What The Hell Is Branding Anyways? Shut Up With The Branding!
“Branding.”
This word gets tossed around on the Internet left and right. It’s clearly an important detail to pay attention to, but more often than not this topic is completely misunderstood.
When we got started online, we had mentors showing us the ropes, and everything that they did looked so amazing to our little novice internet marketing eyes that we wanted to be just like them. Well, this is all well and good, but you can’t expect to create “your brand” when you’re looking over the shoulder of the person next to you taking their ideas verbatim. This is part of the confusion that we went through and I can tell you that if you pay attention to this one specific point, you will save yourself a ton of time and countless headaches. Really when you’re looking at other peoples’ blogs, facebook pages, landing pages, Twitter accounts and so on, you’re doing your research, your due diligence and really getting an idea of what you want to represent. Be sure you’re taking note of what you like and dislike because these are the ideas that will help you develop your personality and flair that you’re going to represent online. This is where a brand is born.
I hate to burst your bubble, but you’re not going to jump out of the gate and have a perfectly developed brand. It doesn’t work like that. This stuff requires some serious time and brain power to go along with constant polishing and tweaking. Brands evolve over time, so be patient. But you may be asking yourself, “How will I know if what I am doing is right, or if my brand is good?” This is a challenging question to answer.
But here it is. You have to understand is that if you have any lack of confidence in your plan or your ideas then you need to stop and go back to the research and development phase. Ask yourself if you are implementing the following necessary traits to build your brand the right way: hard work, determination, creative intelligence, gut intuition, balls and a focused idea.
Understand this…Branding is about being unique, independent and having a clearly defined end goal. In order to have a successful brand online, you need to ask yourself one main thing, “How big is your following?” This is a simple question to answer especially with the statistics available to you on the web. Ask yourself: How big is your Twitter following? How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many people are subscribed to your blog? How big are your lists? What type of income are you making on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis? These numbers are a direct reflection of how big your brand is.
Just remember that this is not an easy game and if you’re looking for an easy game then you need to go back to being an employee so you don’t have to worry about making these difficult decisions. But know this…these tough decisions are going to be the ones that take you to a place online that will allow you to take any business to the next level. Once you’re there, that’s when the fun really starts to begin.
One last point: branding on the internet is about branding yourself, your voice, your story and providing value to your community. As stated before, everyone is unique, so keep the focus on your unique traits and what you have to offer your audience. If you brand yourself, you will more than likely be branding yourself as a leader. Now you’re starting to get big.
(Title inspired by famous Arnold’s Schwarzenegger Pizza Shop Skit “ What the hell is broccoli anyways?…shut up with the broccoli” @ 1:02 CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO SKIT )
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