How to Brand A Small Business Website

Branding of your website is important because it contributes to the long term value of your business.  It creates a sense of customer confidence.   For a small business - your brand is the niche value you bring to the market.  Its the expectation of value in the customers mind about your product.  Part of building a brand is creating an impression in the market.   There are a number of ways you can do that with your website.

• Memorable Logo - a logo is not a brand although it represents one.  All great brands have a memorable logo.  Your website should have one too.  Its not the most important thing - but it can symbolize the value you bring consistently.
• Email List - You have to have a way to engage your customers.  Email is one of the easiest.  You can start having a small relationship by sending short emails to your customers.
• Press Releases - You should publish anything of interest about your brand as often as possible.  There are many free online press release sites.
• Free Content - Give away something of value.  This could be an small e-book or a pdf file.  The kinds I appreciate the most are things that are of real value - not just sales pitches.  Many online businesses use free content to get email addresses.  I personally lean toward just giving material away without requiring an email address.  You might try a combination if you must.
• Blogging - Having a blog is a great way to demonstrate your brand.  Google loves blogs and indexes the pages quickly for blogs that are updated regularly.  
• Twitter - Twitter is becoming a premier search site.  If you have a truly unique offering - making updates about it on Twitter can drive traffic to your website.   You can set up a Twitter account for your business.
• Compelling Content - You will have to be prepared for your visitors by having interesting pages.
• Newsletter or Ezine - Offer to your email subscribers a periodic newsletter.   Your logo and brand slogan should go out with the email if you can.  Try something like MailChimp.com
• Auto-responders - Send an email out to any one who requests it - night or day.  Most hosting companies provide this.
• Domain Name - Use your domain name everywhere.  Make sure its in your email signature and all your correspondence.

Tips For A Well Branded Blog

1. You cant blog unless you already have a personal brand. I joke about this – but I really believe that you cant blog sustainably unless you find your voice, have an opinion, and have something valuable to say. Having a brand is like being in the groove – and when you are in a groove – things roll along.
2. Start with an attention getting title. If you dont capture an audience in the first sentence – you have lost them. The title is going to show up in a list of your blogs and that is all that will be visible. It has to stand out.
3. Make your first sentence powerful – if not controversial. I often cross post my blogs to writerspan.com in order to get more visibility and let them monetize it for me. WriterSpan.com takes its content and shoves the title and the first sentence or two out to 30,000 community websites. So the whole post isnt visible – but the first sentence is.
4. Make your Blog Readable. Nobody has the time nor inclination to read something that is so dense your brain hurts. So one technique is to judiciously use bolding. Making a keyword or concept bold draws the reader into the story.. You probably already know that bullet lists are easy to read – so I wont mention it (ha).
5. Feel free to add some multimedia. Just text can be boring. If you have a image that you have rights to publish – add it to the page – it adds visual variety. Here is a picture of young jeffrey conteplating his future as a writer.
6. Help your blog get Google Mojo. We all know that google pays attention to blogs and catalogs them regularly. You must ensure that your blog is tagged sufficiently. Tags are one way content gets classified and found on the net. So I always at least tag my articles with the word “Brand”. You can also sprinkle keywords here and there in your text to help getting found. Keyword analysis is both a science and an art but its worth knowing a little bit about it. If you use words in your title and your text that google users enter into the search field – then your article has a greater chance of rising to the top of the search engine results page (SERP). Another thing to pay attention to is the link (anchor) text. This is the underlined text as in this blog that opens another location. The best text is a keyword loaded phrase. So I might tell you that I am a forward thinking and charismatic software architect and social media evangelist to call attention to my domain or company. Having good keywords and well articulated link text is essential to be found.
7. Develop your Writing Style. I think style comes from practice. You cant belabor everything you write. So the key is to let out some of your personality in the writing. Let some of it flow. I learned a lot from reading Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. One thing I learned was to mix up the length of my sentences and paragraphs. Small is good. It adds variety and keeps the reader engaged. There is a billion other tricks – I suggest that you try some out in your writing.
8. Blogs can be Short. Dont be afraid to write a short blog. I myself have little paragraph ideas. I have friends that write essays. But I think I have been more successful at getting something written and published with the small pieces.
9. Be Personal and Tell a Story. Don’t fear revealing a bit about yourself in everything you write. Writing is not just expressing intellectual ideas – its about expressing your “full” idea – its thoughts AND emotions. Develop your ability to tell a story. Chip and Dan Heath remind us that stories are a key element to making things stick in other people’s minds – which is an essential element to personal branding.
10. Always Promote Yourself. There is always a chance to promote yourself in your blog – beyond being read or being syndicated using RSS. I always add my tagline at the bottom of the page with a link to one of my web pages. Its a simple reminder to others of my brand but also accumulates inbound links to my target site.

Personal Branding Makes Blogging Easy

Many people around me seem to be interested in blogging. Its almost as if they feel they are missing something if they don’t blog. Beyond selecting which blogger to use to create the posts – most people I know have difficulty figuring out what to write about sustainably. The primary reason people dont know what to blog about is that they don’t know what their personal brand is. If you have a clearly defined personal brand (especially for your career) – then blogging is easy. The reason is because a personal brand is about proactively pursuing ways to find meaning and providing value to the marketplace. It is about some amount of curiousity for new material. Blogging is a way for the personal brander to clarify thoughts that occur to them during a week, satisfies the need to share ideas, and establishes the brander as a person who has opinions and ideas. They establish themselves as a thought leader.

Ok, I understand its hard to clarify what your brand is. But if you have a personal tagline – you might start just writing about that. Sometimes we come up with these taglines for ourselves without really understanding them – they just ring true – thats a good sign. If you dont have a tagline to write about you might think about getting one – to help you clarify your brand. Im still working on mine – but I received a lot of insight after writing a personal marketing plan. I heard recently from Eric Rosen that one way to discover your tagline is to take a look at the recent parts of your resume. Either way – once you are clear about where you are going – writing about it becomes a lot easier.