development
Get Results: Essential elements in brand development

When it comes to building a brand, there are many considerations, but there are 3 that I would suggest should be at the forefront of your brand building activities.

Differentiated positioning

Differentiated positioning involves your branding standing apart from the competition.

Your brand should represent unique meaning from the point of view of customers.

Think about some of your favourite brands, what simple meaning do they represent to you? Volvo represents safety to me, Apple represents innovation.

Positioning is also about where you position your brand in the marketing, are you a specialist, a generalist, are you a premium brand or a value driven brand?

No two brands can successfully hold the same market position, the first in that space will usually be the winner.

Look to disrupt and challenge the status quo, by shaking things up and approaching the market from a unique and refreshing direction. Think about how Netflix have changed the landscape of the video rental business into the streaming services we now see. What would look different in your space?

Play to your brands unique qualities and strengths. What has your brand got to offer that will allow you to stand apart from the competition?

Provide value to customers

The fundamental requirement of any brand is for it to provide value to its customers.

If there is no benefit for the customer in interacting with your brand, why are they going to bother? They just aren’t going to, life is too short to waste time on brands that don’t benefit anyone.

Provide a valuable solution that addresses customers wants and needs.

Make sure your solution fits your brands strengths, talents and skill-set.

Try to ensure your brand is focused on a specific part of the market. It’s often better to focus narrow and deep, rather than shallow and wide in terms of market coverage. Leave the mass market to the big boys who have a big enough budget to reach them.

Brands should attempt to connect emotionally with customers, because  emotions and not reasoning or logic, are what connect people to people and people to brands.

To matter to customers your brand has to provide value on a regular basis, so that if you go away, they will miss you.

What do customers want or need that your brand can provide a valuable solution for?

Effective communication; perception control

Value offering and differentiation are no good if you aren’t able to communicate them effectively to customers or prospective customers.

Brand building orientated marketing is required to tell your story to customers so that they get what you’re brand is about. Speak to your target customers in a language only they will understand. It’s okay if your communication goes over the heads of non-targeted people.

Be inspiring to customers, provide them with hope; show them that whatever they are wanting to achieve, can be done, and they can do it with your help.

If possible connect to a bigger cause – be part of it, together. Play to customers aspirations. Romanticise a calling – “I’m a photographer”  changes to “I help celebrate family – happy families make for happy communities.”

Ask yourself “What does the market think of us? Is this as intended?” If there is a disconnect between the two, revise your brand communications.

For more about branding, click here.

The Ego Is Flawed

Get Results: The EGO is flawed
Get Results: The EGO is flawed

Use the Ego don’t be used by it.

Understand how it is calibrated so you can override it’s shortcomings and limitations and rise above them.

The Ego is well meaning but primitive.

Its fear based approach is self serving and survival driven but limiting and objectionable.

It prefers routine over exploration because it’s the safer approach. Routine is the enemy of innovation and creativity.

Thinking differently results in acting differently, acting differently results in experiencing differently, experiencing results in thinking differently. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Thinking without being invested in those thoughts is freedom from the EGO, because EGO is thought invested with your sense of self.

For more about spirituality, click here.

Branding Is About Owning A Word

Get Results: branding is the art of differentiation quote graphic
Get Results: branding is the art of differentiation

Branding is about owning a word in the mind of the customer.

Having a simple to understand and remember position, separate and distinct from all other competition.

It’s not about saying something short, dumbing down or using sound bites. It’s about prioritising the core message which should be both simple and profound. Proverbs are the ideal in doing this, like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; a one sentence statement so profound that you could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

You can build on top of schemas to leverage existing knowledge, like describing Speed as Die Hard on a bus, or being the test crash dummy of online marketing, as with Pat Flynn.

A good core message helps customers understand and remember your brand, while also helping employees decision making. As with Southwest Airlines’s core message being THE low fair airline, customers know what southwest are all about, while employees know what intent should drive their decision-making when it comes to a choice of say, putting extra filling in the sandwiches or not.

Commander intent is used in much the same way by the Army, a simple, plainly-worded statement that summarises every military order, to ensure everyone understands the underlying tactic to be accomplished.

Journalists would describe it as making sure you’re not burying the lead, but instead putting it front and centre of communication, as if you might be cut off at any time.

