Product Review: Personal branding with The Logo Creator
Logo and your personal brand
I came across a book titled You, Inc. in the bookstore nearby. I haven’t got a chance to buy and read the book, but the title really gives sort of impression on me. I believe the book is about your personal branding. How you market your success. I shared before that my opinion on selling is much more of relationship rather than money or profit. In life you certainly deal with people, so it’s almost impossible that you don’t need to sell, nor building your personal brand.
On the series of turning limitation into advantages, I shared that limitation is also useful in marketing yourself. But it’s certainly not enough, success requires you to build your strength, and market them. That is the essential of the personal branding. That is about the value you bring to people. Particularly this article will share with you the benefit of logo in your personal branding. It’s not everything but undeniably, it’s useful for your branding, for both your personal and business.
This article is a sponsored review I am writing for The Logo Creator. I picked this review as an opportunity to explore more on logo, personal branding and affiliate marketing opportunity. At the end of the article I will share more about my finding with the applications. Meanwhile, enjoy what I want to share about the benefit of logo, image, or design in your personal branding.
The repetitive image
The company I work for recently was doing re-branding exercise. One significant exercise that they are doing is the logo. They hire designers to create the logo, and subsequently they change the entire email signature, product logo, name card, and many others. They wanted to make the new logo appear as often as possible, and one important reason that our CEO shared was the logo is there to increase the market awareness of our presence.
In any business you are in, and including internet marketing, logo is important. It is associated with you, and people will remember you a lot because of your logo. In Landon Porter’s definition of branding, it will distinguish you from all the rest in the market. And even more important, they will associate you with all that you have done, your work, your product, your service, character or anything about you
Branding - the intentional use of images, words, and symbols in a repetitive fashion, to distinguish one “thing” from another “thing,” or better yet, all other “things,” while keeping it relative to the main category of said “thing.”
~Landon Porter (Making Sales Making Money)
The impression maker
“Image speaks a thousand words.” Introducing himself, Landon attach his picture his introduction article to the Making Sales Making Money reader here. The picture below is a copy of it. What’s your impression just after a glance on his picture? My first impression: Landon is a funny, hilarious, and fun-loving person. He admits them in the article, and it is also shown very much from the style how he writes.
Similarly, a good logo will help you define the good characteristics about your business, product, services, or others. Logo is not limited to the business only, logo is also useful for each product or service the business is providing. A blogger, for example, can also use logo in his/her article.
Liz Strauss is an example of a blogger that uses logo extensively in his articles. She attached a logo with the article she’s written. The logo gives the impression of what is expected from the article, and similarly, the logo helps her regular readers know instantly what to expect inside the article.
The attention grabber
There are shifting in resources that we have. Some of what used to be abundant is now scarce, while some that used to be scarce is now abundant.
While opportunity to brand and express yourself is now much more abundant with the Web 2.0 and social media era, the attention that people give to the media is now very limited.
The issue of information overload is now very significant, and it’s no surprise that people doesn’t give much attention. Everything needs to be instant and fast, and therefore, attention is scarce.
Your organization is based on exploiting scarcity. Create and sell something scarce and you can earn a profit.
~Seth Godin (Meatball Sundae)
A successful blogger is the one that manage to get the attention of many readers. It is one thing to maintain a regular readership with consistent contents, but it is also another thing to grab attention from the first time visitors in your blog. Design, logo, and images are some of the attention grabbers. What kind of impressions do you give to your first time reader? You must agree that your design and logo get readers’ attention first, they form some impression afterwards, and then they will judge your content to decide whether to give more attention to your blog or not. A logo is attention grabber, what do you want to say with your logo? Think carefully.
The action tickler
Action, that’s what I’ve been trying to experiment with The Logo Creator in this blog. The inspiration comes from one of the new market trend that Seth Godin shared in his book, Meatball Sundae. It’s the trend #7 in the book, and its title is Google and The Dicing of Everything. Basically it says…
Google and the other search engines have broken the world into little tiny bits. No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore-they walk in the back door, to the page Google sent them to.
~Seth Godin (Meatball Sundae)
What is your page or article that gets a lot of first time visitor? Maybe the one with higher Google rank? Maybe the one with many readers interested in? Or the one where Social Media such as StumbleUpon and Digg has brought you with traffic. Those will be accessed by many first time visitors to your site. The question: what kind of action do you want to ask your reader from there?
It is more like imposing your own advertisement inside your article. Instead of pointing to an image in the Flickr, or Google ads or any other sponsor attractive ads, why don’t you promote some other best articles that you have? With a good logo and image, you can grab their attention, and suggest actions from there. The image above is an example, where I prompt my readers to get the relevant articles based on the book mentioned.
It’s also one reason why I find The Logo Creator is very useful. Adding image and styling text with the software is very easy. The tool is all in your hand. It’s simple and enough to make your logo. You can pick one of the templates they provided, and you can make as many logo as you want from there. If you are interested to know more, below is the review on the usability of the product.
The Logo Creator Review
The elements
Unlike Paint.NET or Photoshop where you can put more than one element within one layer, The Logo Creator treat each of its elements as its own layer. That simplifies the logo creation very much. What you need is only drag and drop each of the elements into the picture. It can be texts, lines, orbs, clip-arts, photos, swooshes, stars, arrows, etc.
While the product is giving you a set of elements to work with, you can also add or import any additional pictures that you own and make it as the part of the logo.
These elements are added as layers, and you can reorder them. Besides that, you can also group the elements. You can drag and drop your mouse to select an area of elements, while optionally, you can exclude some of the overlapping elements (which is called “locking”).
The keyboard shortcut for most of the features are given, I like this feature as it fasten your logo creation. Sadly, the product missed out two pairs of keyboard shortcuts that I find very important. The first pair is the shortcut to lock and unlock all the elements. The second pair is to select the next and previous elements. With these two, the product will be quite comprehensively usable with keyboard only.
The toolbar
You have the elements. The next thing you need to do is modifying them, which is where the toolbars are needed. The program doesn’t come with the usual graphical toolbar buttons; neither has it come with a lot of toolbars. There are only two toolbars: one for editing text and inserting images, while the other is basically all the options that you can do with the elements. Some of them that I can mention are scaling, formatting, rotating, coloring, shadowing, character spacing, line spacing, and some other effects, such as blurring.
The templates
The best thing of all is the template logo that you can pick from. Instead of building from scratch, you are given with a series of templates. These templates are quite professionally designed. From which, you can modify and rearrange to create your suitable logo. There are many packages that come with the software. Pick one that is the most suitable for you. The custom-made logos above are some of the examples of the modification from the templates. Below are some other thumbnails of the logo that you can start with, do check out more from its website here.
For your success,
Robert
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