creative briefing

I’ve been trying my best to keep up with my RSS reading lately, and I have to admit, my recent switch to Google Reader has made the process a bit more productive. Ironically, RSS reading can be anything but productive sometimes (thank you/curse you Satish). What Google Reader has done though, is let me “star” posts that are interesting so that I can reference them later. Brilliant. It’s like my Outlook inbox for RSS feeds (because who doesn’t need another Outlook inbox to live by?).

Anyway, here are a few posts that really stuck out this past week.

• Who remembers the periodic table of elements? Well for all those who thought you left it behind for a career in marketing, think again! The folks at Kolbrener have put together this awesome table of brand evolution terms. It’s time to love chemistry again. (Courtesy of Mish’s Playground and Satish, the RSS monster)
   
• For those racking up consultancy hours, Freelance Switch has posted a list of 6 cool online tools to track your time and help you figure out how many hours to bill. Shweeet.
   
• Starting your own design agency? Here are 20 questions to ask yourself first to ensure you’re ready. Hell, even if you already have a design agency, you should answer these questions. It’s never too late to change!
   
• Your pipeline is your business’ lifeline. How healthy is yours? Shane & Peter get intimate with math and show you how you can measure your sales pipeline in 15 minutes… or it’s free. Their blog post, that is.
   
• If you run a virtual office, check out the Notes from the virtual office series over at #comments. There are only 3 posts in the category, but they’re all worth a read!

I don’t plan on making this a regular thing, I just thought these links in particular were useful to share. Enjoy!

When you see a .doc, you know exactly what kind of file it is, and you probably know what company is behind it. Why shouldn’t this form of brand recognition transcend into the online realm? Why should we be constrained to the .html’s and .php’s of today’s web world?

This third installment of How to brand your website’s URL continues to show you how you can and should be customizing even the slightest details of your website’s URL by using your own cutomized file extensions.

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It seems like everything we do these days has to be done strategically. Take commenting, for example. Looking at John Chow’s top commentators list, this is what you see:

Notice anything? Of the 10 proud members of that exclusive list, only 2 have real names (Debo Hobo may count as an amusing third…), while the rest are strategically branded to give the maximum exposure to the commentators’ own blogs.

Do people develop commenting strategies to get to the top of these lists, or does being a top 10′er come as a convenient benefit from interacting immensely with the community? I applaud those in either category.

I don’t know about you, but when I comment, my name is Verne. Or should it be ‘creative marketing blog wants traffic’?

Update: Turns out John actually encourages this strategy! How evil. Check it out here.

One aspect of branding your URL, or anything for that matter, is to make it as easy to remember as possible (recall Part 1’s branding discussion). A long and complicated sentence will never fly as a company’s tagline because nobody would ever remember it. If nobody remembers it, the value is lost. Likewise, a long and complicated URL makes it difficult for your visitors to remember it, and inevitably, it makes it difficult for them to access the content they’re looking for quickly. Not only that, but it looks ugly in a browser’s address bar.

For site publishers/owners looking to take an extra step in branding their website, here’s the second installment of how to brand your website’s URL, this time using friendly URL structures.

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These days, everything is branded. You brand your company, you brand your products, you brand your swag, and you even brand yourself. The purpose of branding? Quite simply, to make it yours, and to make others remember that it’s yours.

Certainly, your website is also no stranger to branding. But when you think of branding your website, you’d likely first think of tailoring the site’s design, the site’s logo, or even the site’s copy to whatever you’ve decided your brand should be. What you’d least likely think of is branding your URL.

But think about it. Half the time, if your visitors aren’t arriving to your site from linked text on another site or from a bookmark, then they’re typing in your URL to get there. The act of reading your URL off your business card, or off the napkin they wrote your URL on, and then typing it into their browser is just about as direct an interaction with your brand your customers can get. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from branding, it’s that you should brand all your touch points.

Thinking about branding your URLs yet? You should be!

Here’s Part 1 of how to brand your website’s URL: to www or not to www?

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