Find Your Authentic Brand Voice + Message

“I don’t have anything to say,” I thought to myself, staring at the blinking cursor. I felt like everything worth saying had already been said, everything worth doing already done.

What was left for me – or anyone – to say? What was my voice? Why should anyone bother to listen to me?

I was trapped in an endless loop of comparing myself with Jasmine Star and Marie Forleo, and feeling utterly hopeless…

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What are You Really Selling?

In this blog post (and episode of The Brand Cure Podcast), I’m asking you one of the BIGGEST and most IMPORTANT questions to ask yourself about your brand:

“What are you REALLY selling?”

If you know the answer to this question, it will make all of your marketing efforts POWERFUL!

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Ashley Chymiy
How to Choose Your Niche

Who is this episode for?

It’s for you if:

  • You've been in business for awhile, and now you want to raise your prices and be more competitive, so you need to create a premium experience for a certain type of customer.

  • You’re just starting out and are unsure of what kind of business you really want to build

  • You’re launching a new product or service and want it to sell really well right away.

  • You want to pivot and start engaging a different type of customer.

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Get People Talking About Your Brand!

We’re gonna cover how to make your brand more word-of-mouth-friendly, so you can generate referrals and turn your small audience into a big one!

why this matters

Make your brand word-of-mouth-friendly:

  1. Makes you more memorable. Telling a more word-of-mouth-friendly story about your brand makes it easier for your customer or prospective customer to remember you! If they can’t easily understand what you offer and why it matters to them, they’ll have a hard time storing it away in their memory for future use.

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Get More Engagement on Social Media!

If you've ever experienced working on a piece of content and putting it out in the world, and getting almost no response, or just not really getting the response you wanted… that can be really frustrating!

You’re just missing a piece of the puzzle, and so the whole thing is just not working. It's like baking a cake, and you forget one critical ingredient, like flour, and you’re not really going to get a very good cake.

So what are the ingredients to a really active and engaged social media online presence?

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What is a Brand?

A lot of us first encounter the idea of what a brand is, through the visual side: really clever logos, really beautiful colors, attractive visual branding, and a visual aesthetic that draws us in. And that makes sense because that's kind of the part of a brand that you can see at the very first glance, but branding goes deeper than just the visual representations of a brand.

Here’s how I normally define a brand in super super simple terms: Your brand is what you mean to people. It’s how they feel and think about you or your business - and like I said before, it's about more than just the visuals. Those are kind of the symbols in the icons for your brand, what's underneath the surface, but what do the symbols represent?

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How to Build a Strong Brand

Every audience touchpoint is an opportunity to either blend in with the crowd, or create an experience. Branding is essentially creating intentional experiences in a way that sets you apart! Our brains give EXTRA room to unique experiences and makes them stand out in our memories. The days you followed your normal routine last year may not stand out in your memory, but the day trips, vacations, and unusual experiences sure do.

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Ashley Chymiy
Learn Your Customer's Language

So much of your brand strategy hinges on understanding your audience! In fact, branding is all about connecting with your audience, and building a strong emotional association in their minds.

When you speak the the language of your audience, they connect with you in a powerful way. Not only does it show your expertise. It also shows that you care, you listen, and you understand. It shows that you get it. You have invested time and energy, and even your career, into understanding and solving the problems they face.

So how do you learn the language of your audience? Let's break it down into a few easy steps!

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How to Write an Awesome Landing Page

Hey, wonderful you! If you run a business – especially a service-based one – you know your landing page is a critical piece of your marketing and sales system. Is it doing its job?

The key to a great landing page for a service-based business is not a long list of accomplishments, a splashy design, or slick copy. It’s not about SEO or beautiful photography. It’s not about being the smartest, most successful, or most in-demand person in your industry.

I mean, all these things are awesome to have. But they’re not the key!

The key is to a magnetic landing page is showing that you understand your audience and what they need. It’s about meeting people where they are.

This is truly the ticket to grabbing people’s attention and stoking their curiosity about what you can offer.

So whether you’re DIY-ing your website or hiring a designer, knowing these basic principles will help you create a landing page that leaves people wanting more.

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8 Easy Ways to Boost Productivity

When you struggle with motivation and staying focused, it can feel like fighting an uphill battle with yourself. You feel blocked by an invisible wall – whether it’s fear, self-doubt, distraction, or a sense of just being overwhelmed.

If you are having these thoughts, please know that you DO have what it takes, and what you’re experiencing is very normal. And it’s also solvable! You just need the right tools.

Take it from me – it is really, really hard to change these behavior patterns through sheer will power alone. (You'd think it’d be easy to control your own behavior, but it sure as shit is not.)

Because your subconscious is stronger than will power, and it's fighting against you.

But there are techniques and strategies that actually work. They vary from the woo-woo spiritual to the very mundane. Some of them provide a small boost today, others will have a slow-motion impact over the next 10 years, and others can completely change your way of being within a few days (that's not an overstatement).

