Brand On! With Brandon Uttley

Hello, loyal listeners, this is Brandon Uttley. And today I want to thank you for listening to the Brand On podcast. It’s time for me to retire this podcast and focus my efforts on my other, better-known podcast — Go For Launch. I’m in the process of relaunching Go For Launch, no pun intended, and I encourage you to check it out on iTunes and every other major podcasting platform. You can learn more at goforlaunch.io/podcast or goforlaunch.io/itunes. Go For Launch is hosted on the awesome Libsyn platform. If you’re looking into creating a serious podcast, it’s the best I have used. I am proud to be an affiliate, and if you sign up for a new account and use the promo code LAUNCH, you will get the current month and the following month free as a trial. I had been doing the Go For Launch for several years and put it on hold nearly four years ago. It’s a long story, but at the time I had someone who was supposed to join me as a co-host who bailed out. I was frankly burned out after producing nearly 100 weekly episodes singlehandedly. This time, I’m going to keep the production quality high but more simple. It’ll just be me and a guest, or occasionally just me on the mic. I’ll still be talking mostly about business topics, branding, marketing — and how to juggle balancing running a business with maintaining a good quality of life. 

Working from seems idyllic but it presents its own challenges, even for the most introverted type of person. And especially during the global pandemic! Here are 25 tips to make the most of working from home. 1. Rise and shine! Pick a regular time to get up every day. 2. Take a shower and get dressed. Wear appropriate clothing that puts you in the best state to work at your best. Don’t stay in your pajamas all day! 3. Structure Your Day. “Structure equals freedom and structure equals results.” - Craig Ballantyne 4. Be intentional. Make an intention for your overall day, as well as individual tasks. This will help you stay focused. 5. Set expectations - when you work, your availability, etc. Let your colleagues and other people know. If necessary, block off time on your calendar. 6. Separate your workspace from your living space. 7. Limit interruptions — i.e., notifications and noise (use Krisp to eliminate noise on Zoom calls, etc. - https://krisp.ai). 8. Set up and TEST your video conferencing. Use a good camera (such as Logitech) and microphone (I like the ATR 2100)—and also your background. Download Muzzle to avoid embarrassing notifications when you are screen sharing (for Mac): https://muzzleapp.com. 9. Single task. 10. Track your time. 11. Use a Pomodoro timer - work in concentrated time segments (I like Be Focused for Mac). 12. Re-engineer your day into 3 mini-days; this was inspired by Ed Mylett (see this great Medium post by Eduardo Lopez for more details). 13. Take regular breaks. 14. Stand up (vs. sitting all day). 15. Exercise. 16. Meditate - a good free app is Medito. 17. Eat healthy foods. 18. Drink lots of water. 19. Wear blue-light blocking glasses. The American Optometric Association advises that when working on a screen, every 20 minutes look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds. 20. Join online communities - examples including Slack and Comarketing Space. 21. Find an accountability partner. 22. Leave the house regularly — example, schedule coffees and lunches with friends and peers. Harder to do now with COVID-19! 23. Listen to music or ambient background sound (one of my favorites is Coffitivity). 24. Keep a journal. 25. Plan ahead. What about you? If you have a tip, share it as a voice memo at https://anchor.fm/brandonuttley and I may include it on a future podcast episode.

In today's episode, I provide 5 tips to improve your LinkedIn profile. These are excerpted from my new product, LinkedIMPROVED, an interactive checklist, course and coaching to help you dramatically improve your LinkedIn presence. I mistakenly say there are more than 675 people on LinkedIn...I meant to say 675 million!

Anchor has added a new feature that let's you upload the audio from a video session—such as a Zoom or Skype call—and convert it into a podcast episode. 

In this segment, I discuss two new tools for discovering and researching emerging trends: Treendly and Exploding Topics.

If you set up Zoom video conferences, you know the invitations are pretty boring! Zmurl.com aims to fix that, by letting you create beautiful landing pages for your Zoom events. You can even use Zmurl to prevent Zoombombers from getting in and ruining your events! The basic version is free.

Today I talk about Yac, a good tool for remote working. Yac let's you asynchronously communicate with one or more teammates. Using their desktop or mobile apps, you essentially click a button and leave voice messages back and forth. It's a little bit like a digital version of a walkie-talkie for work purposes! It also automatically transcribes each voice message. Currently, due to the coronavirus pandemic, Yac is free to use.

I interviewed Waikit Lau, founder and CEO of RemoteHQ. To get the most out of this, watch our video recording at https://uttley.in/remotehq-video. RemoteHQ is an innovative online collaboration tool that combines video conferencing, shared browsing, screen sharing, whiteboarding, note taking, audio recording, written transcription and more.  In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Waikit is currently offering free access to their pro version. Learn more and sign up at https://www.remotehq.com.

On today's Brand On podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Matt Barnett, the founder and Papa Bear (aka, CEO) of Bonjoro.com. Bonjoro is an app for sending individual personalized videos to welcome and onboard new customers and clients and provide customer service. We recorded this during an unprecedented time, in which much of the world is suddenly working very differently due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many companies are scrambling to work remotely—at scale.  And they are facing difficult challenges in maintaining outstanding customer service. Matt talks about the Bonjoro platform, which can be used for 1-on-1 personalized video messages, as well as group video messages. He discusses different use cases, as well as platforms that integrate with Bonjoro—ranging from CRMs to email campaign systems, Slack, Zapier and more. Bonjoro also recently debuted a new Chrome extension to make it even easier to send video messages from your laptop or desktop computer. Finally, Matt discusses different tools the global Bonjoro team uses to build camaraderie.