Doing this prevents decision paralysis caused by overload, and uncertainty. It’s harder to remember 3 things than it is one. One clear message is easier to communicate, to get across and strengthen.

Use this core message as the centerpiece of your marketing, but branding is also about driving it into the customer experience at every touch point. This means making it part of your value promise and then delivering it, consistently over and over. If you don’t deliver on your promise, your message will be undermined and diluted.

Your Core message doesn’t have to have all the information built it. Treat it like breadcrumbs. The low cost airline, doesn’t advocate saving money on airline maintenance and is not as accurate as “improving shareholder value” but is more usable and memorable, and guides employee decisions by knowing  the commanders intent when making individual decisions.

For more about branding, check out our branding series, here.

Improving Your Planning

Get Results: from here to goal graphic
Get Results: from here to goal

As long as you know where you currently are, and where you want to go (your goal), you will be able to map out what is required to fill the gap between the two. Getting results means you have to have a plan of action to move you towards your goal.

Now many people think about this in simplistic terms. For example lets say you want to start a business online and you come up with the following plan of action;

#1 Come up with a business idea

  • Understand who the customer is
  • Create a suitable name for the business that
  • is memorable
  • Create the brand – it’s visuals and story
  • Fulfil legal requirements – register with inland revenue, regulatory bodies etc

#2 Set up website

  • Get website hosting
  • Register a suitable domain name
  • Get your website live and running

#3 Marketing business

Drive traffic from..

  • Social media channels
  • Adverts
  • Offline channels

#4 E-commerce on website to take payment

Simple isn’t it, this is a outline list of tasks that need to be done for you to get a business up and running online.

However if you think this is all you have to do and the world will be knocking down your door, you’re very much mistaken.

Each step is somewhat more complex than I’ve shown above because it’s not just about what you do, it’s about how your audience responds. If your website isn’t pressing the right buttons for visitors they are not going to take the action you want them to and buy from you.

So you may have to try different marketing channels, different  messages, different media and different offers to see what works for you. Complexity comes from things you can’t directly control or predict. There is often no one right way of doing things, and what works for one business might not for another.

Sure the vast majority of people are looking to improve their situation in some way, they are looking for growth in economic wealth, for social wealth for physical and psychological wealth. If your solution nudges them in that direction, you’re going to have a better chance than you would otherwise.

But you’ve got to communicate this benefit to your audience through your marketing messages. What you think will resonate with them, might not, so you have to test ideas, tweak, improve and test again. You also need to understand their pain points, what is going to motivate them to take action and so on. Below is table with some of this complexity factored into it.

To Do list – simple Complexity Questions that need answering
Come up with a business idea

  • Understand who the customer is
  • Create a suitable name for the business that
  • is memorable
  • Create the brand – it’s visuals and story
  • Fulfil legal requirements – register with inland revenue, regulatory bodies etc
Requirements

  • Must be a solution that will be in demand
  • There must be a market for it
  • It is a solution to a problem the prospect has

actions

  • Do market research
  • Look for proof of existing market
  • Test ideas
  • Do they have a problem I can solve?
  • Are they willing to pay for a solution I can provide?
  • Is it worth doing from my POV?
  • Where can I find prospects to find this information?
  • What is the business model?
  • Where will the solution be available (online or bricks and mortar)?
Set up website

  • Hosting
  • Domain name
Marketing business

Drive traffic from..

  • Social media channels
  • Adverts
  • Offline channels
  • Target prospects wherever they are
  • Deliver the right message at right time to the right person
  • Allow prospects to know, like and trust you
  • Encourage goodwill by providing value to prospects who aren’t ready to buy just yet
  • Engage emotionally through branding
  • Consider marketing channel choices
  • Test channels/ideas/media/messages
  • Build social proof/signals
  • What channels are prospects spending attention on?
  • How can I get their attention?
  • How can I engage with them there?
  • What type of messages will help me get known, liked and trusted?
E-commerce to take payment

You must work to improve your results through continually improving your plan of action and improving your problem solving capabilities.

It’s vitally important you factor complexity into your plan of action, it’s the one thing that is going to hold things up and stand in the way of you getting results.

