What is branding?

Branding is basically the process of assigning an identity to your product or a single individual and then later using that identity in various marketing campaigns and promotions to build up credibility.

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.

- Seth Godin’s definition of a brand

What are the benefits of branding?

Every company, both offline and online, should strive to make the perfect identity for themselves. Other than just working hard to improve their product or service, branding can go a long way into improving sales even if your product is not as good as the competition.

The most important thing in branding is being consistent. Using the same colors, the same fonts, the same logo, the same catch-phrase. You want your identity to be recognizable by just looking at the color combinations and not even trying to read the text.

When you manage to turn your company logo, your personal name, surname or photo associated with the words “quality” or “success” – then you know you have done a good job.

Branding and blogging (example)

Let’s say you have a blog with great branding done on it. You continue to write good blog posts and you gain more and more readers/subscribers every day. Readers that trust you, that like and share your opinion. When they see your blogs name somewhere else on banners or they meet you on a forum and see read your name or signature links, they will associate you with quality and helpful content.

They will easily forgive you

One of the best benefits of having a recognizable brand is that your users/readers will easily forgive you if you make a mistake such as writing a low quality blog post or having some kind of manufacturing error on your physical product. They will not reach for the unsubscribe button as easily as they might when you are just somebody random and unknown without a recognizable identity. Having a excellent brand will not make up but a useless product or poor quality blog though.

Two types of online branding

When talking about existing online, there are two basic types of branding you can choose:

• personal branding
• personal branding with an alias
• company branding

Personal branding

When doing personal branding, an individual business owner or blogger chooses to brand his name alongside a photo of himself. He uses this name while commenting on other blogs, participating on forum and various other social networking websites.

Personal branding with an alias

Some bloggers or website owners that like to remain anonymous or if they have been using a certain alias for a long time, they might want to use that alias for branding. In some situations using an alias can be a good decision but it’s always better to not be anonymous. Check out my last post about The Importance Of Not Being Anonymous and find out why I think it’s better to use your read name instead of an alias..

Here are some examples of personal branding with and without aliases:

Head of the webspam team at Google, Matt Cutts (his blog) is a great example of personal branding without even having a logo, just the name itself.

Robb Sutton has a great thing going on with transforming his name into a stylish logo. Best way to do personal branding in my opinion.

Another blog I read is the David Shaw Blog which is another great and simple example of personal branding with your real name. Maybe not as stylish as Robb Sutton but still very effective.

Another simple and effective example of personal branding from my friend Ileane. I like this blog title because, compared to the other examples, the title is really a sentance that looks like an announcement: "Ms. Ileane Speaks!" that subconsciously demands attention.

18-year-old student and blogger Melvin Dichoso has another great example of personal branding with even a nice associative logo by his name. This is also a variation of using only your first name and not your entire name.

An "extreme" example of not using your entire name and maybe kinda going into the alias party of branding.

It is important to know that you don’t have to be a graphic artist to do good branding. Most of it is based on research and a good  and consistent catch-phrase can go a long way into improving your brand.

Company branding

If you have a business website or one which is run by a few people or a blog with a few friends, you will want to choose a name and logo that will represent your site online. I’ve came across some great examples in the last few months that I have been interested in branding and some of them have really WOW-ed.

So here are some examples of company branding that I would like to share with you:

One of the best, if not THE best example of online branding I have ever come across. This "Fat Cow Hosting" company has it all. They have this great cow mascot and an entire virtual world build around it. They invite visitors to join The Herd, they promise "good hosting, no bull", etc. Really a great job!

Brian Clark's Copyblogger is a simple and associative brand that everyone knows about. It is a blog about writing copy on blog and you can't miss it when you see the typewriter font even if it doesn't have a vector logo.

An excellent example of a clean and simple blog branding with a logo along with a 2-color scheme. This is great because even without the text, the logo itself would represent the blog.

An example of a sentence-like, color-scheme branding method with a nice catch phrase that makes it clear what the site is about.

It’s great to see an evolution of a brand. Jack Curtis from “Sequence Hosting” is doing a great job with the branding and re-branding of his hosting company website and I’m looking forward to seeing his results.

Branding and marketing

After a successful branding operation you will want to use your new brand for marketing as well. Like i mentioned before, it is very important to stay consistent with marketing material by using the same or similar color schemes. When each of your banners looks like it could represent a different company, then you know you have to go back to the drawing board.

Here are some useful links that can help you with branding:

Graphic Leftovers

Graphic Leftovers is a great stock site where you can buy among a lot of other graphic stuff, a great logo that can help you brand your product or website. The prices are quite low and if nothing else, some logos there can give you an idea to make your own. Besides logo designs, Graphic Leftovers can help you with hundreds of banner designs.

