If you think the prices you can charge your clients depend entirely on your skills and the quality of your services, you're dead wrong. Having killer skills is a prerequisite to being successful in the marketplace, but surprisingly enough, those skills can have little to do with what your customers pay you.

Moreover, if your website doesn't project the right kind of image and speaks the right sort of words to your clients, you'll be left playing the "cheapest price wins" game, and never be able to charge what you're really worth.

The difference between hearing crickets and hearing your account cha-ching all day long is your brand.

Every business owner and entrepreneur needs to get right the following three brand elements to get ahead: context, perception, and priorities. And because talking about online branding and website presentation can sometimes feel a little abstract, we will use real-life experiments to see exactly how these three factors can affect your brand and your prices, and how you can successfully incorporate them into your overall website plan.

The Subterranean Musician

Joshua Bell is the Grammy Award-winning violinist who played the Oscar-winning score in the movie "The Red Violin." In 2007, after a couple of full-house, standing-room-only concerts, with the "cheap tickets" going for $100 a pop, the virtuoso fiddler teamed up with a Washington Post reporter to conduct an experiment.

Exchanging a formal concert suit for jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, Bell set up at a corner of L'Enfant Plaza Metro Station in Washington DC and played part of his concert program while he stood next to a trash can. Both reporter and musician wanted to see whether people going by would recognize the quality of the playing (even if they didn't recognize the musician) and whether they would stop to enjoy the music.

1. The context of the experience

What do you think happened that cold January morning in DC? Surprisingly, only a couple of people stopped. The man who has been said to "play like a god" barely got some spare change for his efforts.

Did Joshua Bell play any worse that morning than during his evening concerts? Nope.

Was everyone who happened to pass him by tone-deaf? Again, no.

The problem was not the "service" or "product" but the context. People weren't at the subway station to enjoy the music. They were furiously shuffling in and out of subway cars, trying to get to work on time, thinking about their big presentation, and planning out the day ahead of them. A busy subway station during morning rush hour is hardly the right context for classical music.

Context frames everything, including the value we ascribe to something. And this same rule of context applies to your website.

With so much emphasis given to online content these days, we've forgotten the importance of context. But the right context is what determines the value of your services to your customers.

If your website looks completely amateurish, with half the buttons and links on it not working, and everything simply thrown together willy-nilly—just so you have some content—then you're practically placing your business next to a trash can in a subway station. Will anyone pay you $100 to "play" for them?

Nope—most people won't even throw a dollar bill your way. For your website to function as a successful base for your online business, it must provide the right professional (and professional-looking), high-value context that will frame your high-quality services or products.

2. Perceptions and expectations

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Three Branding Lessons From a Grammy Award-Winning Violinist

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Julia Melymbrose

Julia Melymbrose is the copywriter at the branding and website studio Chocolate and Caviar, which specializes in creative, one-of-a-kind websites.

LinkedIn: Julia Melymbrose

Twitter: @JMelymbrose