subject: How To Create A Profitable Online Brand! [print this page] Hundreds of millions of people use the Internet on a daily basis. There are millions of active websites.
Differentiating yourself from the many is the key to getting noticed in a tough, competitive marketplace. A simple answer to the question of how you do this is to create a brand. By creating a brand you are being distinguished from the crowd. Apart from getting more traffic and people to your site you are also giving yourself expert status.
1. Brands are seen as a benchmark or acid test of how good your services and products are. If you manage to create a leading brand you are increasing your level of business. For example, if you are known as the leading brand in Market Research you will get infinitely more traffic than an unknown in the same field. This may seem a very straightforward, obvious matter but very few people position themselves as market leaders.
2. Creating a brand around a product or indeed yourself, as some people do, creates a shorthand reference that people can easily latch on to. For example, not many people know about search engines but nearly everybody knows about Google and what it does. Successful branding works in the same way. Your product or, if your brand is you, yourself, becomes a shortcut for what you do. The importance with this lies in where you can spend your resources. Once you have a brand up and running you can spend less time trying to explain what it does and focus on creating a better product or service.
3. Branding is a very powerful way of creating associations. If you have a successful brand, the chances are that you have created powerful associations between your product and service and your customers' response.
4. Now I am not suggesting that you create a poor product or service and create a positive brand around it. Instead, having a good brand will amplify the potential of your product or service. The more you create positive identifications between people and your product or service, the more likely you will receive increased business.
However, it also works the other way. You can easily create negative associations between your product and service sometimes even unbeknownst to you. The above are just some of the many positive aspects of creating your own brand. Billions are spent each year on marketing campaigns. This money is not being spent purposelessly. It is being spent for a reason - branding works.
It is quite simple to create your own brand and if you are not branding your product or service, or indeed yourself, the chances are you not tapping into your market as much as you could.
