When building a brand be sure to build a unique brand and avoid being generic. Any brand that is generic will be easy to forget, cause brand confusion and is a recipe for disaster. Strong brands are unique and well though out.

Take for example if they had of named Bable Fish something more generic like Easy Translate. The name would be better at describing what the service was like many generic easy translate software that is available the brand would have been easy to forget.

Have you been to a health store lately? All of them seem to have the word Nature in them, Nature’s Way, Nature’s Best, Nature’s Resources. All of these stores use the same colours, similar logo’s, sell the same products and in essence have the same service. If you owned a health store how would brand it?

 

Today’s edition of In The Sphere brings together a rather eclectic collection of posts from around the blogosphere. We have a look at everything from nostalgic memories of your high school graduation to funny moments from everyone’s favorite president. Enjoy!

Darren Barefoot brings up an interesting point about high school graduations. Do we have proms in Canada? We hear about senior prom all the time on television and in movies, but it doesn’t seem to be much of a Canadian phenomenon, does it?

Courtney Tuttle follows in this trend of discussing young people by describing some of the best ways for teens to make money. No longer are they restricted to flipping burgers and delivering newspapers. Court knows at least one kid that turned $10 into $10,000 over the course of a summer.

Problogger Darren Rowse is well established authority on just about everything to do with making money through blogging. While many blogs focus on monetization through advertising, you can also promote your consulting services on a blog. Darren’s got tips to help you do that too.

Laura Spencer address the age old question of nature versus nurture, but she does it under the context of whether someone is born to be a freelancer. Is it because of what flows through our veins that we choose to embark on a freelance career or does it have more to do with our upbringing and experience?

Last but not least, Extra Funny Videos entertains us with a collection of the top ten George W. Bush moments. It must have been hard for Letterman to narrow it down to just ten moments. There are so many to choose from!

A cartoon created by artist Krishna M. Sadasivam.

If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all marketing campaign. There are so many variables involved in creating an advertising campaign that they really have to catered to each specific company for a very specific purpose. While certain sports themed companies, like Nike and Under Armor, may perform better by emphasizing the concept of competition and rising above the rest, this may not be the best strategy for other organizations.

A recent post on DarrenBarefoot.com illustrates this very concept. In taking a closer look at a box of Girl Guide cookies that he recently purchased, he noticed some rather interesting copywriting on the box.

In a prominently featured text box, it reads “No tryouts. No cuts. No competition. It’s the greatest team she’ll ever join.”

Although they may go after individual badges, Girl Guides are not supposed to compete against one another. The organization is meant to foster teamwork and collaboration among its members. It’s clear that they want to emphasize the concept of “team” in the Girl Guides organization rather than the concept of “competition”. This follows in an increasingly popular trend in parenting circles to reduce or eliminate competition among children.

When designing a marketing campaign for your company or product, consider the emerging trends among your target demographic and how you can best address their wishes. Parents of Girl Guides want the girls to learn about community and collaboration, and the message depicted on the cookie box reinforces this commitment.

Last week we asked how many web hosts do you currently use and 71% said one. This weeks question is…

There are certain pages and functions that should be included on every blog, regardless of the niche and the nature of the website. There should be an About page that tells readers a little more about what the blog will address and hopefully the About page also provides some information about the writer(s) behind the blog. There should be a Contact page so that readers can get in touch with the blogger about any specific questions. Another very important page that should be included on every blog is an Archives page.

As you can imagine, there are many WordPress plug-ins out there that address this very matter. Yes, WordPress automatically generates pages for each month in the archive, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could have every post ever written on your blog on a single page? If you post a lot, however, this page can get incredibly long. The Clean Archives Reloaded plug-in cleans that up for you.

Instead of having links to every posts shown all the time, Clean Archives Reloaded creates a series of expandable menus for each month. Click on March 2008, for example, to reveal all the posts that were written in that month. You can expand and collapse multiple months too. For an example of how this plug-in looks like in action, check out the archives page on Viper007Bond.com, which happens to be the blog of the Clean Archives Reloaded author.