Graphic River

Graphicriver.net is one of the most popular stock graphics places on the Internet being a part of the also popular Envato marketplace chain. I’ve came across some fantastic and professional banner designs for affordable prices that can make a great difference in your branding. There are dozens of categories worth scrolling through so check it out!

Thanks for reading and sharing this post on your favourite social networking sites. I hope branding goes successful for you and that you have fun doing it! Feel free to ask and questions about branding in the comments because there is probably something I’ve missed.

No related posts.

While most people might like this tactic and the fact that they might get a lot of followers in a short period of time, it really doesn’t guarantee your twitter account quality. Let me tell you why.

Quantity vs. Quality

You click on a persons Twitter name, you see 8500 following and 8000 followers. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Is this person thinking:

“So what if I follow 8000 people, who cares, as long as they follow me back and they get to see me tweeting my blog links.”

Or is he really interested in what 8500 Twitter members want to say? Ok I understand you might want to return someones follow just to be nice, but what’s the point? I’d personally rather have 100 interested followers that will click on my blog post links and read at least half the post (may even comment) then 8500 people that will ignore my tweets and just spam their own stuff.

Social networking should never be exploited for one-way communication broadcasting, information/link dumping or spam. Unfortunatley there aren’t rules against all of those mentioned but there is a thing called online credibility. Social interaction can improve your results in the long run and I’m sure a lot of people with more experience with social media would agree.

Information overload

How do you effectively track 8500 people tweeting so that you can actually benefit from following all of them?

Twitter is pretty close to being real-time and I don’t know about you but every time I search something, a few seconds after I get the results displayed, the yellowish banner slides on top saying “XXX more tweets before you started searching”. It’s impossible to benefit from everything even if you spend 24/7 online, in front of your computer.

Something you tweet at 12:00 may already (any probably is) kicked down to and out from someones visible twitter stream by 12:03. Depends how many followers your followers actually have.

If you maintain a high following to being followed ratio, it will make your account look popular and more people might decide to join in!

Twitter lists

This is where the new Twitter lists feature comes in. You can follow a small number of people that you really like directly with your account. Then you can follow dozens of lists with hundreds of members about certain niches if you really want.

Are you doing it right?

There is a field called Average Time Spent On Site in Google Analytics which tells you the average time users spend on your site. Read one of your blog articles in a normal pace, time yourself, crosscheck the times. If your reading time is close to the average time spent on site from the stats, you’re doing a decent job, especially if you are a beginner. On the other hand, if your average time on site is 20 seconds and you have thousands of followers, you might want to rethink your strategy 

This can of course be most accurate if your main promotional method is Twitter like mine is at the moment. But even if it’s not, the tactic is great and you should use it.

What’s my secret?

No secret what so ever. Just be an altruist (I just had to use this word because it’s best describes it). What this means is, follow people you are actually interested in, ignoring your followers count. Ok, you can use it sometimes to motivate yourself and follow back people you might find interesting.

My Twitter account followers graph from Su.pr

Re-tweet things you come across that you think would benefit people with the same interest as yourself. Also re-tweet other peoples posts out of the blue, without waiting for that person to return the favour and re-tweet one of your posts.

So how do you spread your tweets if you just joined twitter and have no followers. Simple, you use

Hash tags

Hash tags are strings of text written after the symbol # which then turns that string of text into a link – when clicked, takes you to a search page for that word.

I’d like to think of hashtags as TV channels where you can broadcast information even if you don’t have followers. This method of tweeting can usually lead to people noticing you and following you. Especially if they think your tweets will benefit them.

Don’t forget to socialize and make friends!

You don’t have to … but after all, Twitter IS a social networking site. Don’t be a mindless Twitter drone just tweeting your own stuff not even caring about someone elses content.

I’ve met some great people on Twitter among my 35-ish followers that I wouldn’t change for anything. These people have given me ideas and motivation to do some things I’ve never even knew I could. Would I have noticed these people if I had 1.000, 5.000 or 10.000+ followers? Maybe – probably – not really – if you’re lucky.

It is not my intention…

to badmouth people who follow a huge amount of accounts. Some of them are also good friends of mine. That’s why I’d like to leave this in the air and let you comment why you guys think it’s good or bad to follow a lot of people and how do you manage to find the perfect tweets in your overpopulated twitter stream.

Conclusion

Wrapping this post up, I want to show you two examples of great Twitter ratios which just give out the impression that these two individuals are great content providers.

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to share your opinion and to share this post with your friends if you think it’s worth it.

