How do you weave your most important business strengths into the visual elements and essence of your brand?

The visuals that your brand conveys, from headline graphics to the subtle color nuances and emotional subconscious placements, are a bouquet of brand synergy.

The emotion behind your brand visuals accentuates the impact factor.

Your brand is an incredible entity of your business. It has personality and breathes life into your entrepreneurial presence.

The brand visuals are like the cloak of your brand. Is yours a flowing, semi-transparent material studded with elaborately sequined mehndi patterns? Or is it a hand woven crimson-nutmeg wool shawl that enfolds warmth and comfort?

Graphic design takes a lead role in your brand perception.

Have your brand visuals created by your designer who is intuitively poised to align the many subtle nuances that is the future of your business. Your designer also designs your visuals to speak to the hearts of your right people, your potential clients.

Your brand visuals drive your marketing, pushes business forward, and allows you to naturally glow in your marketplace.

When you get well-defined in all the elements of your brand, including the visuals, you grow and flourish brand value and most of all it is the conduit for your business growth as your right people will be inspired and motivated to buy from you.

If your brand visuals aren’t connected to your voice and essence, there is a subtle disorientation that happens and things don’t feel lined up on an intuitive level. It all needs to be tuned into your message’s essence and deeper story through your website and any other promotional materials.

Your brand thrives on consistency and coherence. Your designer needs to understand what that looks like on a profound level – what you’re saying to the head and the heart, so your finished piece makes sense at a core level.

The four main brand attributes that deliver impact: 
Color, Continuity, Connection, Core Essence.

{These are the brand elements that will speak to their heart and subtle emotional level as a state of being, the value that will be received by your client — that which in turn creates memorable impact, and transactions. It’s infused in your brand essence.}

1. Color

Color is a key component that conveys your essence. Deeping on where the range of the hue falls in the color wheel, its brightness, the color can convey different aspects. Also if the color is beside another color it can have different effects, too. Combinations can present a collaborative montage of essence.

The psychology behind individual colors usually conveys some of the following:

• Green – Charm. Youthful. Growth. Abundance. {Here’s a quick example of differing specific values/hue tints: Deep green – mystery, richness. Celery green – energetic, eco-friendly, and some more of the above.}
• Blue – Depth {think the color at the core of a flame}. Trust. Authority. Calm. Peace.
• Red –  Enthusiasm. Exhilaration. Desire-fire. Intensity. Passion. Conduit.
• Purple – Intuitive. Free-spirited. Aspirational. Dignified.
• Yellow – Optimism. Cheer. Friendliness. Energy. Warmth.
• Orange – Magnetic. Bold. Confidence. Eastern spirituality {when appropriate}.
• Pink – Sweetness. Femininity. Soft. Nurturing.  Security.
• Brown – Approachability. Organic. Earthy. Reliability.
• Gray –  Timeless. Solid. Practical. Simple. Humble.
• Black –  Power. Sophistication. Elegance. Cosmic. Depth. Mystery.

2. Continuity

Keep the artistic style succinct within the frame of continuity.

Your colors, along with artistic elements such as your social media icons or your headline graphic fonts, say a lot about your brand styling. Your consistent image will create recognition, back up your voice and language, and cultivate connectivity your clients will begin feeling comfortable with, like swinging by a familiar café when they come to hang out on your website. They’ll find a comfy seat, sip some latte, and then ultimately buy some dark roasted organic beans from you.

Which leads me to the next point…

3. Connection

When people land on your site, they need to know why you are there for them. They need to feel what your values are about. Your visuals can speak to the heart.

How do your visuals speak to their human emotional needs, which creates the lasting impact and change their life was in need of?

You won’t be able to resonate on a soul level to everyone. And you don’t want to. Your right people will get the authenticity that you are. Your designer/brand strategist should have you filled out a detailed questionnaire that gets to the spirit of your brand at its core intrinsic level, and pull out the elements that need to be illuminated so your right people feel this connection, and use you as their resource or service provider.

The many elements from font choices, stock images, custom art, etc. connect your specific client type to your brand.

4. Core Message Translation

This is about the succinct relevance in the feel of your message. Keep it to the point and keep it on-topic to your brand.

What are you laying down? What is the feeling behind it?

Are you about empowering others, and therefore need a powerful and inspiring brand? Are you a life coach who connects to your clients in an intimate loving way and need an open-hearted brand with warm splashes of light play, hues and swashy inviting fonts?

Your core message essence needs to be conveyed in your brand message and its visuals. 