This is a system focused on KNOWLEDGE and PRODUCTIVITY, it doesn’t take into account any MOTIVATIONAL elements that might be holding you back from taking the action YOU need to be taking. If you fear failure or disappointment or loss, if you fail to take responsibility, if you lack resourcefulness or self awareness, these are all motivational problem areas that need to be addressed.

Motivation is a subject in its own right and there are lots of articles throughout the site dedicated to it. Check them out here.

For more about productivity, click here.

Building Brand By Creating Valuable Content

Get Results: content is king graphic
Get Results: content is king

Why Content is important

You’ve probably heard the term “content is king” countless times, and it’s ever more important in today’s internet-centric business environment.

The aim of content creation should be to allow your business to stand out from competitors, and help prospective customers get to know, like and trust you, so that they will, in time, consider doing business with you.

In other words content should be used to build your brand!

If you try to transact your prospects every time they interact with your brand, you will find you have to compete with all your competitors doing the same thing, and that can get expensive in terms of advertising costs.

Using advertising to first grab attention, then trying to convert prospects via a landing page or over the telephone is a big ask, and prospective customers are very guarded against slick sales messages. They will only consider you if you make the right first impression and are able to build trust quickly.

Consider an alternative solution, which is a longer term strategy but can  prepare the ground by building trust and goodwill with people that are not quite ready to buy just yet, but who might be in the next 30, 60 or 90 days. This is called content creation.

When it comes to creating content you should be looking to give visitors something for nothing, to provide value to them without asking for something in return. You should try to help your prospective customers get to know more about your brand, to get to like how you do business and allow them to build up trust in you.

So, create content that prospects want from the page they arrive at. Make sure your adverts or links from adverts or social media posts are clear, and informative and accurately reflect what you’ve promised them. Don’t promise something that you fail to follow through on, just to get them onto your website. That is the surest way to ruin your reputation and destroy trust.

Once they are on your page you need to understand who the prospective customer is, what is their desire? What solution are they seeking? What possible questions are they asking and wanting answered?

To provide value for them, you need to answer these questions effectively, thoroughly and as uniquely as possible. Don’t just regurgitate the same old information, that everyone else is doing. Instead do it in your own voice.

Some content ideas…
1. To build awareness on social media use ENGAGEMENT POSTS – any format, to get comments or a reaction (clicks) – this pushes up in news feed and can include questions, funny memes, photos with a question
2. To grow authority – Encourage testimonials, case studies, speaking engagements, you in action doing what you’re trying to sell – honoured rather than boastful
3. To get clients – leads (email list sign up or phone) and clients attraction. Questions, graphics, videos, gifs

To provide value;

  • Be relevant – You must have content that interests your prospective customer, otherwise why would they be interested in what you have to say.
  • Be contextual – formatted for each channel specifically. Try to reformat your content to suit where you want to be found. Vertical video works better on Facebook than it does on Youtube.
  • Facilitate access,
  • Be transparent – builds trust,
  • Be authentic – be true to yourself,
  • Inspire interaction – build community,
  • Be current – so that you resonate with your audience today,
  • Aim for connection – It’s better to be narrow and deep than wide and shallow- 100 loyal fans better than 10,000 none engaged followers.

Content should be made up of:

  • Opinion,
  • Expertise,
  • Information,
  • Insight,
  • Access,
  • Passion.
Get Results: content is emotional intellectual graphic
Get Results: content is emotional intellectual

There are only 3 types of content when you boil it down.

Escapism and entertainment

Escapism – being removed from our mundane real life situation for a short time, to forget.

  • humorous,
  • clever,
  • insightful,
  • interesting (aligned with audiences interests),
  • create a knowledge gap and fills it,
  • curiosity,
  • unexpectedness,
  • surprise,
  • inspirational,
  • emotional,
  • highlights a threat,
  • challenge plot, creative plot, connection plot.

Information and utility

Providing information that will help prospects in some way to improve their understanding, increase their knowledge or make life easier or better in some way.

Core information your customers need to know about your products and company before they’ll include you in their consideration set.

  • Product information,
  • Customer FAQ’s,
  • How – to’s,
  • Styling,
  • Customer ratings and review.

Ancillary content – This is the supporting and additional content. Think of ancillary content like the bonus tracks on a DVD.

