Category Archives: marketing

Thoughts on Marketing Your Brand Across Social Media

I did not major in marketing. I didn’t even minor in business. However, I still wanted to share my thoughts on a cohesive aesthetic across online mediums. (Blogger, youtube, and actor website).

Actors, much as we may resist thinking of ourselves this way, are a product in a self-owned small business. I want my product to have a specific look that can be easily identified. I’m trying to brand myself across different media. The way that I’m accomplishing this goal is pretty basic; consistency in colors and images.

My biggest tie in across mediums is the color scheme. I chose blues and whites. I chose blue because it makes my eyes pop. Seriously, that’s the reason I chose that scheme.

I also have my profile picture consistent across most mediums. Further, I designed my logo and used it on both my website and my youtube channel. I deliberately didn’t use the logo on this blog because I didn’t think it was appropriate. Self-promotion is an added plus of having this blog. However, its content is not centered on me. It’s about the business, process, etc. of acting and the city of Chicago.

Here are some screen captures of various online presences:

Website Screen-capture
Blog Screen Capture
Youtube Screen-capture

A note on my twitter:
If you’ve visited my Twitter you’ll notice that the only thing that it has in common with the other mediums is my profile picture. Other than that, it’s a crazy colorful comic book type tiled background. I love it. It’s quirky, it’s eye catching, and it’s me. Is it bad that it isn’t consistent with the other mediums? I don’t know. Does my concern for cohesiveness outweigh how much I like its look? No.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on consistency across mediums. Does it matter? Am I completely full of it? Etc.

Resources: How to Design and Code an Actor Website

I read the columns on Backstage rather regularly. One such piece, by Taryn Southern, gives a list of ten online tools that an actor should be using. You can read that article by clicking here. Unsurprisingly, one of those was a website. The author warns, in another article, that you shouldn’t do this solo if you don’t have any web skills. Well…there’s no time like the present and you can learn anything on the internet.

If you’re on this blog because you’re interested in acting, let me tell you that frugality is going to be essential. With that in mind, I’ve put in lots and lots of hours of sweat equity into this most recent project. Namely, I’ve been mocking up an actor website in Photoshop Elements 5 and then painstakingly coding it in pure HTML and CSS. (Caveat: For the contact form I used php in addition to HTML and CSS).

I’ve never done this. Ever. The closest I’ve come to coding was copying and pasting the embed code from youtube into blogger. This is a completely different animal. But, as I mentioned above, you can learn almost anything on the internet.

When I’ve got my site up and running I’ll share that. For now, here’s a screen capture of the site running locally on Chrome. I ended up really liking how it turned out. Hopefully, everything will go well when I upload it to a server. I’ll probably do another post on how I chose my web host and the process of changing it over so that it will run online.

After the picture, you’ll find some of the resources I used. I pulled from all over the internet, and I know I’m leaving things out, but I hope it will help get you started.

My self-designed and coded Actor Website
Most basic: I used Notepad ++’s online demo to code the entire thing.
The resources I kept going back to were: Lifehacker;  CSS-tricks; and W3Schools.

Photoshop Mockup (I used Elements version 5 and it still worked, you’re just going to have more work-arounds if you’re using an older form of photoshop.)
CSS-tricks

Where to code
Notepad ++ Demo

Basic HTML
Lifehacker
CSS-tricks (a video about converting your mockup to both HTML and CSS)

Basic CSS
Lifehacker

Putting it together
Lifehacker

Embedding Video in HTML
HTML Goodies

Downloading PDF HTML Code (for resumes)
Whirlpool Forum

Creating a Contact Form (I’m not sure if mine works yet because it needs to be tested online)
Tangled in Design

These are the basics to get you started. If you think of something specific that you want to do, just google it. There are lots of resources out there that will get your design from photoshop to the internet.

One note: Don’t forget to test your site across browsers. Mine worked perfectly in Chrome, almost perfectly in IE, and not at all in Firefox and Safari. The issue was relative path vs. absolute path in the HTML. Chrome and IE recognized my absolute paths but the others didn’t. I sent out a cry for help via Facebook and one of my friends solved the problem for me. Thus, don’t be afraid to ask for help!