Here are a few examples of how to stay true to your visual core message:

If you’re a creative… flowing elements that dance around on the page or website might be lovely and just what you need to show your ever-expanding flow of ideation.  But what if you are a slightly more rebellious type of creative? You make bold statement-based impact art; your brand would look different in your brand with edgier bright or high-contrasted graphics and brand elements. All depending on exactly how your message needs to be conveyed.

If you are an inspirational life coach… and you are about empowering others and perhaps through heroism — you’ll want to represent and instill confidence and inspire self-righteous leadership in your people’s own lives. What does that style look like? Depending, you’ll want to match up the correct blending of colors and font choice to instigate your motivated action in your potential client.

A business coach empowering larger corporations? Imbue power. Authority. Solidity. Results. Understated, but bold. Put that in your brand image.

A tantric relationship coach helping couples/individuals fulfill an inner sense of intimacy? Sensuality. Silky. Warm. Deep. Compassionate. Softness. Weave it into your gorgeous brand visuals.

A yoga instructor for a boutique spa? Aligned. Enfolding. Opening. Aesthetically pleasing. I needs to flow identity and appearance.

How do the subtle ways of your deeper story get conveyed in your brand image?

Carefully plan your branding and design strategy. Having an expert work with you will ensure your brand identity aligns with the value you’re proposing. Remember it’s about the experience conveyed and the emotional impact your service/product is beautifully veiled in. If you make them feel connected and a part of something, your business will blossom along with your clients’ satisfaction.

How do you feel your brand story’s visuals are presenting itself to others? Are you in alignment?

Let’s attune to the next level of your brand story’s visuals.

Maybe you are ready for some new beauty or banners for your website? A new WordPress website? New headshots for your website? View my work in my portfolio and answer a few questions for a free 20-minute session with me here>> www.ProsperityBranding.com/discovery

In today’s uber-connected online world requires a high level of “know, like and trust” concept for your personal brand. So, where should you start? Here’s a look at some practical tips to build your network and marketing with more ease and grace with 3 brand gems to support your lifestyle and portrait photos in your marketing and online personal brand.

1. How do your potential clients “KNOW” you?

This is where it all begins. It’s about visibility. Being seen. Before you can offer anything, your people need to obviously know you exist. You need to be in their scope and they must see you. Seems pretty basic, yah? Well it’s one if the biggest, consistent challenges with my clients and many entrepreneurs. Visibility is often one of the primary challenges. Introvert or not, you have to get yourself out there and around from commenting in forums to bring readers or discovery-session-takers to your schedule, and activating relationships. Make an enticing offering for opt-in and continue to cultivate connections. AND share PHOTOS of you, your offerings, your products. Heartily.

2. How do your potential clients “LIKE” you?

After you’ve gotten savvy about the KNOW factor, great, they know you exist… so do they like you? Listen up, because you’re not going to get everyone to like you. You can’t market to everyone anyways! That’s like marketing to know one. When you go to connect, write a blog, make a video, do a Facebook post, you need to know who your people are and who you are speaking to. Effective, magnetic brands know who they are speaking to. They create polarity and people often like or dislike. Your likers will become your audience or clients! And may fall in love with you, too.

Well, how do you do that? BE. YOUR. SELF. That is the only and most powerful thing in a personal brand. Align to your core values and share, share, share your message and offerings. Sing it from the rooftops and be 100% authentically true to who you are.

3. How do your potential clients “TRUST” you?

This is when they know AND like you. And come back for more, and to work with you. First steps to the formula where your people can return again and again, once the foundation of trust is here. Break it down to the principles of a great brand…

Be Consistent.
Be Clear.
Be Congruent.
Be Compelling.
Be Communicative.

Show up again and again as YOU, as your values. Make sure you have a clear expression of you and all you stand for brightly shining through. Have everything play out in the ultimate equation of it working together. Keep your message inspired, interesting, informative and valuable. And communicate… over and over, again and again. This keeps the KNOW in step #1 alive and flowing.

What’s something you can do now to up your KNOW-LIKE-TRUST factor in your brand?

P.S. And don’t forget AMAZING personal brand photos of you for your website, blog, business cards, book covers, and all your social media and marketing channels. And then of course having the photos beautifully designed into these various marketing channels. KNOW anyone that might be able to do this with and for you?  

If you’d like my eyes on your brand, I’m offering Activate Your Brand Discovery Sessions this week: https://prosperitybranding.com/discovery/

Seriously. I haven’t met a woman who hasn’t been through the fires of overcoming the fear of getting visible as a way of expanding in the world and growing her business.

