Cindy Ratzlaff

Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.

The Brand of You | The Four V’s of Branding

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Here’s the Cindy Ratzlaff quick branding MBA in a nutshell. You are a brand whether you’re a student looking for that first job out of school or an entrepreneur creating a product in your home office or an author about to publish your first book. You, the person, are a brand. When you understand that one simple truth, you can purposefully plan how to communicate your brand promise to the world.

The four V’s of branding are essential elements to consider when creating and communicating your brand.

Voice
Your voice is your message and your tone. Think about how you want your brand to be perceived and experienced. Create a short list of three words that clearly lay out your tone. Are you sharp, fast, and pointed? Are you or your product smooth, easy and effective? Will you make your customers life stress-free, unburdened and organized? Choose your words, try them on for size and make sure they convey your brand promise.

Visuals
Now that you know your tone of voice, turn your attention to the look. Consumers have different learning styles. Some will immediately respond to your voice. Others will be swayed by your visual appeal. Match your imagery to your message to reinforce your brand promise. Remember that your brand promise begins with you, so invest in quality professional photography to put your best face forward in social media and on the web in general. When you meet clients, employers, or colleagues who have only known you on line, you want to hear, “I recognized you from your social media avatar,” not “Wow, you look so different from your picture.” A professional looking picture engenders confidence in your potential to solve a customer’s problem and that’s really what all brands do; solve a problem.

Value
Make sure that you know the competitive landscape for your product or service in your arena. Design your offerings, your desired salary or your product price to reflect true market value. Understanding your potential customer’s most urgent needs will help you here. In social media implementation, for example, clients can be expected pay more for campaigns that are a rush and a more reasonable rate if they’ve planned ahead. Price your services based on time and experience needed, resources required and fair market value.

Variation
Your service or product variation is your point of differentiation. How do you or your product differ from every other product or service that is offered? Some points of differentiation might be affordability, location, education, experience, testimonials, first to market, or fame. Spend time creating your list of ways in which you and your product can answer this question from your potential customer. “Why should I buy this product or service from you instead of someone else?”

Using the Four V’s to plan your brand strategy will keep you focused, honest with yourself and help you identify your personal brand strengths.

Building an Author Platform | Publishing House Secrets

By Cindy Ratzlaff

You’ve got a great idea for a book, have created an outline, done your research and you’re ready to find an agent and sell your book to Random House.  Having been one of the people who sits at the table, reads your manuscript, proposal or outline and decides whether or not to buy your book, let me tell you the first questions we ask ourselves.

Publishers want to know.  What is your platform?

We need to know how you are going to sell your book.  As a publisher, we’re going to provide professional editing, design services, expert sales people and great distribution.  We’ll put marketing dollars toward selling you book and work hard to give your book the visibility it needs in stores and online so that YOUR fan base can find it and buy it.  It all starts with you.  The publisher wants to know, before they buy your manuscript, what you bring to the table in terms of a ready made audience.

  1. Do you have a radio or television show with a lot of viewers and great ratings?
  2. Are you a celebrity?
  3. Are you a lecturer with many firm bookings for the coming year?
  4. Do you head a vast organization whose members will want your book?
  5. Are you social media savvy with more thousands of followers?
  6. Do you have a large database that can be utilized to rally your fan base to purchase your book?
  7. Have you previously published a bestselling book?

Gone are the days when a publisher could easily take a risk on an unknown writer.  Although that still happens, thankfully, it happens less frequently than one would wish.  So how do you make yourself a more desirable publishing partner to attract the attention and investment of a big publishing house?  You create and execute your own pre-publication marketing plan.  This is a good strategy even if you are self-publishing…in fact, especially if you are self-publishing.

Here are just a few things every author and would be author can do to being now to build a platform that will help promote your book at publication time.

