Building Your Brand
In the last several years, there's been a growing recognition of the importance of "branding" for businesses and organizations of all size. Far more than just a marketing plan, branding encompasses every aspect of your organization's interactions with customers. In upcoming months, we'll be giving more tips about branding in Sparks, but the essence of a brand is a person's gut feeling about your company. Strong brands build relationships with their customers, creating a loyal base which allows them to claim greater market share and more easily achieve business goals.

Just as in personal relationships, the key to a great branding relationship is trust. Honoring do-not-call requests, having a customer-friendly privacy policy, and consistently delivering on your promises all help to build trust, which in turn help to build your brand. Learn more about building trust in this excellent article from MarketingProfs.com: Trust is a Two-Way Street.

Four keys to higher
search engine rankings
A recent issue of SitePro News gave a rundown of four key ways to improve your rankings in Google. Not incidentally, these are the four keys to improving your rankings in most search engines:

• Identify the best keywords for your site
• Use keywords in your URL and Title tag
• Use <h1> tags and keyword density
• Links, links, and more links!

See the Keywords section of our Web Smarts: Search Engine Strategies page for resources on selecting good keywords. See the Linking Strategies section of our Driving Traffic to Your Site page for great info on building effective strategies for getting other high-quality sites to link to yours. These simple changes can make a significant difference in how your site performs in search engines. Learn more by reading the SitePro News article.

Sparks on holiday until January
Sparks will be taking a break next month for the holidays, but will be back in January with more news, tips, projects, and the next VisoVerbo winner! We wish all our readers a wonderful holiday season.

This month's winner: Damini Solomon!
In addition to wild acclaim, Damini wins a T-shirt featuring this one-of-a-kind design. Have a favorite quote or saying? Send it in! If your quote is chosen, you'll receive a T-shirt with a custom design! Check out your competition here.

See the creative process for the design above

Catherine Hilt-Hughes
Catherine Hilt-Hughes is a life coach near Boulder, Colorado specializing in working with people in transition. Whether they're moving into a new career or trying to leave old patterns behind, Catherine's clients seek ideas and support for creating positive change in their lives. While Catherine had experimented with several business card designs in the past, she wanted something that would truly communicate the essence of her business and be something she could be proud to hand out.

We worked with Catherine to produce a simple business card which expresses the feel of her coaching approach. Gentle, supportive, and positive, Catherine acts more as a catalyst for her client than a dynamic analyst. Our challenge was to create a design which captures that sense of gentleness in an easy-to-produce business card.

Our design captures the sense of expansion and transformation that are key to the coaching experience, while the green color palette and heart/leaf icon keep the feeling gentle and natural. We designed a two-sided card so recipients could "discover" the tag line by turning the card over. Simplicity and balance work together to express Catherine's unique approach.

See the business card designed by Cairril.com Design