Imagine it. There you are. Ready to stand behind the camera in the first place to have your most radiant essence show up. Exposed with your photos plastered in your website as the credible expert you are, ready and fully awake to work with high-end clients. And then launching your website or online program.

Then you stop and rethink it. Without even knowing it, those fears of getting visible arise.

I experience it over and over with my women entrepreneur clients wanting a photoshoot or personal brand website, but they are quietly self-sabotaging from unconscious fears of being seen. They put it off; “Oh, I’ll do it in the third quarter this year,” or make other financial excuses (when there is always a way to create your dreams to unfold).

Because it feels exposed. It feels vulnerable. Even feels unsafe. Call it that past life where you stepped into your power as a medicine woman and was persecuted for it… or call it something else.

Why is this?

Can’t we just lovingly smile at our humanity? Those perceived flaws? Can we just accept our discomfort with getting a photoshoot, standing behind the video camera, or building a powerful website to blast forth our message and services?

It simply feels scary to be seen.

It’s a world of judgement, projection, rejection, humiliation, and more, that our minds can cower from when we put ourselves “out there”. Especially on a world wide web where there are well over 3 billion people who use the internet. Feel into that big group of mass consciousness!

It is really just our self-perception that matters in the end. But it is typically a human setback that needs to be worked through and overcome.

And it is the magic that happens each time I work with my clients. They seem themselves in a new light. They see their beauty. Their potential. They see their radiance to shine their light into this world.

Yes, it takes a leap. Especially if you are sensitive (most of us are!), or introverted (it is time to lovingly move ourselves beyond that label!) and spiritual (where you are used to the realm of the inner world and projecting out).

I can relate completely! 

I thought I was going to pass out the first time I had a celebrity photographer photograph me in Hollywood. I got hair and makeup done that I looked like someone from a movie set, and then showed up before that long lens… it felt like I was looking down the barrel of a gun. But that didn’t stop me. And when I got my sparkling golden dance outfit on and started playing and twirling, it all shifted.

I felt my inner landscape — my essence — dancing as itself.

Which is what I do with my photoshoot clients. We play. We express. After a bit, we barely even know we are taking pictures! 🙂

The antidote to staying hidden… is allowing yourself to BE SEEN.

We must move beyond the playing-small-stories. Beyond to projected judgments of others. Beyond the idea that your nose or thighs are too big. (It’s bull-oney.)

We must instead shine as the glory light expressed as children of the divine.

That is how I see my photography and website clients. I will not see you otherwise, and I will insist you to show and shine as the radiance that you are – I will be a compassionate midwife and also a tough loving mentor.

You must know the prosperity — your inner most happiness — that is beyond the surface of the face of your website or brand. The deeper beauty that is waiting to have its luminosity expressed in this world. That which will support you bouncing out of bed in the morning, and going to bed with a brighter smile. It is my delight to capture this, and create visual magnetic gorgeousness and an online platform for you to shine from.

This is exactly what I explore in my Activate Your Prosperity Brand discovery session. I invite you to APPLY HERE for a complementary session for us to chat about your online brand and supporting you to lovingly getting visible.

Let’s make 2016 the most liberated, safely visible, and beautiful year yet.

Learn more and go here: www.ProsperityBranding.com/discovery  Connect with you soon. 🙂

There is truth that your audience is judging your book by it’s cover, whether we want to admit it or not. We can’t help it — as humans we are simply visually-inclined. The visual translates to thinking which in turn effects our judgement of whether something is credible, inspiring, or interesting. The face of a book cover expresses the essence of the read, and is important for making a potent first impression with your ideal potential readers. 

In this article, I will cover a few things that you need to know before hiring your book cover designer. 

First and foremost, I say if possible, your personal brand wants to radiate through from your online visual brand to your book cover. There’s only one of YOU on the planet. What better than a punchy brilliant photo of you, rich on-brand coloring, gorgeous typography, and an overall best-selling vibe to attract thousands? 

Here’s one example of that. Client Spotlight, Tanya Paluso (Lynn) of Tribal Truth.  Her photo (by yours truly) shows her fun nature in the hot pink dress while being down-to-earth with barefoot in lotus style… attracting a specific-target audience of yoga pants wearers, priestesses, goddesses, the modern day woman, and beyond. The mandala design radiates a sense of expansion, while the gold gives a feeling of prosperity and divinity. And the prayer hands and light rays at the heart dove-tail with the title, all while showing an understanding of an open heart in leadership being a focus of the book. Intuitively this shares as a feminine leader further alluded to in the title’s tagline. Amazingly, Tanya had an epiphany in her business direction after I was blessed to help her understand her personal archetypes based on her core values… furthermore represented here in her Sacred Feminine Archetype photo. 

