You Need To Develop A Strong Brand Online

It is possible to succeed online without a strong brand but doing this is going to be a lot harder and you will seriously be limiting your potential for growth and for profit.

Let’s assume for a moment that your business model is predominantly online – let’s say that you are selling digital products or affiliate products through a brand. Now, in this case, your key objective is going to be to grow the amount of traffic visiting your site and to then establish trust with that audience such that they will be interested in buying what you have to sell.

This will be nigh impossible to accomplish however if you haven’t first built a brand and layered it into your site and your content.

This is how it works:

• Someone finds one of your articles on social media or a Google search, enjoys it and then moves on to other things – no one becomes an ‘overnight fan’
• During another search or through another post they then find themselves coming across another post or two of yours
• They read this, enjoy it and remember that they enjoyed the last thing you wrote about too
• They then come across you a couple more times and are impressed each time
• They now consider you a reliable/entertaining resource.
• The next time they’re looking for content in your niche, they will search for their question and your URL
• Perhaps they’ll take some time to look around the other content on your site
• They may even then bookmark your site or subscribe to your RSS feed
• Likewise, they may subscribe to you on social media and/or add their e-mail to your list
• They will then consider buying your e-books/recommended products when they see you recommend them
• If they enjoy the product, they will be much more likely to buy from you again in future.

After this lengthy process, you’ve now turned a first time visitor into a paying customer.

But note how much more difficult this would be without a strong and consistent branding. Without a catchy site name and logo, how would they know that they were reading your website again the second time they found it?

Likewise, without a clear sense of identity and a clear mission statement, why would they consider subscribing?

And if your social media channel is just your personal name with no branding, are they really going to want to follow you?

The same goes for other business models too. Let’s say you’re manufacturing a product. Having a brand will allow you to market the product and generate buzz for it more effectively but more importantly, it will enable you to build on your success. Once you’ve built a strong brand and people have enjoyed products from you, they will then know to seek out more products from you in future because they’ll expect that they’ll be similarly high quality.