  • Take prospects behind-the-scenes,
  • Let prospects get personal with your employees,
  • Encourage customers to share photographs using your product.

Re-imagined content – Plan different versions of your content to ensure it’s contextually relevant to each specific platform. Again, this is best planned in advance to maximize resources and include it in your content creation contracts.

Provide Commentary – This is the related content and comments that your employees, customers and fans create in coordination or as a result of your core content.

Commentary works best when your audience creates it out their desire to share with their circle of friends and social connections such as Facebook and Instagram posts.

Internal content curation – This is where you maximize the value of your own previously published content by using it in the creation of new content and the re-promotion of old content, giving it new life. It has one or more of the following attributes.

  • Make content contextually relevance,
  • Extend content into a new format.

Some additional ideas..

  • Target a new audience for old content,
  • Provide access to a location, a person, an institution,
  • Curation of other peoples content,
  • Provide insight,
  • Chart your own progress in some relevant endeavor,
    • Your journey to build your business – moving your business online,
    • Your progress in a new job,
    • Learning a new skill,
    • Put sales techniques into practice,
    • Sell something different every day testing your sales skills.
  • Current niche trends,
    • Current trends/techniques,
    • Software trends if relevant,
    • Explore the topic more freely and in-depth,
    • Cover local issues,
    • Real estate – local amenities, history of area – reasons why it’s good living here,
    • Local relevant events.

Social

Connect people and community, to share ideas and stories.

Coming up with content ideas

Here are the 33 prompts that you can use to write just about ANYTHING… feel free to copy and paste them into notepad so you can use them every day when you sit down to write content.

  • Ask a question,
  • Reference current events,
  • Create your own terms,
  • Reveal news (new/introducing),
  • Tell the reader to do something,
  • Give stats,
  • Make a comparison,
  • Promise useful information,
  • Direct offer,
  • Tell a (quick) story,
  • Make a recommendation,
  • State benefits,
  • Use a testimonial,
  • Arouse curiosity,
  • Promise to reveal a secret,
  • Be ultra-specific,
  • Target section of your audience,
  • Time-based headline,
  • Stress urgency,
  • Scarcity of savings/value,
  • Deliver good news,
  • Challenge the reader,
  • Highlight your guarantee,
  • State the price (as benefit),
  • Set up (seemingly),
  • Contradiction,
  • Address reader objection/concern,
  • “As crazy as it sounds”,
  • Take them to the promised land,
  • Demonstrate ROI,
  • Reason why headline,
  • Stress cost saving and value,
  • List / answer questions,
  • State / deliver on reader’s goals,
  • Highlight cost of mistakes.

Use this website for content ideas http://answerthepublic.com/ enter a keyword and it will suggest content ideas

Types of content

  • List pages,
  • Check lists,
  • Resource lists,
  • Lists of lists,
  • News lists,
  • Demonstration,
  • Series,
  • Infographics,
  • How-to guides,
  • Researched statistics,
  • Timelines,
  • Did you know,
  • Flow charts,
  • Whitepapers,
  • Research,
  • Trends,
  • Topical guides,
  • Beginner overviews,
  • Downloadable guides,
  • Live Blogging,
  • Event coverage,
  • Covering fast changing situations,
  • Live Q&A’s,
  • Round ups,
  • News round-ups,
  • From around the web,
  • Summing up events,
  • Q&A’s,
  • Q&A session,
  • Q&A for interviews,
  • Q&A FAQ,
  • Informal Q&A,
  • Opinion pieces,
  • Controversial posts,
  • High level breakdown,
  • Forecasting trends,
  • Deep dive,
  • New angle,
  • Interviews,
  • Industry leaders,
  • Innovative companies,
  • Topical expert,
  • How to’s,
  • Content curation,
  • Case studies,
  • Charts/graphs,
  • Ebooks,
  • Email Newsletters/Autoresponders,
  • Cartoons/illustrations,
  • Book Summaries,
  • Tool Reviews,
  • Giveaways,
  • FAQ’s,
  • Webinar,
  • Guides,
  • Dictionary,
  • “Day in the life of” post,
  • Interview,
  • Lists,
  • Mind Maps,
  • Meme,
  • Online Game,
  • Helpful Application/tool,
  • Opinion Post,
  • White Papers,
  • Vlog,
  • Videos – screencasts, talking heads, illustrations, graphics, film roll,
  • Podcasts,
  • Templates,
  • Surveys,
  • Slideshares,
  • Resources,
  • Quotes,
  • Polls,
  • Podcasts,
  • Pinboards,
  • Photo Collage,
  • Original Research,
  • Press releases,
  • Photos,
  • Predictions,
  • User Generated Content,
  • Company news,
  • Announcements,
  • Timelines,
  • Meme – Meme Generator and Quick Meme,

Even more..