Related posts:

1. Hashtag Heaven – Getting Started On Twitter
2. Getting Rid Of Twitter DMs
3. Questionable (Twitter) marketing tactics

So let me tell you a bit about it and how it could help your business evolve.

Improving much?

How much have you improved (business-wise) in the last few months – or have you been following pretty much the same routing for ages? If the answer is YES, you should definitely be looking for new ways to reach your customers. In this blog post I am going to explain to you how a simple yet powerful online tool can boost your business quality.

So what is it?!

It’s called Animoto! and it is an online tool used to compile images, video clips and sound into a video presentation that will really catch your audiences eye.

What is so special about Animoto?

Instead of just making a plain unattractive slide show presentation, Animoto gives you the power to create videos with impressive and unique transitions between elements accompanied by your own music (or something from their growing sound library).

“Animoto makes a perfect product perfecter.” – TechCrunch

“I was honestly blown away at the quality.”– LA Times

“Promises to usher in a whole new age of video-making.” – Enterpreneur

“A superior slideshow.” – National Geographic

In stead of  explaining all the features, I’m going to embed a nice little example I made about 2 months ago with Animoto. Just a short presentation for my Knowledge Reactor website:

Anyone can do this! If you know how to make and arrange folders in Windows, it’s as easy as that! Now let’s get to the important part.

Who should use Animoto?

There are 4 special sections of the Animoto website:

• Animoto for business

Here you can check out some examples of product presentations, service presentations and even videos about entire buildings such as wellness centers and hotels.

• Animoto for photography

A great way you can use Animoto is if you own a photo studio or if you just take pictures for a living. Make attractive presentations and compilations of wedding, conventions, parties and other events. Instead of spending hours trying to learn how to do it with different kinds of software or hiring someone to do them for you, do it yourself! You have full control.

• Animoto for real estate

One of my favourite uses for Animoto! If you are into the real estate business, it’s as easy as taking a couple of dozen photos and a few short video clips of the property. Wish I knew about this a year ago, when I was working on a local real estate website.

• Animoto for a cause

Fight for a cause with Animoto! They actually support non-profit and humanitarian organizations by giving them free pro accounts. How great is that!

After you make your video, you can …

share it on other social networking websites or export it directly to YouTube. There is also an embeding option (like shown above). The best thing ever is that you can download your video in high resolution MP4 DVD-burnable ISO format.

Some of the features like the high-res download and the Animoto watermark removal are only available in the pro account but if you own a business 200-something dollars a year should be a problem, considering the benefits of the tool.

Animoto affiliate program

A great way to make money with Animoto is to refer people to their website with your unique referral links. Not just that someone clicking your referral link benefits you, but it also gives the person who clicked a $5 discount on their all-access pass purchase!

I’d like to share this referral code ENLDZYQW if you are interested in getting that discount, just write it down in the referral box during registration. Another option is to click the “Animoto save $5″ banner above. You can also choose not to use it and try the service for free.

Share your videos!

I hope this post has helped you reach new levels in presenting your business, product or service. Feel free to share your Animoto video links in the comments and write your thoughts.

Related posts:

1. Questionable (Twitter) marketing tactics

No matter how much (or little) blogging you do, you should always be on the look-out for ways to improve your posts. Improving your posts means more visitors will actually read it instead of just skimming through your text. They might even subscribe to your feed as a result!

Here are 6 ways you will make even Chuck Norris scratch his head:

1. Learn to think like your reader

Whether you are writing a post on a blog or a landing page for your business website the single, most important thing you need to focus on is thinking like your reader.

Does your reader want to read more about you or about the product he is thinking of buying? Is he going to value hype or fact, theory or testimonials? Put yourself in his shoes and serve the right appetizer, main course and dessert.

2. Transform features into benefits

Readers visit your blog because they want to read something or download something that will benefit them. It can either be a piece of information or a freebie Photoshop brush, your visitors are looking for value.

The best way to show them that value is to saturate your posts with benefits. You don’t have to … but if you do write about a product or service, make sure you turn features into benefits.

I have found this to be especially useful for business websites promoting their products or for affiliate marketers.

If you are writing about a WordPress plug-in that will automatically delete spam comments – a feature for that would be “This plug-in will delete your spam comments automatically!” Try changing that into a benefit, like for example: “By deleting spam automatically, this plug-in will give you 30 extra minutes per day to work on your blog!”

You can do the same with any product, just focus on what the user gets from it and how it would change the way he or she lives/works/blogs/etc.

3. Poke readers in the eye with your headline

Use your imagination and try to combine unusual words that might make your post headline catchy but not obscure.

