The Importance of Branding Your Online Business
Starting an online business involves a lot of planning and preparation and one of the things that should be included in your plan is how you are going to establish your business as a brand. The brand you establish for your online business will be your identity to the online community and the one aspect that makes you stand out from other businesses that are similar.
Branding your online business involves planning your approach from the very beginning when you plan the other elements of your business. Here are a few tips on how to establish your brand and why it is important to the success of your online business.
Come Up with a Logo
In addition to creating a name for your business that is easy to remember come up with a logo that will help people to identify your business brand. As you promote your online business people will begin to identify with the logo and immediately recognize your product or service. People tend to remember visual images so a logo certainly helps when it comes to getting your prospects to recognize you.
Start Creating a Buzz
Just like in the offline world word of mouth advertising goes a long way on the Internet and especially with all of the social networking tools that are readily available online. Start creating a buzz about your brand by creating and distributing high quality information that is useful and adds value to the lives of others.
– Tweet Your Brand: Use your professional profile with Twitter to tweet high quality information that is related to your area of expertise. Develop a list of followers that will start associating your brand with quality. If you are consistent with quality your followers will begin telling others about you.
– Network Your Brand: Offer high quality information on social networking sites such as Facebook and social bookmarking sites such as Digg. Take an interest in others in the community in addition to offering your own information. Use your brand name whenever possible and help others with solutions to problems. If you do this on a consistent basis people will start buzzing about your brand and you will be associated with offering quality.
– Brand Your Videos: Create informational or instructional “how to” videos on sites like YouTube. When you make your video, design it in a way that reflects your brand and then offer high quality information that helps other solve a problem. Brand the video and create a link to your site. If your video is useful others will pass it along to their friends and people will start buzzing about it.
– Advertise Your Brand: Create press releases about your new business and your brand and use viral marketing tools such as Squidoo to distribute your announcements and information throughout the Internet. Make sure your brand is clearly defined in your advertisements and any information you distribute on the Internet.
– Guest Write: Offer to write articles for other blogs and newsletters and place your brand in your signature. Make sure the information you offer is high quality and relevant to the topic of the blog or newsletter. Offer to do something in return for the author of the blog or newsletter such as writing a testimonial about their product.
These are a few ways to establish your brand online and start creating a buzz about your product or service. As you can see, if people identify your brand with quality your business will be easily recognized and you will build many long term relationships with clients in the years to come.