  1. Create a Facebook Profile so you can easily connect with everyone you every met.  Those people are the most likely to want to purchase your book and support your newest endeavor.
  2. Create a Facebook Fan Page for your book so you have a professional page with your book title that will be indexed by Google, increase your SEO and give you a proper place to talk about the making of your book.
  3. Start a Twitter account in your own name.  Every tweet is a unique URL and again, online is all about search.  Every tweet is new content, all new content increases your Google juice, the more Google juice the more people will see your name and find your book.
  4. Write a blog.  Do it on WordPress or Blogspot because both of those platforms are already optimized for search.  You need a blog to communicate longer thoughts than can be done through either Facebook or Twitter.  Additionally, your blog can be reproduced as a “guest blog” on sites with more traffic.  This, of course, increases your visibility and the likelihood that readers will find your book.
  5. Make videos.  Talk about your book or your area of expertise.  Tell or show viewers something they don’t already know that fits in with your book theme or ideas.
  6. Write a book club guide with questions and discussion prompts.  Put it on your blog as a free download for book clubs.
  7. Make your own book trailer for free with a program called Animoto.  Upload it to YouTube, Facebook, and your author page on Amazon.com, as well as your blog.
  8. Offer yourself as a guest on Blog Talk Radio shows, webinars, teleseminars or any other outlet where your most likely audience already gathers.

These strategies take time to implement.  Most of them are free.  Once you write your book, your new job is marketing.  Having a well plotted strategy will help.  What platform building ideas are you employing?  I’d love to know.

Affiliate Programs | Income Stream for Authors

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Most authors do not want to become affiliate marketers, spending time promoting other people’s products for a percentage of any sales generated.  It seems time consuming and slightly unseemly.  But those same authors, writers, speakers and entrepreneurs wouldn’t hesitate to recommend books they love to their friends and followers.

Recommending books to your fans and followers is a good marketing strategy.

If you love to read. have ever recommended a good book to a friend or reviewed a book online, then setting up an affiliate relationship with Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com can help pay your web hosting bills, increase your position as a trusted source of information and support authors and writers through recommending their work. You simply sign up for an account and when you find something you’d like to recommend, you grab the link and share it on Twitter, Facebook, your blog or even through your e-newsletter.  You can build a “recommended reading” widget through these affiliate programs and add new books easily.  These sites pay you a small commission on each sale resulting from your recommendation.  You will not get rich with this strategy, but you can bring in enough to pay for a book or two per month that you’d probably buy anyway.

It’s not the money that makes this worthwhile.  It’s a win-win marketing strategy that helps your visibility, increases your social currency and frankly, gives you something to blog about now and then when you’re stumped.

I only recommend books I love and in the case of Amazon.com, I occasionally recommend other products that I personally use like Samsung HMX-F90 camcorder as well as the really inexpensive but awesome tripod I use which costs less than $15.00 and that has a travel case!

I know that I enjoy reading lists from trusted sources.  Trust is the key issue here with dabbling in affiliate marketing.  If you recommend things you don’t like, people will come to view your lists as a waste of time.  So don’t squander your social currency.  Recommend the best and earn a little change in the process.

I’d love to see your recommended reading lists.  I’ve been so busy reading non-fiction books by clients so I can help them with their promotional plans that I could use a good novel to sweep me away.

Top 8 Thought Leaders I follow on Facebook and Why

By Cindy Ratzlaff

As any professional will tell you, keeping up with professional journals, lectures, whitepapers and the like is a significant part of staying current on your business. Social media makes this a little easier and instead of pontificating on this point, I thought I’d demonstrate by taking you through what I read everyday and why and share how this fits into my MVP Strategy or Maximum Visibility Plan for creating powerful awareness for your brand.

Here’s a list of the top 8 thought leaders I’ve book marked in my A-list.

