Ask a Customer (Just One) To Do a Review

10-Minute Branding Refresher: How do you build your brand 10 minutes at a time? You start small, and you simply begin. An excellent way to convince yourself to get going is to plan your ending. You can even set a timer. Then, be sure to bask in the success of your huge accomplishment of actually beginning and also appreciate the amount of work that got done. Then, repeat the process tomorrow. And the next day. And so on. You will be amazed at your branding progress . . . 10 minutes at a time.

Today’s 10-Minute Tip:

If you have a very friendly repeat customer who has been complimentary about your business, you have a possible candidate to write a review for you. Very often, you just need to ask. Since this 10-minute branding activity can be done at any time, any day that you don’t have a specific idea for contributing to your company’s brand, you can ask a customer for a review.

When approaching an unfamiliar vendor to acquire a needed product or service, most of us at least take a cursory glance at past customer ratings and reviews. While some of your patrons may not be comfortable offering a review, many would be more than willing to help out.

While an in-person request is probably ideal, an e-mail, text message, or note at the bottom of a customer satisfaction survey can also work just fine.

When making your request, emphasize how quickly and easily the task can be done. Suggest the various ways the review can be performed – from filling out an online form to writing a short note on a piece of paper, giving you a message that can be repackaged to display on a sales counter or reproduced in a brochure. Remember, the goal is to find a method within his/her comfort zone. (If appropriate, offer to pass along a link to an on-line review site.)

Helpful Hints You Can Provide

The review can be used to discuss your product(s) and/or services.
Suggest the person be as detailed and specific as possible.
Honesty always comes across best and creates a more meaningful and sincere message.
Reviews and ratings can be revised/updated in the future.
Tell the person to consider what he or she would personally like to know and include that kind of information.
Thank the person.

Making a customer request for a review can be accomplished in under 10 minutes . . . but the benefit can linger for years to come.

Learn more at:

Getting Reviews for Your Business

Review Request Sign

Basic SEO: Review Your Web Pages’ Titles

Welcome to our first official installment of 10-minute branding!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, in a nutshell, helps your web site be found online.

The very first step is to make sure search engines know your web site exists. Or, more specifically . . . check whether your web site is indexed. If you haven’t already done that, click on over to this article (Make Sure Your Web Site is Included in Search Engines’ Index) and then save this post for tomorrow.

Once you’ve taken care of that quick task, you’re ready to move forward!

META TITLES

The web page title is part of a collection of “meta tags” that communicate important information about the page to web browsers as well as your visitors.

The “meta title” is the title of each of your web pages that gets displayed when your page is listed in a search engine’s results. For example . . .

The title is one factor that determines whether your web page gets displayed in someone’s search results, so you want to give all of your pages their best chance at seeing the light of day.

BEST PRACTICES ACCORDING TO GOOGLE

You may already have a title on each of your web pages. If so, that’s a great start. Then, you need only review them to be sure they’re optimal. So whether you’re drafting your titles from scratch or reviewing existing ones, you’ll want to review Google’s “Best Practices” for meta titles:

Accurately describe the page’s content.
Create a unique title for each page.
Be brief but descriptive.
Use the title tag (see below).

An Example of the Meta Title Tag in Action in Your HTML:

<html>
<head>
<title>Brand Building for Small Business</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”A Blog for Entrepreneurs Looking to Create and Develop their Corporate Identity.”>
</head>

ONLY 10 MINUTES A DAY

You might be questioning this approach at this point, thinking, I already spent 10 minutes just reading this article! If so, you’re done with your 10-minute branding exercise for the day! Come back tomorrow prepared to get started on executing the task. Once you reach 10 minutes, save your work and come back the next day!

QUESTION?

We’re always happy to hear from you. Scroll down to the “Leave a Reply” section below.

Weeeeeeeeeeee’re Back . . .!

Prefatory Note:

When Carole first suggested the idea of moving forward with a somewhat altered approach to our blog (i.e., 10-Minute Branding) I was intrigued and sensed some real value that would speak to the current needs of people trying to build a successful small business and have some semblance of a work/life balance. While I am currently at a different stage than her (having – for instance – two adult children out on their own rather than two teenagers at home), the freshness of her plan was appealing and seemed in keeping with our DIY mentality. BUT . . . me being me, I had to build a justification for myself. Below is where I landed.

