Should I absolutely use my real name for my personal brand or can I use an alias (my middle name)?

I think I get where you are going with this. Your company buys products/merchandise from people looking to sell that merchandise. Example: Amy has a printer and she is looking to sell her printer. She does not know where to sell her printer so she Google's, "Where can I sell a printer" and you want your landing page to surface specifically for that product. This is an excellent growth tactic and one that can be extremely effective. First, I would start by creating a general template for this set of pages including everything except that which would be specific to a specific category. Then I would go down a level and think about how you could speak specifically to each category. Example: Instead of saying something general like, "XYZMarketplace has bought 100,000 products this year" I would be targeted on exactly what they originally searched for. So this could be along the lines of, "XYZMarketplace has bought over 1,000 printers this month" or "Sell Your Printer in 5 Minutes". This talks directly to what they are searching for. Often times companies stop there and after a user clicks your CTA (call to action) the user is pushed into the standard onboarding flow. This often leads to a higher drop-off rates during onboarding. I would suggest that you customize your onboarding flow for that specific category. Example: The user that was searching for, "Where can I sell a printer" and landed on your printer landing page liked what you were offering and clicked the CTA of "Sell My Printer Today". Now you may have an onboarding workflow that says, "We are thrilled that you decided to sell your printer on XYZ. What type of printer do you have?" Then use icons and images, to take them through the decision tree. This does take more work than having just one generalized onboarding process, but it will greatly increase your conversions. The tools I would use to do this is a combination between Unbounce and Optimizely. They both are going to be hugely beneficial. If you are looking for a free alternative, I would suggest Google's little-known option called Google Experiments. This will get you started, however, based on what you are looking for it may not be powerful enough to effectively manage the number of A/B tests and landing pages you would be doing. In regards to spam, it is highly unlikely your pages will be marked as spam as long as your pages contents are considerably different. If you duplicate the product specific landing pages and only replace the instance of the product then you are running a significant risk. If you actually speak to the differences beyond the product name you will not have this problem. I would love to chat with you further about this. Here is my Clarity.fm VIP link for a free call. https://clarity.fm/lipmanb/vip/t

What a great question! You are on the right track. First, lets define Avatar as "An icon or figure representing a particular person." In business application, an avatar is a representation of your ideal client/customer. A business may have multiple avatars representing several target demographics. Some prefer to distill this down to one person as an “avatar.” I recently interviewed super entreprenuer John Lee Dumas of EOfire.com and he has a very clear Avatar he calls "Jimmy" that he uses for business decisions you may want to check out. I hope that you have already gone through the exercise of your UVP, or Unique Value Proposition. If not, may I suggest the worksheet on this page, first: http://bit.ly/1kYTLbf Ok, so once you've clarified the why choose me, then start working on your Avatar, that's the who, or as we marketers like to call them: personas that represent segments from your target market. You have to start somewhere, right? So do. Are you going to first focus locally in your zip code and surrounding area? That can be one piece in helping you visualize your Avatar's lifestyle. Target marketing has to do with breaking your potential global audience into segments, specifically only the potential buyers of our product, service, or cause. As much as we might be tempted, we can’t be all things to all people. We have to commit and put some stakes in the ground. Are you ready to write your personal ad? Who are you looking for? Some of the most basic questions you should ask in forming an idea of Customer Segmentation has to do with what these people want, need, think, and feel. No time is wasted from this exercise because it will ultimately lead you to where and with who they hang out (their tribe.) Why is that our desired end point? Because that virtual or real (coffee shop, tradeshow, website, search engine, twitter feed, health fair, street location, podcast, meetup, traditional media) is where I should be hanging out with my product, service or cause and shouting my UVP from the rooftops as part of the conversation! Taking this thought experiment all the way through will also assist you in the critical understanding of whether the segment is large enough for you to be successful. I like using the Personas app (available on iPad) to put forth a visual representation of my potential target markets, but a white board works too! Literally put in a photo representation of your Avatar with a Name, and start brainstorming out: Think and Feel? See? Hear? Say and Do? Hangs out with/where? For you, offering your B2B services, maybe explore linked in to find where your peeps hang out and get a clearer idea of, let's call her, Samantha. Samantha is a small business owner of a growing service business whose revenues just got in the black. She has two employees and she's looking to hire another. She is struggling with getting her website up and mobile friendly and feels like she needs to be more effective in communicating what she does. She is overworked, in her mid 40s and recently divorced with 2 boys ages 10, 12. She has little time for fluff and needs guidance in creating a system that will help run her business. Can you help Samantha? :-) If you'd like to get more tips that sound like this, I'd be tickled if you let me know if Sell Local. Think Global. speaks to you. It's my first book and I'm feeling very vulnerable putting myself out there! eep! Available now on Amazon: http://bit.ly/olgasbook

Whenever I think of skills, the first one I think of is people skills. I think that is the most important type of skill-set to have. Knowing how to treat and talk to people is beyond important in the workplace. When you know how to talk and treat people, it really doesn't matter what kind of product you are selling. When you make it about the person and not the product, walls fall down. Learning how to read people and get a feel for their personality has really helped too. It's a shame more management teams don't take the time to learn and teach this to their staff. I hope that helps!

Sarah is correct here. Becoming an influencer or authority in any area takes time and dedication, is not something you can typically leverage over night. My suggestions to you is stick to a hyper targeted niche, narrow down your vision and scale back all efforts to the most minimal most targeted effort possible that will yield you to the next effort all with one goal in mind. In growth hacking, we take this approach as having minimal goals but approaching them aggressively to reach highest results at each goal level. No matter how minimal the goal might be feel, if you're moving closer to the bottom line the goal is worth the effort. With that said once you have a niche and only focus on that the social platforms and users will begin to recognize this and turn to you. A quick hack for boost, although it typically doesn't list is writing a piece for publication to local journalists or online blogger. Write about something in your niche, look for relatable blogs or journalists and send it to them. Follow the bloggers, message them, ask for guest articles, or make suggestions on their posts vi their comments with links to your own blog. Dedicate a Facebook page with images (not info) and always include a link to that guest post, or your blog, or article. For example, the first time I came out on television, I managed to get more views of the back stage images than I did on the actual show. I leverage that into more appearances and visitors to my websites and businesses. The authority level can after a lot of work tho. Expertise came to me in my field due to experience and education all I had to do is expose my insight but even that took time and consistency in one area.

I face the same challenge! I came up with a separate name that still represents my brand but doesn't force users/partners/clients to try and remember my complicated name.