Every morning I log onto Facebook, first thing. There I’ve set up a Facebook list called A-listers. This list captures those thought leaders that share great links, create important content and whose interpretations of my business arena are important to me. I click on this list which filters my news stream on Facebook to bring in just the posts by the people on my list. Then I can quickly scan this list and see if there is anything I’d like to share with my fans. I make it a point to give a nod to the originator of the content and to the person who brought it to my attention. Why? First, because it’s the right thing to do. Secondly, because by doing so, I demonstrate to these thought leaders that I value their contribution, appreciate their content and continue to look to them for leadership. I claim a place in their community as an evangelizer of their brand. Thirdly, my name appears in news streams loosely associated with their name. This is something called ambient awareness. I didn’t originate the content, but I passed it on and named them. My name and their name are read together by more people as the content is reshared. In other words, I endorse their work and introduce them to others, thereby sharing valuable content with my fans.

Who do I read and why?  Here’s a list of the top 8 thought leaders I’ve booked marked in my A-list.

1. Mashable:  Mashable is my number one read because he and his highly credible team of uber tech and social media obsessed reporters are 100% on top of all things related to technology, people in technology, applications, social media, and virus attacks. They give me the how, the why, the who and the what and keep me in the loop. If you follow only one blog on social media, make it Mashable.

2. Mari Smith: Mari Smith is the Facebook guru. She continues to invest her time and talents in knowing every nook and cranny about Facebook and she is a serial sharer. She’ll tell you everything she knows and more. She’s funny, generous, gifted and worth your time. By calling Mari a Facebook guru, I actually do her a disservice because she’s more than that. She’s an expert in relationship marketing, whatever the platform. Trust me. Add her to your everyday reading list.

3. Dan Schawbel: Dan is the Personal Branding Guru and author of Me 2.0, and his insights into the brand that is you are simply brilliant.

4. Darren Rowse, ProBlogger: Darren’s tag line is “Build a better blog.” He’s not kidding. Daily posts with actionable ideas for creating a more vibrant blog that people will read and want to follow. I bow to his brilliance and read him every single day without fail. He’s an evangelizer for the blog as your core content base and other social media sites as your syndicators and I think he’s a rock star in both information and delivery.

5. Adam Urbanski: Adam is the king of marketing strategies and is someone who truly understands how to connect the social aspects of social media to the deliverables of selling. He’s a consultant, teacher and businessman who delivers real content that can be implemented by businesses, solopreneurs and brands alike.

6. Read Write Web: This is a blog that does reviews of new technology products, comparisons and analysis. It’s ranked by Technorati as one of the Top 20 blogs in the world for a reason—simply stellar information delivered in easy to understand and digest bits. Go there now.

7. Miles Austin: Miles writes a blog called Fill the Funnel and his pithy, eclectic mix of commentary, review and hot news are all about web tools for sales.

8. Natalie MacNeil: Natalie’s blog She Takes On the World by Natalie MacNeil which gives great career advice to women. I like her style, content and message very much.

There are many, many more that I read during the course of my week but these are my never miss blogs. They keep up current, energized, engaged and motivated.  What are your favorites?

Reputation Management | Crisis Management

By Cindy Ratzlaff

One of the biggest concerns companies have about venturing onto social media is a fear that detractors, competitors or others who dislike their brand will comment publicly, venting their problem and leaving open the door for a lot of negative viral buzz. Their thinking is that if they aren’t on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any of the other major sites, those naysayers or disgruntled types will have no public venue through which to flog them. The fatal flaw in this strategy is that angry consumers or clients don’t need a homebase through which to damage a company and it’s reputation. They have their own homebase through their individual social media platforms. When a plane is stuck on the runway for more than three hours, hundreds of passengers will take to Twitter with the hashtag #Airlinenamefail or something similar and soon enough thousands will be aware of their plight.

Your brand is what your customers think it is, not what you think it is. So listen, engage, and if the message you want is not the message they’re repeating, alter your strategy.

If a company stays away from social media so as to avoid negative online feedback they will accomplish two things:

  1. They will be unaware of problems that might have been easily resolved but when left alone may become much bigger problems.
  2. They will be miss a valuable opportunity to fix minor problems and turn cranky customers into happy evangelizers.