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Feel CONFIDENT in Your New Biz

Creating a business takes a heck of a lot of hutzpah. Because you’re reading this, I already know you have a rare entrepreneurial spirit and desire for more, deep in your cells. You’re constantly trying new things and pushing your own limits.

When you’re exploring new territory, it’s completely normal to feel out of your depth. It’s natural to feel underprepared – unsure of your ability to deliver and succeed. But you shouldn’t let that stop you from making big shifts in your life!

This post is about building confidence in your new business – the confidence you need to show up fully each day, ready for whatever comes at you.

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Can Your Brand Be Too Consistent? Shake it Up!

Lately I’m seeing some very diligent business owners – smart cookies who understand the value of branding – creating content that could be called too consistent. It always looks and feels exactly the same, carries the same tone, uses the same format, is painstakingly curated, and misses the opportunity to reflect the human experience.

You know what else acts the same all the time, no matter what is happening around it? A robot.

Hyper-consistency can feel safe and even “correct” from a branding perspective – but after a while of too-perfect consistency, it can begin to feel stale, inauthentic, and like your heart isn’t in it. Like you’re not deeply invested in your work and living it every day.

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Ashley Chymiy
Hiring a Biz coach? Know What to Look For!

Hey you, new entrepreneur!

Are you new to the online business world? Are you suddenly seeing ads every which way, showing beautiful women laughing and cavorting across tropical islands in designer clothes, promising that you, too, can have six-figure months in just a few short weeks?

Yea, me too. And I was especially bombarded with these ads when I started researching online business to prepare for my launch.

I’m not naming names, but you may have caught yourself lying in bed reading these people’s webpages at 2am in the dark, your eyes bugging out of your head, wondering if you, too, could make a million dollars this year in passive income, “retire your husband,” and go travel the world.

If that’s your dream, awesome! I fully support that. But along your journey, you may encounter people who promise they can get you there super fast in just a few weeks – big on promises, short on details. 

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Resilience as a New Entrepreneur

Hello, wonderful you! Ashley here, coming at you analog-style.

That’s right – I’m writing this post with a good old fashioned pen, on good old-fashioned paper, using my good old-fashioned hand. (Okay, it has to be typed up at some point, but this draft is totally old school).

Why am I writing this blog post by hand? Well, just moments ago, I was settling in at my desk to write my weekly-ish blog post. I’ve worked over the past few months to maintain a regular blogging habit, and it was time to reinforce it.

But just as I pulled open a new document, the power went out.

Yep – no flickering, no off, then on, then back off. Just out, FOREVER.

Okay, not forever. It will come back on eventually I’m sure (unless this is the end of the world, in which case this day is going very differently from what I expected).

I’ll be honest – for a split-second I thought, “Oh well! Too bad! The universe doesn’t want me to blog, I guess. After all, my blog post ideas are in a Word doc I obviously can’t access right now.”

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How to Claim the Position You WANT!

Hey...where are you?

In bed? On a train? At the library? Your favorite café?

Whatever your answer is, that is your position. And if your position is where you want to be, woohoo! You’ve succeeded at deciding where you want to be and then going there. Well done!

But if where you are isn’t where you want to be, you need start by doing some positioning – that is, you need to figure out where you’d rather be.

Now let’s tweak this question – where is your business?

It’s still a simple question, but when it comes to your brand, the answer might not be so simple. If your business isn’t exactly where you want to be, you guessed it – it’s time for positioning!

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My "Popcorn" Blogging Method

This post is all about quickly creating blog copy that feels fresh, alive, and authentic to your personality. And because I’m hungry and waiting for dinner to finish in the slow cooker, I’m using a food analogy.

Picture this: You’re about to make popcorn. With gusto, you unfurl the crinkly tri-fold of popcorn and Frisbee-throw it into the microwave. Beep-beep-beep, you enter the time indicated on the box, and hit “START.” Then your delicate dance with fate begins.

The popping slowly begins, crescendos to a popping mania, and lo, it dwindles back down to slow popping again.

You spring into action and hit the “STOP” button. With trepidation, you open the microwave and delicately drag the popcorn bag out of the microwave. It smells buttery and fresh. Unburnt… or so you hope.

You delicately open the bag, shake it a bit, and….

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FEAR and How to Kick it in the Tush

Ahh, the F-word.

If you have ever gotten a new business or product off the ground, you may know something a little thing called fear.

One moment you’re chugging along, whistling while you work, happily chipping away at a project. And then the next moment, it’s like you run smack into an invisible force field – and try as you might, there’s no getting past it. 

I’ll let you in on a secret: As I write this post, I’m in the middle of experiencing a spell of fear and resistance.

I’m getting closer to a big new launch, after working on it for weeks and weeks, and it’s like all my deepest fears are bubbling up to the surface. Am I hitting the mark? Is my copy going to resonate the way I want it to? Should I go back to the drawing board on that thing I don’t think is perfect yet? The list goes on.

Luckily I’ve been here before, so I see it for what it is – garden variety resistance.

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