In 2010 I was sitting down in my college library with a good friend and started designing a logo for our new business. We were young, and our lack of experience drove us to focus only on logo design and brand name… Needless to say, we failed before we even took off.

Fast forward 13 years, and I’ve scaled two e-com brands, one digital marketing agency, and consulting firm.

So if you’re wondering what makes a good brand, you, my friend, are in the right spot. In this blog post, we’ll talk about your brand personality, your brand voice, the partnerships you’ll have to make, and much more.

You just started your business, or maybe, you already have one, but you want to build a brand for yourself. Building a brand from scratch may take some time, but rest assured, you are in the best spot. When I transitioned from owning a digital marketing agency to consulting, I knew I had the perfect opportunity to create something that could resonate with my ideal clients.

Building a brand is not rocket science. But since the words “brand” and “branding” get thrown around a lot, we need to clarify a couple of things.

First off, a brand is a series of traits that your market should recognize and hopefully associate to a positive experience or emotion.

If you think of a business as one of your acquaintances, a brand would be their personality. What do you expect from them? What do you think when you hear their name?

Out of all topics I’ve discussed on my blog, confidence is probably the one that’s dearest to me. And since I’ve used NLP to boost my confidence, I want to show you how I did it. But before we do that, let me tell you more about my situation.

If you have been spending hours every week trying to get visibility on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or Linkedin, good for you! It means that you know the importance of capitalizing on your market’s attention.

But if you have been neglecting Search Engine Optimization in the process, you are missing out on a much more valuable tool.

Neuro-linguistic Programming is a set of mental tools and practices that were developed in the mid-1970s. But in the past years, NLP techniques have been used in business (especially in sales and productivity) to help entrepreneurs get over common hurdles.

I started my business in 2012 and after a few years of finding myself making the same mistakes (mainly due to poor habits and bad planning) I decided to give NLP a try.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to build an internal, affordable SEO system, I want to touch upon some of the KPIs (Key performance indicators) you should try to hit when growing your organic presence. Keep in mind, this data is not meant to be accurate, but you can still use it as your North Star every time you monitor your progress.

In fact, every niche, industry, country, and city will have a different number of competitors, keyword search volumes, and audience types. And so that means that your needed efforts will vary accordingly.

Hiring a virtual assistant can be the smartest thing you can do for your business, but it may also be one of the most confusing.

When I first started building a virtual assistant team almost a decade ago, I have a ton of questions regarding pay rate, training, management style, payment arrangement and a many others.

So, if you are struggling to make up your mind and create a solid plan, this blog post will give you all the info you need to get the ball rolling.

After years of trial and error, in 2018, I finally cracked the code on how to build an A+ remote team that took care of all the pressing issues and to-do's in my business.

My agency clients, which already trusted me, were excited to learn more about the process.

But I also noticed that most of the new prospects were confused about the topic.

One of the most common questions that I get from my clients and prospects is “How much does SEO cost?”

And while this is a fair question, there are way too many variables to give a straight answer.

It’s like asking a real estate agent, “How much do houses cost?”

In 2012, when I started working with virtual assistants (also known as VAs), few people knew what I was doing.

The majority of those that heard me say the word “Virtual” assistant thought I was talking about computer software.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to build an internal, affordable SEO system, I want to touch upon some of the KPIs (Key performance indicators) you should try to hit when growing your organic presence. Keep in mind, this data is not meant to be accurate, but you can still use it as your North Star every time you monitor your progress.

In fact, every niche, industry, country, and city will have a different number of competitors, keyword search volumes, and audience types. And so that means that your needed efforts will vary accordingly.

Everyone has their fair share of bad habits, but some can be incredibly detrimental to health and

productivity. In this digital age where work-from-home has become an expected norm, employees are

likelier to develop bad working habits that impact their work output and overall health. Study results

showed that while working from home offers flexibility, it also comes with challenges, such as employees

being sedentary, experiencing distractions, and lacking a productive workspace.

If you want to understand how things go viral and how trends start, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is the book you want to read.

A few years ago, I was scaling an Amazon store, and I needed a fresh perspective on marketing my brand.

In 2017 I was working around the clock, and my business wasn’t growing. I thought about hiring a virtual assistant, but I delayed the process because I wanted to keep the profits and do everything myself.

Little did I know, I was about to create a downward spiral of late nights, bad quality customer service, and an overall sense of stress and anxiety.

With over a decade of experience using many sales processes, I can confidently say that The Challenger Sale is one of the most effective ones, especially if you are selling a tool or a service that is not well-known to the general public.

In fact, the Challenger Sale is all about challenging the prospect’s beliefs about their business and possible solutions that are available to them.

I started selling SEO in 2012, and I have been exposed to all sorts of sales processes for over a decade.

In my best-selling book Smart Business Better You, I talk about when our office was shut down for over 2 weeks due to a major flood. In that chapter, I explained how the majority of the top performers in our team could not maintain their sales numbers because they had to work from home.

6 hours and 30 minutes… That’s how long it took me to read Deep Work by Cal Newport. I know the exact time because I was sitting at the finish line of a trail marathon that my then-girlfriend (now my wife) was running. And truth be told, I didn’t even feel the time pass by..

Newport’s fresh perspective on focus was (and still is) totally different from what the average business gurus talk about. Everyone tells you to be on social media and to be omnipresent. Whereas Cal’s message is the opposite; disappear, make yourself hard to reach, and favor alone focused time over any type of distracted work.

Since I was born in 1986, I have witnessed some new amazing technologies appear and become mainstream.

I remember the first cell phones, computers, smartphones wearable devices.

Grit by Angela Duckworth is easily on my top 10 books to read, and that’s why.

In 2016, I was traveling back to Toronto after a business conference, and I was a bit down.

On the last day of the event, one of the speakers asked us to measure our “success factor” based on the kind of results we had achieved over the past 12 months.