Choosing a WordPress theme is a very formidable task. Not only do you have the challenge of finding something that looks good to you, but you also have to worry about whether your viewers will appreciate it. Your big question should be, ”does this theme represent the brand I am trying to promote to my customers?”
Here are a few things to consider when choosing a theme: » Read more: Finding the right WordPress Theme
A big part of Personal Marketing is promotion.
As you may have read in “Personal Marketing (Promotion)” I suggest that part of promoting yourself involves posting to a blog or participation in forums and commenting on blogs. As you start participating in discussions on the web you will start to get noticed.
How are you noticed?
Avatar: a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet.
“avatar.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 08 Oct. 2009.
<Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/avatar>.
Is your Avatar a big sideways “G”? That’s an indicator that you haven’t setup an Avatar yet. So you are associating your name and comment with a Generic Brand. If you don’t want that to happen, then you might want to read on.
How do I setup an Avatar, so I won’t appear as a big “G’ or a Generic brand Avatar?
You need a Globally Recognized Avatar. There is a service called Gravatar.com, see the video that follows to see more details about what a Gravatar is.
To setup a Gravatar is a very simple process:
Note: You might have to flush your browser cache in order to see your Gravatar show up.
Gravatar Overview Video
When you develop your Personal Brand, the Name you use is one of your most important assets. Many people have unique names and have little competition for the use of their name.
Wes Johnson is my name. Both names, I have discovered, are pretty popular. If you’ve ever done a Google search on the name you’ll find there are a lot of Wes Johnsons. In fact there are several notable public figures that share the name Wes Johnson. Since they are in the news, have personal blogs, participate in forums, or have blogs written about them, it has been quite a challenge to be noticed. In order to be noticed, sometimes you need to be different.
MrWes is my brand name.- A few years back even before I decided to start blogging, a neighbor of mine had started calling me Mr. Wes. Over time other neighbors, friends and associates started calling me Mr. Wes too. I really liked that nickname so I decided I would get the domain. At first I went with the .com and then I decided I would get the .net domain as well.
Stake your claim - Pick your brand name wisely then grab as much of the internet as you can.
Where to reserve your brand name:
The rest of the MrWes brand story. Many years after I grabbed my brand name domains, I decided to start writing my blog. Fortunately, I already had my domain and brand name picked. So, that wasn’t a problem. I tried using my brand name MrWes as a user name for forums that I frequented, that’s when I realized that other people were using my brand name for their user name. Sometimes, I had to choose a variation on my brand name. Then, I decided to lock up the .ORG just in case, but it had been taken.
Final thoughts – When you create your brand name, make sure you have a plan to stake your claim ASAP. You don’t want to leave anything to chance. You need to make sure your name is associated with your message.
In yesterday’s blog, we talked about your Personal Brand. In this blog I present an action item list to help you develop your Personal Brand
My Personal Brand Strategy:
This list will get you started with your Personal Brand. The more time you spend developing your Personal Brand the more you will understand the importance of your message, your image and protecting your reputation.
What is a Personal Brand?
Last week, I wrote a series on Personal Marketing. In this series I covered the Marketing Mix and how we personalize it, to help market YOU. We covered the process of defining four aspect of the Marketing Mix (Product, Place, Price & Promotion).
Your Personal Brand is what we’re after. This is what we are going to Promote.
Before we start Promoting your Personal Brand, we have a few questions to consider:
My next blog will cover your Personal Branding Strategy.
The details are better at 600 dpi
Yesterday in my post, Trouble with Fonts, I shared about all the problems I was experienced with the embroidery setup. Today I brought in the desired logo image as a GIF image. Unfortunately, the software didn’t like GIF images. So, what kind did it like? JPG format was the preferred format. So,I brought in the right file format. When the image was imported into the program it appeared to shrink from a very large size in the image file to 1/4 inch high. The program had a difficult time trying to identify some of the characters. It lost some detail. So, what was going on? After I thought about it for a while, it turns out that the default for my paint program was 92 dpi. That was fine for websites, but not to good for interpretation by Embroidery software. Once, I figured out what was going on, I changed the scale to 600 dpi and selected the largest font that was available 288 pt. After these adjustments, I created my logo again. This time, the Embrodery software had not trouble identifying the characters. In fact it was pretty flawless. We generated a test with the new image and everything worked beautifully.
MrWes logo on blue shirt
Once we worked out all the kinks the finished product was exactly what I was looking for. Now I know that a 600 dpi jpeg image is exactly what an Embroidery machine is looking for. I also learned that while you’re working out the details of an image, you might want to have your laptop handy to make any last minute details.
MrWes logo on green shirt
Great Job
Within hours of submitting my design, I was able to wear the final product. I plan to wear these shirts all the time. In fact, I’m already planning on having a few more made. It turns out embroidery is pretty affordable. Thanks you Double Stitch for helping me get the end result I was looking for.
The Results
I started wearing my shirt right after I received it from the shop. Without even thinking about the message I was sending out to the public. To my surprise, a cashier at Home Depot started up a conversation about social networking and Twitter. That was really cool. I’m already getting the results, I was hoping for.
Till next time, Don’t forget to Follow Me @MrWes
My Personal Brand
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on my Personal Brand. Today, I was ready to commit my logo, domain name & twitter reference, to a local embroidery company. I was hoping to get some shirts embroidered with the font you see here. As I had mentioned yesterday, I had already spent a bit of time going through 117 variations. We finally settled on this arrangement.
My preferred logo
A few days before, I had talked with one of the owners about the cost of embroidering. The charge is usually by the number of stitches. There was no mention of any issues with fonts, so it didn’t occur to me that there would be any problems. I bought a couple of shirts today and brought them in for the embroidering job.
I don’t know if new embroidery machines are like this now, but it appears that the machine this company is using, has proprietary fonts. None of the Font names matched. A form of copy protection? Or some form of future revenues? I guess it does understand True Type fonts, but none of the fonts matched my preferred font for my logo.
Alternative Logo
Twitter background
Making the background image was easy
It wasn’t too hard to create my Twitter background. I used Paint.Net with layers to create this one. I loaded the main picture to the bottom layer. In case you didn’t notice, this was an image from my recent hiking trip to Lake Chabot in Castro Valley. I created a second layer for the text. It took a little while to get the text to look the way I wanted it. Then I saved it. It took a few tries, because the first time, the picture wasn’t scaled properly. I ended up with the focus being zoomed into the upper left part of the picture. I went back and changed the dimensions of the picture to about 20″ wide, then resaved it. This brought most of the picture into focus. For wider screens I’m sure it will look normal. I’ll probably do 17″ next time. I’ll probably do a little more experimentation with the image size and the background color.
Font selection was the hardest part of the image
It took me longer to figure out which font I would use than it did to generate the image file. For the font choice I was going for a specific look that says,”This is Wes Johnson” I initially created 117 various combinations of Font families, boldness, and capitalization. I picked my 3 favorites from the list, then I had some others pick our their 5 choices out of the 117. I am still amazed that there was unanymous agreement on the Font family and capitalization to use. I chose the font that is on the picture above. I’m sure I’ll update the image in the future or at least add more personal marketing info. In the meantime, I think this image will work fine.
Till next time, visit my Twitter profile and follow me @mrwes
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