  • Social equity – introductions, access to contacts (interview, insight) – Leverage status (fame), membership (masons), contacts, relationships.
  • Guides – A guide is a detailed and fairly long piece of content. Think of it as an epic blog post. It goes beyond the length, style, and approach of an ordinary blog post.
  • Book reviews – A book review is a simple discussion of a book plus your take on it. You recommend good ones, critique not-so-good ones, and share the value that you glean from them. Book reviews are great because they help to position you as a thought leader.
  • Opinion post (rant) – This style of post is substantially different from your typical blog post, mostly due to its tone. You may be used to publishing a careful and researched discussion of a topic. The rant or opinion, by contrast, may be stronger and more expressive. The more vociferous your position, the more it’s going to get read and shared.
  • Product reviews – Like the book review, a product review can help establish authority and leadership in your industry. Every industry has its unique array of products, software, and services. When you engage key developers, manufacturers, or service providers, you gain recognition and respect. All you need to do is share your experience with the product and provide your recommendation.
  • How to.. The how-to is one of the most popular types of content, especially in my niche. On my blog, I write a lot of how-to guides. How-to articles have awesome long tail search potential due to these popular long tail query introductions: “How to…” and “How do I…?”
  • Lists – Lists have endless appeal. We’re wired to love them. Chance are you’re going to see or read an article today that involves some sort of a list — “5 Security Breaches You Need to Know about,” “17 Ways to Rank Higher in Google in One Month.” Hey, you’re already reading an article with the title “15 Types.”
  • Link pages – link page is simply a post that provides links to great resources around the web. The great thing about link posts is that they spread link love to other sites, provide your own site with authoritative SEO signals, and assert your thought leadership within your field.
  • Ebook – An ebook is long content packaged in a different format, usually as a PDF. Ebooks are often a downloadable product, available for free in exchange for joining a mailing list. Producing an ebook helps to strengthen your authority within a field, and it makes for a powerful method of sharing your knowledge with others.
  • Case study – A case study explains what your product or service is and how it helped a client. The case study basically says, “here’s what we do, how we do it, and the results we get.”
  • Podcast – Podcasts had their phase of popularity, and they’re still a great form of content. Plus, they’re not hard to create. Many people listen to podcasts during their commute or exercise. You have a chance to spread your message farther and better using this format than a lot of other formats.
  • Interview – Every field has its leaders. When you’re able to interview a leader, you can garner a lot of respect from others in the field, not to mention huge amounts of traffic. Interviews are unique. No one else has this information — only you.
  • Research and original data – Most of us work in data-intensive fields, where numbers and metrics hold a lot of value. Sharing your findings with others is a powerful way to drive traffic, build trust, and establish your authority. When you do the research, which is hard work, people respect that. What’s more, people share it.
  • Contextualising,
  • Communicating,
  • Digesting info and regurgitating/repackaging and presenting it to your audience in a new package,
  • Content curation and Content aggregation, where you filter good quality content for your readers, this adds value for them and saves them having to troll through low quality content,
  • If you don’t have anything to say, DOCUMENT! – easier than having to create new content,
  • If you’re not an expert in your niche you can become a well informed commentator (share stories from niche – curate content made by others and add your own commentary).
  • Inspire,
  • Connect.