Mashable wrote an excellent post recently sharing three terrific examples of how major brands monitored, managed and resolved (or not) some important brand missteps and criticism.

Bottom line: The conversation about you is going on with or without you. You can only influence it if you are aware of it.  Every company should be active on Facebook and Twitter, at the very least, to monitor and influence their brand reputation.  Every company should have a google alert set for their key words and get that digest daily.  Every company should search their brand name or the name of their current campaign on Twitter daily.

Social Media Technology vs Social Media Marketing

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Socia Media Technology enables Social Media Marketing

I’m hearing a lot of talk from big advertising and PR agencies about social media technology. That sounds so much more impressive than the overused phrase social media marketing, doesn’t it. But in reality, they go hand in hand and one does not displace the other. Social media technology is the architecture and social media marketing is the message. It’s that simple.

Although the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, the message still needs to be crafted.

Your brand can have the most sophisticate social media technology available, yet not attain your goals if your social media marketing message is not clear.  Creating conversations with your clients about their wants, needs and how you can fulfill them is what social media marketing facilitates best.

So, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, ask yourselves the important questions:

  1. What is my unique value to the consumer?
  2. How will I communicate that both verbally and visually?

Then bring social media marketing and social media technology to the same table for a good long talk.

Twitter power | Forbes List

By Cindy Ratzlaff

I was delighted to open my e-mails this morning and discover that I’d been named to the Forbes list 20 Best Branded Women on Twitter.  It was fun to be included in a list with Maria Shriver, Kimora Lee, Ivanka Trump, Ann Curry, Kathy Ireland and Alyssa Milano to name just a few.

Alyssa Milano, Maria Shriver, Ivanka Trump, Ann Curry and Cindy Ratzlaff

We’re all so different that it’s hard to image another list where we’d all be named together.  But it just goes to show you the power of Twitter to extend your brand message and personality to an enormous audience.  If you’re not already representing your brand on Twitter, what are you waiting for?

7 Brand Visibility Superstars | Maximum Visibility Blogging

By Cindy Ratzlaff

7 Blog Strategies for Brand Visibility

Most people do not think of themselves as brands.  They think of themselves as having a great, marketable idea or a top-notch marketing tool or a book or motivational speech, but not as a brand.  Viewing yourself, and therefore your product, as a brand will clarify the steps needed to take your idea, product or self out into the world and connect with consumers.  Here are 7 quick blogging strategies you can adopt, right now, to boost your visibility and build you brand into a sales driving machine.

7 quick blogging strategies you can adopt right now

  1. Blog:

    If you’re not blogging, you’re missing an important opportunity to spell out exactly who you are and what you offer to consumers in a way that positions you as a thought leader in your area of expertise.  You can start a blog on WordPress or Blogger in minutes, and for free.  No excuses on this one.  As Nike says, “Just do it.” When I started my blog, I used my very first post to clearly share exactly what my brand stands for and to announce my presence to the waiting world.  I also used that first post to establish my brand voice; personal, intimate, transparent.

  2. Guest blog:

    Take your expertise out to the world by offering to guest blog for larger websites.  In the last few months, I’ve written several blog articles for major sites such as Oprah.com.  Doing so increased my visibility and helped bring my work to a new audience. The key when blogging for other sites is to make sure that you speak to that sites audience interests while still maintaining your own brand voice.  I loved writing for Oprah.com because I was able to talk about overcoming challenges, which is just one element in developing a strongly branded platform.

  3. Encourage Discussion:

    Blog posts that give step-by-step how-to information about a topic in which you are a pro will be highly viewed, encourage questions and responses and will increase your social currency as a teacher.  A recent post on the blog Social Media Examiner by Nick Shin garners more than 214 questions and comments and another 752 retweets.  That’s valuable word of mouth brand building.

