Just because you have a website for your business doesn’t mean you have branded yourself online. You may even have a web presence and rank for some keywords via the search engines but online branding is much more than that. In order to become a well know brand you must dominate a majority of these seven areas.
One of the best ways to get maximum exposure online is to get a video to go viral. Creating an interesting or funny video can grab the attention of people everywhere. People love to watch videos on Youtube and the funnier the better. One suggestion we give is to create a parody and integrate your product or service. Including your brand name in the title, description and logo at the end of the video. As the video goes viral and spreads your business name and logo can reach further than most advertising can.
Videos are relatively cheap to produce you just need to put your thinking cap on. Once you create a great video you can leverage social media websites to help spread your video.
Some people think social media has become the biggest thing since sliced bread and they are right. On the World Wide Web there has never been a better time and better vehicles to promote content. Websites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx and Twitter can become powerful tools to help reach people faster than ever before.
Videos are good but some of the most popular websites launched with interesting articles and graphs and those can work well too. Remember that the content has to be great or your efforts won’t get any traction on the social media websites.
Once you have created great content you will need a Social Media Marketing expert or enthusiast to help promote it. On social media websites like Digg and Reddit if the average person submits great content it’s a waste of time. In order for your content to take off you will need someone that has good connections for each of these websites.
What’s in a name? Everything! If you really want to separate your online business from the millions of others in your niche then you need a name that will stand out. Find yourself a unique domain name that can be branded. Too many online business owners go for name with their main keywords in them.
Example:
www.dogtoys.com
www.webhosting.com
www.shoes.com
While these are some great domain names and can make for gaming the searches engines a little easier, that’s all their good for. If you truly want to build a strong brand online you need to separate yourself from the keyword domain names. It is extremely hard to brand a domain like Shoes.com, as customers will get confused with other websites:
Shoe.com
Shoes.net
Shoes.org
Tips: Domain names are very cheap when you find the right name be sure to purchase as many of the domain extensions as you can. As a general rule of thumb we buy the following extensions; .com, .org, .net, .info, .us, .me and .biz.
Ranking number one in Google, Yahoo and Bing can help your company become a brand. Often searchers see the first few rankings as market leaders within that specific search. Ranking at the top of the search engines can carry more benefits than just leads and sales. 42% of all searchers click through to the website that is listed at the number one position. Ranking for this gives you much more visibility and free marketing. Bloggers will blog, tweeple (people that use Twitter) will tweet about your website and other webmasters will list you as a resource.
When you’re just starting out, establishing your brand via search engine rankings can be hard to achieve. Most websites will not rank well until after years of trust and lots of organic looking links. You can learn about search engine optimization yourself through places like SEO Book or you can hire a reputable Search Engine Marketing firm.
One of the quickest ways to have a web presence in the search engines is to use Pay-Per-Click Marketing. In PPC you pay to have your website listed in a box market “Sponsors” on the search results pages.
PPC can be used to get your name out there while people are searching for related products or services. If you have a big enough budget you can do what some of the car companies were doing a few years back. A few of the big auto makers made ads and choose every keyword they could. For about a week no matter what you were searching for online you would see an advertisement for their new car.
In every industry there are a handful of successful blogs and forums. This is where people in your niche are looking for some type on information or like to contribute themselves. These communities are perfect for getting your brand name out there.
Become active as much as you can. If it’s a successful blog you could make useful comments on as many post as you can. This works out best when you are the first person to reply to a blog post. Same thing with community forums, people join these places for help so be helpful.
If you have a decent advertising budget you may want to consider banner advertising. While banner ads don’t convert very well for sales it can however get your name and logo out in the community. Just make sure the banner is in a place where everyone is going to look. Banner ads on the side bar of most website will get ignored by the majority of the readers. Sometimes you can get advertisements within articles or on the center of the page.
One of the best ways to create an audience is to give them a reason to keep coming back. Creating a blog on your business domain can increase keep readers coming back over and over again. I recommend you add a blog as a sub-domain or a folder.
Example:
http://blog.yourdomains.com
http://yourdomain.com/blog/
Just starting a blog is not good enough you need to give people a reason to come back often. Ideally if you can schedule blog posts for every day you will have a much better chance of growing your readership. Your goal for your blog should be to become a leader within your industry.
If your content is good it will attract people to talk about you, mention you on their tweets and even blog about you. Creating great content will give you free advertising ever time someone links to your website or mentions a blog post of yours.
Advertising itself is not marketing and building a brand is not a one step process. You will need relentless pursuit of each of these seven steps in order to become a true online brand.
