The Big Fat Reality

Do you know that branding is as important for bloggers as it is for big names? The process of building a brand is often overlooked by many bloggers, and as a result, they will lead to many ‘challenges’ such as infringement and trying to be different as they move along their blogging journey.

According to Entrepreneur, the definition of branding is “The marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products .”

A blog may just be a small business or even a leisure one for you. However, the process of keeping your brand as an asset is a significant factor. Many bloggers and website owners are facing a lot of challenges in business because they are building a brand as early as when they started their blogs.

A brand serve as an outer coating of your blog (and business). Therefore, it is important to build a brand for your new blog as soon as possible.

In this article, you will discover four powerful ways to build a brand for your new blog from scratch.

Step 1: Start by defining your brand

The first step isn’t about registering for a domain and subscribing to a good web hosting. Instead, the first step involves establishing your brand.

This step is important because it gives you an idea of what your brand is. You will be able to perform better and more efficiently (in marketing) if you know what your brand’s purpose is all about.

A few questions you can start in defining your brand with are:

What are you selling?
Who is your target audience?
Who are your competitors?
What makes you different from the competitors?

Every successful blog needs to have a brand. And this means that you need to define the brand right from the start!

While defining your brand is an important start point, you can still perform amendment and adjustment in the future to further inline the brand towards your goal.

Important tip: Your brand character needs to promote your business ultimately, connect you with readers and making your blog different from the rest.

Step 2: Building a brand based on a person

A branding project is only successful when you have the right type of audience in mind. By now, you should realize that there are no two readers that think or act alike.

As a human, we behave, think, believe and understand differently. Your brand has to fulfill the understanding part.

For example, there would be different words and actions which are deemed ‘rude’ by particular religion while others may be all right with it.

In this step, creating the right persona for your brand is vital as it will help you to streamline the target and audience.

If you need help creating the perfect persona, here’s a great article from HubSpot for your reading/reference.

Your goal shouldn’t be reaching out to as many people as possible, but to reach a particular type of people that will look highly on your brand. Instead of targeting a broad range of individuals, the ultimate goal is to provide actionable solutions to your chosen target audience and ‘solve their problems.’

Step 3: Creating the first great impression

Now that you have completed the two heavy lifting in building a brand, the next step involves creating the great first impression for your readers.

Here’s a little story of mine.

I launched a brand new blog, StartFreelanceCareer.com not too long ago and I knew that I’m serving to an audience consisting of freelancers.

Just like any other business, I need to create the first great impression to “wow” them right from their first visit.

So, here’s what I did:

Create a logo for the blog
Consider on the design for the blog

For the blog logo, I decided to create my own which looks pretty similar to this website’s one (as a temporary). If you are looking for a free logo maker, head over to GoSpaces and see what they can offer. It is a kind of cool free online tool that allows you to create impressive logos for free!

Do you know that a logo is crucial regardless the size of your business?

When it comes to choosing a good logo, take into consideration of the color and design. A logo should be used for a very long time and therefore, it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

How about the design of the blog?

I have been a huge fan of StudioPress child themes, and while they are excellent choices, they lack uniqueness which I dearly need. I certainly do not want to create another blog that looks like a thousand others.

I settled down with Divi 3.0 and trusted me, it is the best drag and drops WordPress builder I have even used. It took me slightly over 3 hours to completely create the blog design.

Important tip: If you need to find a simple slogan generator, you should take GoSpaces slogan generator for a spin. Trust me; it is fun to use!

Step 4: Creating social presence

The last step is crucial. For the record, the old way of stamping your logo won’t make the cut in today’s technological world.

A branding process is not complete with an active social presence. You can start creating a social presence by building branded social media profiles. This means that you need to start Facebook Pages, Google+ Pages and Twitter account based on your brand’s name.

So, how many social media profiles do you need? I have no plans to disappoint you, but the truth is that there is no definite answer.

You should have at least an official account for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Creating more social media accounts would highly dependable based on your business needs.

Important tip: When it comes to creating branding on social media, it is important to understand that you should always use usernames or social media handles that represent your brand. In this case, it is always recommended to have a similar social media account name on all social media platforms. Trust me; it would be easier for your followers to connect with you on different social platforms.

Summary

There are a lot more tasks to complete instead of buying a domain and hosting it online. If you want to be successful, you need to start branding your blog immediately.

I certainly hope you find these four steps to building a brand for your new blog useful.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and let’s discuss further.

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