Look after your readers

  • Always reply to comments or messages,
  • Say thanks,
  • Use names and tag people,
  • Share things – if you come across something you like share it,
  • Be an investigator – Google Alerts – gives you news about a chosen keyword(s),
  • Check out the results, go to a page and leave a comment as a nice gesture,
  • Make navigation around the site easy,
  • Decrease page load times,
  • Get rid of annoyances on site such as pop-ups and distracting ads,
  • Surprise audience – give something for free,
  • Include transcript with podcasts or video,
  • Use high quality audio and video,
  • Skip the sales pitch – the best sales pitch is no sales pitch at all,
  • Reply with a video,
  • Invite participation – reader challenge, ask for opinion, calls to action – get people involved,
  • Be honest,
  • Be passionate,
  • Get personal – infuse your personality and life to get deeper connection,
  • Provide unique content such as provide case studios, experiments, income reports etc
  • Proof read content before you post it,
  • Remember who you are and who your serving,
  • Always over deliver,
  • Write post which is potential vehicle for income. Good quality, unique, have affiliate links in sidebar so on every post and in text,
  • Create a visual representation of the information you are talking about to help you and your audience remember it,
  • Transformation – what’s the transformation you want your audience to go through. Another way of putting it is what’s the purpose of your article. What’s the goal,
  • Start with in this episode we are going to talk about x. by the end of this you will be able to Y using your Z,
  • Tell them what you’re going to tell them, Tell them, Tell them what you told them,
  • Reverse engineer the transformation. Work backwards. What supporting content do you need to include to achieve the transformation,
  • Write down all possible objections and include a reply to each of these in the supporting content,
  • Tell stories (more memorable) or Include case studies or Research and data. Always include the professors full name and qualifications include accurate data to the penny,
  • Subdivide the article so that it is easier to understand and follow. Subdivisions could be steps, tips,
  • Make the beginning and end memorable,
  • Ending should have a call to action, get audience involved, show how what you have talked about actually works, surprise audience in some way (must be relevant),
  • Beginning should have a video or high impact beginning,
  • Aim for Consistency,
  • Talk like a human being,
  • You shouldn’t be vanilla – take a point of view,
  • Don’t talk at your audience, talk with them. connection, interaction.

So as you can see there is a lot to consider with regards  to your content. The best advice I can give is get stuff out there and see what works best for your audience.

BRAND As An Acronym

Get Results: Branding acronym graphic
Get Results: Branding acronym

Branding is a key function that will allow your business, product or service to stand out and mean more to the prospects you hope to turn into customers, as well as to your existing customers, so that they keep coming back to you, rather than the competition.

If you’re not a brand, you’re a commodity.

We love to use the acronym B.R.A.N.D. to remind us of the essential elements of a successful brand.

Bold

To stand out, above the competition, your brand has to be bold. Vanilla brands just aren’t going to cut through the noise from all your competitors messages.

Get off the fence and take a position. Have a strong message that resonates with your  prospects and customers. It’s much easier to get into the customers mind if you have an emotional connection with them.

Relevant

To make an emotional connection with prospects and customers, you’ve got to be relevant. If you and your message isn’t relevant, you’ll be ignored and overlooked.

The human mind is conditioned to pay attention to things that mean something to it and filter out everything else. People go about their daily routines in a trance-like state, and grabbing attention is only possible if your message is relevant enough to pull your prospects out of that state and give your message some consideration.

Advantageous

People are always looking to improve their sense-of-self, via some type of perceived increase. Increase of knowledge, increase of valuable connections, increase of property, increase of standing in the community. At their core people act to seek pleasure and avoid pain, it is the driving force of the human race, and most other species.

So your brand should act to help them do this through your brand promises. Mercedes helps customers tell the world how successful they are and that’s the promise their customers are willing to buy into and pay for.

Your brand has to do the same to be successful.

Notable

Your brand needs to be worthy of attention by being as close to remarkable as possible. This will help you stand out and be remembered more easily. Marketing guru Seth Godin will tell you to “Make things better by making better things.”

However it’s not enough to just be remarkable, the key is to make sure you tell your story in such a way that your prospects and customers buy into it.

Different

Being different means positioning yourself uniquely within the market you operate in. Branding requires you to own a unique word or have a unique meaning in your customers mind.

To do this you have to position yourself away from competitors. No two brands can own the same word or meaning if they are going to be successful brands. Think about how you position Mercedes and Ford within the automotive market, or how you position Tesco from Aldi from Asda within the supermarket space. They all occupy unique brand positions.

Different isn’t a nice-to-have element in branding, it’s arguably the most important one.

For more about BRANDING, click here.

