Category: Personal marketing
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What a difference a decade makes!
More than a decade, really. When I started writing this blog in 2006, my phone looked like this. Although that technology now seems hopelessly dated, I think the ideas about advertising to ourselves have held up pretty well. At that time it was often necessary to geek out a bit with our technology to make…
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Occupy your head
TBYB! has always been about the fight to resist corporate influence in our lives. Specifically, we’d like to wrest back control of–or at least participate in–the unconscious discourse in our own heads.
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Reboot
More than anything else, Take Back Your Brain! is a site about seizing your power to create the life you want. What is the desire that has been whispering to you for several months or years? I’ll bet you know what it is. Go ahead and write it down right now in a place where…
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A picture of your target result is worth at least 1000 words of crisp, powerful copy
Images get to us; we remember them and act on them. Sometimes we even seem to try to make our world look like it does in the picture. Advertisers know this, so they make sure to expose you to lots of images of their logos and products, especially pictures of people that look like you…
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10 steps to powerful personal marketing
Personal marketing uses commercial and social marketing principles to help us succeed at goals we have chosen for ourselves. It’s powerful stuff that can really help your life. But the following feedback from a reader made me realize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed about how and where to begin. This article shows…
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Should I sell your attention?
Take Back Your Brain! wrestled with an interesting ethical dilemna this week. For the first time, someone approached me with an offer to advertise on the site. It was a pretty decent offer, too – more than two hundred dollars for doing very little work. Thinking about that offer provided an opportunity for me to…
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Holy piranha, Batman!
You’re exposed to some kind of persuasive message every 7 seconds, on average, for your whole life. And every one those messages has at least one thing in common with the others: ALL of them are about someone else’s priorities!
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Marketing 101
After taking a marketing class winter quarter I’m more convinced than ever that it’s where the action is when it comes to understanding and changing human behavior, and therefore those of us who are motivated to grow can benefit greatly from learning about its fundamental techniques. Marketing includes deciding exactly what you’re selling, honestly assessing…
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The Merchants of Cool
More than any generation in history, people who are young today are not free to create an authentic culture of their own. Instead their hopes and desires are intensively studied by marketers, then amplified and sold back to them in a diabolical feedback loop. That’s the premise of the PBS Frontline documentary “The Merchants of…
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How does your marketing stack up to Super Bowl ads?
TBYB encourages you to level the playing field, as it were, by stepping up the production values of your own advertising. Though you’ll likely never decide to sink a million bucks into producing an ad to influence yourself, it’s certainly possible to add a little color, a photograph, or a slogan. Rather than just writing…