If you struggle to get engagement on LinkedIn with your posts, I encourage you to check out the tool that I talk about in this episode. It’s called Lempod at https://lempod.com.

Most of us share a lot of links these days. Whether we are emailing or texting someone a link, sharing on social media or putting a link in a blog post or whitepaper—links are pretty ubiquitous. But many people don’t stop to think about the wasted opportunities of just sending plain, verbatim links. The most obvious issue with a lot of links is their length. When links are really long, they just look bad and often have a bunch of random letters, numbers and symbols in them. But aside from simple aesthetics, naked links are inefficient. From a business standpoint, you could be getting more out of the links you share. For example, you should always know at a minimum whether a link got clicked on. Even better, you could know exactly who clicked on a given link—if you are using tracking in many email campaign systems, for example. Beyond just tracking clickthoughs though, there are other ways to really enhance your links. A few of these include: 1 - Making them shorter — this is the most obvious benefit, which makes links look better and contain fewer characters 2 - Branding your branding by using your domain name or a variation of your domain name 3 - Adding retargeting codes to any link you send — this means being able to later serve ads to people who have clicked on your enhanced links 4 - Adding information that can tell you exactly where your click links came from, using the bizarre sounding Urchin Tracking Module or UTM parameters. By the name, the name Urchin came from a company that was the predecessor to Google Analytics that was used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across various traffic sources and publishing media. 5 - For Ecommerce purposes, share links that properly attribute affiliate sales in multiple countries, such as Amazon affiliate links There are many tools to accomplish this type of link-sharing goodness. Five of my favorites, which I will include in the show notes of this episode on Anchor.fm/brandonuttley include: 1- Google Analytics UTM Builder - a free Chrome extension - https://geni.us/chromeutm 2 - Bitly - https://bitly.com 3 - Geni.us 4 - Rebrandly - https://rebrandly.com 5 - Sniply - https://snip.ly I hope you’ve learned a few things about the inherent power of link sharing and that you will check out some of these tools to make your links look and perform better!

Press releases are not only expensive, but they are increasingly ineffective. Learn more effective techniques on how to distribute news of value from your company or organization.

Lots of people still do marketing and “lead generation” the hard way—surfing Google endlessly, poking around company websites looking for contact information, trying to match it up with LinkedIn profiles, etc. Fortunately, there are more modern tools to stop wasting your time and start scaling your efforts. One of my favorite tools for lead generation is Seamless (link: https://login.seamless.ai/invite/brandon-uttley). This allow you to find leads at scale, with minimal effort. Some might say tools like this are "cheating” but I disagree. Anything that cuts out wasted effort is worth looking into. If you agree or have a different opinion, let me know at https://anchor.fm/brandonuttley.

If you want to advertise on Facebook and Instagram, of course you first need to have a business Page and administrative access. But what happens if you lose access to the Page? For example, if someone sets it up for your business then leaves—and isn’t around to add someone else as an admin? This happens all the time. In fact, I recently started working with a new client who had not been able to access their Facebook page—for three years! They had tried in vain to get customer support from Facebook. Sadly, people had messaged their businesses and engaged with their Page, and there was no way for them to respond. And naturally that meant they couldn’t advertise. When they hired me, I too struggled to find any way to get support from Facebook. Numerous forms we both filled out went into the void with no response. That’s when I discovered Facebook’s dirty secret. On a whim, I decided to log into the account of another customer who was paying for ads. It was only then that multiple options to contact Facebook support appeared, including online chat. I was able to connect with a kind person at Facebook who patiently listened to the issue my other client had about not being able to access their Page. After several days of back-and-forth emails and having them complete the proper forms, they were finally able to regain administrative access and start posting to their Page, responding to customers—and advertising! But if you’re a business that has lost admin access, the Catch-22 is that you won’t find anyone to help you and therefore you can’t advertise on Facebook or Instagram until you do gain access. Imagine how many millions of dollars Facebook loses because of this short-sighted stance on customer support. You won’t find the same level of overt discrimination from Google or Apple—there are readily available ways of contacting their support teams. And you don’t have to prove you are a customer first.

Hey there and Happy New Year! I’m getting back to recording after a decent break through the holidays.

Get into the habit of using good file naming conventions for your photos, PDFs and other digital files. You’ll thank yourself later, your friends, family and colleagues will thank you—and Google thank you.

We all get busy. But unless you fail to plan for “busyness,” you don’t have a good excuse not to keep producing content to promote your business.

Do you let too much planning get in the way of producing content? Be more spontaneous! Consistency often tops quality for staying top-of-mind with your audience.

Have you ever been afraid or reluctant to post something online, for fear of what others may think—or believing that no one will care? It’s a pretty common feeling in my experience. My advice is simple: just go for it.

If you are starting a podcast and want full control, you will need to sign up with a reliable, affordable podcast hosting company. I recommend Libsyn, as you’ll hear more about in this podcast. And when you use the Libsyn discount code LAUNCH during the signup process, you’ll get two months free! Libsyn launched in 2004 as the first podcast service provider. Since then, they have become the world’s leading podcasting hosting service, hosting more than 67,000 podcasts worldwide, including roughly 35% of the top 200 podcasts in iTunes. Libsyn is the most experienced podcast hosting platform for both audio and video. Libsyn is easy to use, and it allows podcasters to publish their podcast episodes to all the major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneInRadio, YouTube and more. Check out the Libsyn Directory, where you will find many of the world’s top podcasts, including The Joe Rogan Experience, WTF with Marc Maron and the Gary Vee Audio Experience—not to mention the Go For Launch podcast.