Get Results: brand acronym full version graphic
Get Results: brand acronym

Influencing Opinion Of Your Brand

Get Results: branding components graphic
Get Results: branding components

Successful branding is about controlling the perception of your business/ brand in the mind of prospects and customers alike. It’s made up of …

Impression

The impression people have of your business is going to heavily influence whether they are going to consider buying from you or not.

Being perceived as credible, likable and trustworthy, is particularly important with regards to people who have had little or no previous experience of your business/ brand.

Perception is a dance between impression and reputation. As people get to know more about your brand/ business, reputation becomes more influential, but even then, people’s impressions can still be altered through ongoing interactions. In the same way you can go off people, you can certainly go off brands and businesses depending on new information. There is no such things unconditional love, with regards to branding. However people tend to be more forgiving of bad experiences, or bad publicity if they have previously built up positive history with you.

Reputation

Your reputation is about what people say about you when you’re not there.

Always be looking to strengthen your reputation through all customer touch points for new and returning prospects, and customers. Reputation is spread through word of mouth and technology that performs in the same way as word of mouth. If you have a bad reputation, you need to take a serious look at what is going wrong, having a strong brand with a bad reputation is the worst place possible to be.

Remember this point; If you’re not strengthening your brand, you’re weakening it, there is no middle ground here, so ensure you’re strengthening it at every opportunity.

Throughout the customer journey, there are a number of touch points they are exposed to your business/ brand in some way. You should look very carefully at each of these points and consider how they impact your reputation, and influence impressions of your  business/ brand.

Some possible touch points might include..

Social media channels

  • What are you posting about?
  • What value are  you adding to prospects and customers?
  • Are you constantly trying to sell or are you adding value  in other ways? Consider Gary Vaynerchuk’s jab, jab, jab, right hook principle, otherwise known as build brand, build brand, build brand, push offer.
  • Are you’re communications giving the impression you want them to give, through the imagery, copy and other media?
  • Are they driving your brand promise home?

Search engine listings & website

If your customers are searching on search engines for the solutions that you provide, you must make sure you can be found there, either through SEO, or PPC.

What pages are you being found through?

Are people finding your page, but not clicking on your link? If not clicking on your link, why not? Are you not giving them a reason to click?

Are you communicating the right messages on those pages, once they click through?

Are these pages helping to build your brand, through the copy, images and other media?

Are you demonstrating enough social proof through reviews and testimonials, case studies and the likes.

Premises and signage

Is your premises and signage giving the right impression of your business/ brand?

Is it all ON BRAND?

Your people and value delivery

Your people include your Customer service reps, Receptionists, Employees, Leaders, and sales people. Your brand promise is not just something you just say, it’s something you live from and in. All beliefs and values, and the subsequent behaviours that come from them, should be aligned to drive you brand promise forward. Branding starts within your business and is then communicated out through what and how you do the things you do to bring value to the market.

Control OPINIONS

At the end of it all, you are trying to control the OPINIONS of your prospects and customers, and indeed, everyone else that comes across your business/ brand.

They have to KNOW, LIKE and TRUST your business/ brand.

To KNOW you

They can only know you, if they see you, so been visible. Share your story with them, let them see you in action with behind the scenes content or  a 247 like backstory. Be as personable as possible, don’t hide behind a corporation persona, because people prefer to buy from people.

To LIKE you

Think about the people you like and why; generally people are attracted to people who are like them. People who they feel they are on the same side as, and have things in common with. We learn this through interaction, and sharing, so your business/ brand needs to do the same kinds of things, by sharing and caring.

To TRUST you

To build trust, you must be AUTHENTICTRANSPARENTCONSISTENT and GENUINELY want to look out for best interests of your customers.

Without these, people will see through you and your intentions.

Summary

It’s vital you control the narrative and story around your business and brand.  Make sure the reception of your message is as intended, during the transmission of it. Otherwise you might mistakenly misread what people think about your business /brand, so keep communication channels open both ways, to ensure you’ve got a good handle on the opinion of the people that matter; your prospects and customers.

Make sure your message is simple to understand and easy to remember, emotionally meaningful from the point of view of prospects and customers, and further strengthens your brand promise.

For more about marketing, check out our marketing guide, here.

Check out our branding series, here.