Here’s an example:

• Instead of “10 Mistakes That Bloggers Make” try using something like “10 Crimes Committed by Bloggers”

What is the main difference between the two blog titles? Which one would you be more likely to click?

Everyone knows that the first title is about mistakes that bloggers make. The mistakes could be while writing posts, making their blog templates, using copyrighted images.

The second one, on the other hand, can seem like a headline from a newspaper where someone got killed by an angry blogger right? People get excited, curious and really want to check it out. It’s as simple as that!

Another example you can learn from is the title I put together for this blog post. Chuck Norris has nothing to do with the world of blogging and copy-writing but he has become a synonym for being hardcore. It is that association that drove some people to this post.

You might even be one of those people that clicked the blog post link because you wanted to find out what Chuck has to do with writing copy. Turns out, nothing – but you learned something new didn’t you!?

NOTE: These headline tactics should never be used to mislead or trick your readers into visiting and seeing something TOTALLY unrelated! Overdoing it could be seriously counterproductive for your business or blog.

4. Make your text easy to scan

It is a busy world we live in and often people don’t have time to read through your entire blog post. Your job is to setup some sticky terrain for them to get “trapped” in and attract their interest.

Aside to writing eye-poking headlines, make sure your subheadings are also catchy. Pay special attention to the beginning of each of your paragraphs. Does the first sentence spark any interest in the reader? No? Think of what attracts your attention when scanning a blog.

A reader should be able to get the point (punchline) of your post by just reading your headings and subheadings.

Reveal just the right amount of information in your subheadings to interest your readers and they will stay!

5. Fragment your text

Reading text on the computer screen is half as fast than reading it from a piece of paper. How do you compensate for this? You split your post text into fragments with noticeable subheadings, then you split each fragment into 5-sentence paragraphs.

Splitting your text up into paragraphs and putting noticeable blank spaces between them will make your readers job easier.

Vary the length of your paragraphs and keep your sentences short! It makes it easier to read and navigate through the text.

Another thing to avoid is using justified text because nobody likes reading boxy chunks of text.

6. Keep your language simple

You want to provide useful information to your readers not stun them with your fabulous excessive knowledge of using superfluous verbs that will short circuit their neurons.

No!

The last thing you want to do is make your readers feel like they (or you) are from a different planet. In fact, you don’t want them to feel like that at all! Try to keep your blog posts formatted as a simple one-on-one conversation. One where you want to explain something to your friend and in which you are using the simplest examples and language.

Stick to the point and deliver your message!

If you can manage to follow these 6 simple steps, Chuck Norris won’t stand a chance – He might knock you out though…

Related posts:

1. 6 Most Successful Types Of Headlines

The anonymous beneficiary

A month ago, after being “followed” by an individual on Twitter, he contacted me promoting his website that was about a Twitter marketing e-book. The e-book was completely free, as the website said on numerous banners and flashy-text and the person suggested that it would really help me.

At that point I was quite amazed because it was the first time someone personally approached me via Twitter PM and offered a friendly suggestion, for free even.

So I went for it and clicked on his website link. Got to the website, scrolled down a couple of miles and found the 300 x 500 pixel download button and as it usually works, entered my name and e-mail after clicking the download button.

The download started and finished in a few seconds and after seeing the PDF file size I asked myself – “How could anyone fit anything useful into a 15KB PDF file?”. Boy was I surprised when I opened that PDF file. There where only a few pages, most of them blank and one with a short introductory text and a Pay-Pal “BUY” button.

The realization

After realizing that I have just almost been tricked into buying something that was firstly presented to me as being free – I closed up the website, deleted the PDF file and blocked the person who so nicely offered to help me out for free.

There is one thing I want to make clear here: It was not a problem for me spending those $5 or $10 on that book that might have good content in it but the fact that the website was just a big lie really insulted me.

I guess the owner thought people would get to the “BUY” part and think to themselves “Ah well, if I came along this far in the process of getting the e-book, I might as well pay the money.”

Conclusion

If you are doing Internet marketing, affiliate marketing or just selling your own product on the street next to a hot-dog stand somewhere, the most important thing is credibility (would like to give props to Lisa Irby of “2 Create A Website” for all her texts and videos about credibility in affiliate marketing, it has taught me a great deal).  How highly do your potential customers think of you and your opinions (or of your company if you present one)? Always try to play fair and don’t mislead your customers because a few failed sales can hurt you a lot less than one disgruntled or insulted customer.

Thank you for reading and I would like to know what YOU think about my experience and other similar situations. If you have personally had a similar experience I would love if you would share it in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Getting Rid Of Twitter DMs
2. How I Got 300 Twitter Followers Without Mass Following Others
3. How to Spice Up Your Product Presentation