  4. Lists:

    Creating blog posts with lists is a spectacularly easy way to encourage other people to link to your post and provided info nuggets for a fast read. Darren Rowse of Problogger.com says lists can be short, they are pleasing to the eye and they are very likely to be passed on to others.

  5. Listen:

    Check your Google analytics for some real insight into what your followers want from you.  I wrote a post on How to Add a Twitter Button to your Facebook Fan Page more than a year ago that still ranks as the #1 draw to my website, so recently I updated it to reflect Facebook’s new look and added visuals to help people understand the instructions.

  6. Be Provocative:

    I wrote a piece called “Bacon and Book Marketing Strategies” to illustrate the value in keeping up on trends. This piece spoke to my audience with humor but also grabbed the attention of a wider consumer base and brought new readers to my blog.

  7. Re-purpose your content:

    As new people find and follow your blog, don’t be shy about bring up older posts and introducing them as a resource to this new groups of followers. Blogging powerful, useful content is a key component in my Maximum Visibility Plan.

I invite you to post a link here to the blog post you think best illustrates one of these ideas.

How To Add a Twitter Button to Your Facebook Fan Page

By Cindy Ratzlaff

NOTE: Since the writing of this blog post, Facebook has discontinued Static FBML. Adding a Twitter app to your Facebook page is now easier than ever before using free tools such as Woobox.com. Here’s how:

 

  1. When logged into Facebook as your personal profile.
  2. Open another window on your browser and log into your Twitter account.
  3. In a third window, go to http://Woobox.com.
  4. Log into Woobox using your Facebook account.
  5. On the top of the page, you’ll be able to choose which Facebook page you’d like to use to install this app. Choose your business page from the menu.
  6. Now look at the top of the page, choose “static tabs.”
  7. Then choose “Twitter,” and follow the directions on this page.

Woobox will install a Twitter app on the left hand side of your business page and pull your Twitter feed into the app for your visitors to see. The app view will also include a button for people to “follow” you on Twitter, directly from that Facebook app.

 

Brand awareness is directly connected to increased visibility.  Making it easy for people to find you, wherever you are, is just plain good business. Twitter, the micro-blogging social media platform is tracked by Google.  Every tweet you make is a unique URL and increases your visibility online, making it easier for people to discover you in a search.

Adding a Twitter Button on the wall of your Facebook Business Page–not your personal profile–allows people to easily find and follow you on Twitter.  You want people to be able to interact with you on any social platform they frequent, so adding a convenient way to connect with you on Twitter is a key visibility strategy.  I’ve blogged about this in the past, but since Facebook has changed it’s face so many times in the last year, I thought people might need these updated step-by-step instructions.  Please feel free to post a comment here if anything is fuzzy and I’ll clarify or illuminate any issues you are having.

The blue Facebook Bar contains the white search window

Step One: Install the Static FBML (Facebook Mark-up  Language) Application to your page. To find this application, enter the words “Static FBML” in the search window on the blue bar at the top of your page.

Step Two:  When you get to the Application page, click “Add to My Page” which you’ll find directly underneath the Avatar image on the upper left hand side of the page.

Step Three:  An overlay screen will pop up and list the names of any pages associated with your profile that do not already have Static FBML installed.  You’ll click the “Add to Page” button next to the page on which you wish to install this application.

Static FMBL App

Step Four:  Go back to your profile and click  “Ads and Pages” on the left hand side of the page.

Locate the newly installed FBML app

Step Five:  Click Edit under the FBML application in your list of applications on your page.

Step Six: A box will appear that can be customized.  You’ll title it “Follow Me On Twitter” or “Tweet with Me” or something that invites people to follow you there.

 

Step Seven:  Enter your HTML coding into the FBML box for your custom designed Twitter button or you can use google to find a variety of sites that offer free Twitter images.  I like  Twitter Buttons where you can enter your Twitter name into the automatic code generator and they provide you with the HTML code you need to create a button.

Once you’ve entered your desired code, press “Save Changes.”

