How To Bring Down Your Personal Brand

Your personal brand should be the poster child for positivity. Everything about you should say that you are likable and a pleasure to be associated with. Inspiring those around you should be your goal. Every entrepreneur wants to associate themselves with influential people, because referrals are the best form of lead. If a person finds you likable, always seeing opportunities and beaming with a positive attitude, they want more of you. Don't you find yourself getting pumped when you share a lunch or coffee with positive people? They're contagious!

Or the flip-side, negative people who always whine and complain and blame their failings on everything but themselves can bring you down faster than anything. Negative people where negativity like a badge of honor and they excel at it. The trouble is that it leads to massive failure. This is a sure fire way to drag down your personal brand. To make matters worse, negative people attract other negative people. It becomes a spiral down.

Look around, are people you associate with complaining about the economy consistently? It's time you pulled back, and actively search out people who see negatives as a positive source of opportunity. You know the old quote - "when one door closes, another one opens" - this comment is alien to negative people. Your brand is in your control, IF you are pro-active and are open to opportunity. If not - YOU lose, it's pretty simple.

Eliminate An Embarrassing Moment!

I just loved this idea when a friend told my what he did when he attends events and can’t recall a person’s name who approaches him AND they ALWAYS know his name. It’s even worse if he’s with someone and now he can’t introduce them.

He had HELLO MY NAME IS stickers similar to the above printed up. Adam tells me he always gets a chuckle and it often starts conversations. I’m copying this one myself -Brilliant.

Their Mad, They've said So & They love You!

Customer complaints! We've all been there - we're in a restaurant or store and we have a complaint about something. What do you do about it? A good many people just suck it up and leave. Others say something. Which customer do you prefer? Does your business make customers jump through several hoops to voice a complaint. Do they have to fill out a long form? Do you make them call a 1-800 number or go to a special webpage?

Recent research found something interesting about how people complain and their impact on doing business with you. It found that people who said nothing were typically not self-confident. If it was a restaurant situation, they felt uncomfortable about making the friends at their table uncomfortable as well. They sucked it up and left. The down side was the majority of this group never come back.

On the other hand, folks who had no problem voicing their dissatisfaction continued to do business with the guilty party. They saw the act of complaining as therapeutic.

These results prove that you should go out of your way to make it as easy as possible to accommodate customer complaints. How you handle the situation makes them into your best customers, and this builds a strong brand in their eyes.

10 Small Business Action Tips!

Most small business retailers I've had the courtesy to meet, typically use traditional marketing to get business through their front doors. This means running print ads in the local press and waiting for the resulting traffic. They don't go out and get business as much as they try and lure them in.

I was at a local national chain with my wife and asked the sales person if they were on commission? "Yes, 100%" they informed me. I asked them what they did to get business in the door. "We send out the regular flyers from head office", was the reply.

"What do you do personally to drum up business?" I asked, knowing the answer to come. They didn't know what I meant. Since they are 100% commission, they are essentially a free agent, and as such I feel that they should be out in the marketplace, networking, building a customer database and contacting them through direct mail and html marketing, (even at their own cost, which is tax deductible). On the news, one local retailer said that they would weather the storm by cutting waste and reducing their ad budget by 50%. Can you believe that last comment? That's just what you want to do when things get bad, cut the very expenditure that actually brings you business.

What can you do as a little guy to get the cash register humming again? Well try these 10 tips on for size:

1) Read books on motivation and guerilla marketing. You will find great tips and suggestions for helping to get business in the door. Jeffrey Gitomer is one of my personal favorites. No BS.

2) Contact past customers, thank them for their business and offer them a personal incentive.

3) Using an email database, send out weekly html marketing possibly linked to an online promotion.

4) Join local professional groups. Get out into the community and join committees. At his level you can build influential relationships.

5) Cross promote with complimentary businesses. Combine mailing lists and offers.

6) Join networking groups. Nothing like dozens of sales people looking out for you.

7) Display at local events that your audience attends.

8) Change your sales message from what you sell to, how what you sell, fulfills a customer's need. (What's in it for them?)

9) Rack your brain for good news about your business and submit it as a press release to local media regularly.

10) Offer to write about your business category in the local press to help position you as an expert.

Bonus) Sponsor sports teams whose parents are possibly your target audience.

By doing suggestion #1, you will discover dozens of proven methods for bringing in business. The key is you have to get off of your butt and get moving. Doing any of these suggestions will result in boosting your moral and put you in control of generating traffic - as opposed to waiting for them to magically appear from an ad or two.