Perform an Internet search for the statement “attention span of millennials and Generation Z’ers,” and you will find a variety of references to an 8-to-12 second time frame.

Is this finding a sad commentary on the younger crowd who are soon destined to rule the world, or is this fact a symptom of necessary adaptation to survive and ultimately thrive within an increasingly complicated and complex society?

Personally, I’ve come to believe the latter. As the demands on our time and attention have grown, the ability to process information quickly and make meaningful use of small blocks of time becomes essential. Furthermore, this realization has led us to consider the ways in which we can best be of service to small business owners who have among the greatest demands on their time and resources and who must achieve the highest level of efficiency to be successful in today’s fast-paced business environment.

10-Minute Branding

We think this concept of 10-minute branding can indeed be an important key to Get Sh – Done (and perhaps still create some extra time for family). So . . .

After a two-month pause in new additions to our blog, we have decided to resume but with a shift in focus for the immediate future.

Over the past three years, we have covered many of the basic principles and tools of branding for small businesses. Equipped with this library of resources, we decided we could be of greatest use to you – our audience – (while still preserving our chosen DIY focus) by offering weekly tips on branding activities that can be accomplished in just 10 minutes. (While some activities might require spilling over into multiple 10-minute sessions, our goal is to avoid intruding upon your already-busy schedule while still helping you realize your overarching goal of building a better, stronger brand identity.

Can You Really Accomplish Anything Meaningful in Just 10 Minutes?

Guess we’ll see, but . . .

Some branding activities can indeed seemingly be done in 10 minutes. For instance, you can write a thank you note to a customer that instills in them a strong sense of service while giving you a chance to tout your business in a desired way. Furthermore, 10 minutes a day for each day of a six-day work week yields an hour of potential productivity. If you used those 10 minutes to collect three prospects’ contact info, you’d have a dozen and a half by the end of the week to approach the following week one by one with a branded message. I fully suspect that converting some of those prospects into loyal customers would justify the effort and validate the process.

Furthermore, devoting one hour per week in 10-minute blocks yields more than 50 hours of annual productivity devoted specifically to building and refining your brand. Needless to say, a lot can be accomplished in a work week+ period.

That said, you will have to be disciplined in doing your 10 minutes per day. If you do, we believe you will be pleasantly surprised.

Our Part

For our part, we will provide tips that we believe can be accomplished in one or more ten-minute blocks. We figure one way to make this happen is to try to devote as close to 10 minutes as possible to our creation of the tip, which should help ensure that the activity does not get overly complicated.

This approach is very much an experiment on our part. As a result, we really would appreciate your feedback by leaving a comment in the form below or by sending a private email to brandbuildingforsmallbusiness@gmail.com.

How to Build Your Brand 10 Minutes at a Time

Photo Credit: jcomp – http://www.freepik.com

You start small.

Us humans generally hate new initiatives. They’re intimidating and elusive, and we almost never know where or how to begin. However, the trick — I’ve learned — does not lie in picking the perfect point of entry . . . or executing the perfect strategy. The trick is simply to begin. And an excellent way to convince yourself that it’s okay to begin is to plan your ending. Set a timer if you must. Promise to dedicate no more than 10 minutes to the task you’ve been procrastinating. But. Here’s the important part. Do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. You will be amazed at the progress that can be made . . . 10 minutes at a time.

So, engaging our audience with ideas and how-tos for 10-minute chunks of branding progress is going to be the new approach for us at Brand Building for Small Business. Frankly, I was running out of time to contribute to this blog. I love what we’ve created thus far and am extremely thankful for our followers who take the time out of their lives to read our posts and come back week after week. Still, I was struggling to find the hours needed to put together my thoughts and share step-by-step how tos. Like most people, my life is pretty full. I own a small business, I’m raising two teenagers, I’m trying to maintain a household . . . and my sanity. I’m only somewhat successful. 😊 As a result, I considered approaching our blog with this 10-minute strategy, which I’ve already effectively used to tackle a number of other areas of my life (says the women with a freshly caulked tub). Knowing my time deficit is not an uncommon challenge, I had a lightbulb moment. What if my partner and I each focus on dedicating only 10 minutes a day to this blog, writing about all the ways you can build your brand in only 10 minutes a day. . . . There’s a lovely little symmetry there that spoke to us, and I hope the approach speaks to you. Stay tuned. . . .