Step Eight: Go back to your page and click the + sign on your tabs bar. Locate your new “Follow Me On Twitter” FBML app and click on it.

You’ll see that the phrase “Follow Me on Twitter” has now become a custom tab on your screen.

Your image  is now a live link, under this custom tab.

Make sure you post about your new tab to alert your followers.

Five Questions with the Expert | Career Reinvention When An Industry Changes

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Catcher in the Sky’s Lisa Gordon

Lisa Gordon spent two decades at the top of her field in advertising sales for newspapers and magazines like Time, Real Simple, Prevention and Entertainment Weekly. When her industry took a particularly hard hit as the economic climate worsened, she realized that she needed to reinvent herself, add to her skill set and move forward without looking back.  Lisa’s transformation took her from old school, traditional communications to the new high tech and cutting edge world of app development.  We caught up with Lisa recently to ask her five questions about her reinvention process.

RATZLAFF:

Your background is in print advertising sales and sales management, how did you make the leap to developing mobile apps?

GORDON:

I spent more than twenty years in businesses related to ad sales. When I started
working in the 1980’s I was in a thriving field with no end in sight. I could
never have guessed what kind of atrophy would occur this many years later.
When my oldest son went to kindergarten I was experiencing a lot of personal
upheaval and was in the fortunate financial position to take some time off to be
with my kids. After three or four years I started thinking about getting back to
work. By this time, newspapers and magazines were closing all over the country.

It was clear that I could not go back to a vanishing industry.

I had had my own business for ten years so the idea of going back into business
for myself was a very attractive one. Having some time off gave me the insight I
needed to break from my rut. I contacted a former colleague and we
brainstormed ideas for more than a year. With an idea in hand, we consulted with
a dear and successful friend who gave us direction. In the end, our app has
nothing to do with any of our original business ideas.

RATZLAFF:

What do you find to be the biggest challenges in starting over in an industry that is not just new to you, but new in general?

GORDON:

Actually the easy part is starting in a new industry. I embrace the challenge of
learning something new. The difficult part is the fact that the industry is new.
There are no real experts yet. The app industry is growing at an exponential
pace. It seems like everyone is learning by trial and error and what worked last month, won’t necessarily work this month. Being part of this Wild West is fascinating to experience from the inside.

RATZLAFF:

Your apps, NameCatcher and NameCatcher Biz help people to remember names of acquaintances. What inspired you to create these apps?

GORDON:

For the most part it was born out of necessity. My partner and I both have young children and I have an aging father. Just through our kid’s activities and my dad’s caregivers, new people, acquaintances, really, come in and out of our lives regularly. These people are important to us, but sometimes it is just hard to remember all of the names and how we know them. It can be embarrassing to keep asking people to repeat their names. As a regular user of my own app, I have seen how good it makes someone feel when they are remembered.

RATZLAFF:

You and your partner both have marketing backgrounds. Can you share your thinking on how you’ll go about marketing your apps?

GORDON:

One very interesting thing about this app is when people see it or hear about it they
instantly know how they would fit it into their own life. And, everyone thinks they
are our demographic. The truth is, nearly everyone with an iPhone is our
demographic. As exciting as it is to have the millions of iPhone users as possible
users, such a broad audience is hard to reach. So, we have broken down the possible
users by category and are targeting them individually. So for example, we speak to
“mom” targets differently than we do to our Boomer targets. We will often break
those targets down even further so we can speak directly not generically.

RATZLAFF:

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into the mobile app business or any new business for that matter?

GORDON:

  • Start with a great idea, but be flexible as to how it can work as an app.
  • Get a basic understanding of the app business and the available platforms before investing any money.
  • If you are not technical, hire the right people who are. If you are not good at marketing, hire someone who is.
  • Never get comfortable with the way things are because they will change.

Both NameCatcher and NameCatcher Biz are available for download at itunes and readers can find more information about the company, Catcher in the Sky, on their website.

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