What does your designer need to know before designing your cover?

You designer needs a feel of the book, and if possible having read it. Ideally the author would provide a brief synopsis and any visual references for insight (especially if you’re not working with an intuitive, visionary designer.) The voice will come through. Ideally your designer will know a thing or two about branding, and be able to express an archetypal feeling for the book, in addition appealing to the ideal target market designing something slick enough that will appeal as a best-selling book cover. This will create the emotive ideal feeling, and a sense of style which will want to be perceived and visualized. Many different designers have a specific or unique style of design. If the vibe of your book matches their designerly style, they will be a good fit. Or, you can find a designer that will create based on the essence that wants to come through. If your book is light-hearted about joy, for an obvious example, the tone of your book cover wouldn’t’ want to feel moody and brooding. And vice versa, if your cover was about deep transformation or a story around intense karma, the feel might be a little more reverent. It also simply depends on the archetypal qualities. The feeling of a Heroine is simply different than the Innocent or the Lover.

This is a post for The BossLady Blog Tour – dedicated to The Bead Effect project, developed by Kimberly Riggins to nurture collaboration among women business owners.

To say I’m thrilled to be a part of this tour is an understatement. It was an honor to have Kimberly hand-select me as one of her 12 powerhouse “bossladies.”

So what is a BOSSLady?

For me, being a BossLady is taking a stand—for myself. It’s about washing myself clean of co-dependencies, recommitting to my dreams and believing that I can lead the way to my own financial bliss.

It took me years to align with my BOSSLady, who I so often refer to as my inner Empress.

She responds, rather than reacts. She’s an effing lady and also an untamable wild woman. She melts into her femininity; doing business from her brilliance but staying centered in her breath, hips, and heart.

And when it comes to her business and her brand…it’s pretty much the same. She stays grounded, connected to herself + owns her stuff!

Here are 3 Ways you can Channel your Inner BOSSLady into your Brand:

Embody Your Unique Bliss

If you are a Personal Brand, then YOU are your brand. And everything you put out into the world MUST have YOU in it. Think of your brand as a texture, color, flavor, and perhaps some luminous light. Add to that your passions, your pleasures and some good old-fashioned fun.

Now how does that get expressed visually and message-wise?

Let’s say you are a raw foods teacher who loves to skate the boardwalk? But you don’t live near the beach. Who cares? Channel your inner BOSSLady by grabbing your green drink and film yourself roller-skating around the kitchen!

Or maybe you love to belly dance? Why not get all decked out in your garb, grab a video camera and create a welcome message you can splash across your homepage. (That’s what I did.)

Bypass Your Competition & Stop Comparing Yourself

I had to totally ditch the idea of being “in competition” with others in my industry. It kept me playing small and it stopped me from stepping into my entrepreneurial BOSSLady.

Since there is a lot of noise on the web, your strategy is simple… be so unapologetically yourself that you’re infectiously standing out above the cookie cutter brands and stepping up as the crème de la crème!

Think about it…did you ever hear competition toted as a good thing? I think its a bit of poppycock. We are in this together. Sure, we all want to be successful but not at the cost of someone else’s demise. I believe we could be even more successful if we helped our fellow BOSSLadies out, don’t you?

But I also know its not that easy and sometimes we compare ourselves to others in our industry. I’ve fallen into that trap too but I can tell you this…it has never served me well. I ended up losing my voice and sounding like a rent-a-copy of someone else. That never feels good. So tune into your mission, keep your eyes on the prize and do your own thing. Tap into your BOSSLady and express the heck out of it!

Face Your Fears & Have Some Patience

I think one of the best tactics you can use to market your brand is to take some risks. BOSSLadies face their fears and do the uncomfortable anyway. Why? Because in order to grow, you must be willing to take that next step.

But recognize that you move at your own pace. Be patient with yourself. BOSSLadies aren’t looking to become overnight successes. They are looking for longevity. And consistency.

Whatever you put out there…remember to always be YOU and have some FUN. BOSSLadies never forget that!

Check out yesterday’s article by the alluring Alana Sheeren HERE! 

And TOMORROW? Stay tuned for BossLady awesome Amber Campion’s words of wisdom!

With Golden Light,
Lucinda