What’s your brand value?
Blogging has reached newer heights. I love some of the content that gets churned out by a lot of the bloggers. And that makes me a regular reader of a lot of these blogs. Some of them are from established bloggers while others are from not so established bloggers. I have made a nice collection of these blogs over the last couple of months and added them to my feedly account so that I can read all of the fresh posts that they publish.
One of the blogs that I am a regular reader of, is Kate McKibbin’s Secret Blogger’s Business. She posts some super valuable content pieces very regularly.
In fact, I happened to stumble upon her blog through one of the newsletters I had subscriber to, from a different blogger. There was an article that he had referred to in his newsletter and when I clicked through, I came across this nice and girlish looking blog.
The first impression was the kind that I couldn’t really express. I was super-impressed with her blog design. It had a refreshing touch to it. But… it was a girly looking blog. In fact, it looked more like a fashion blog than a “make money blogging” kind of a blog. After about 30 minutes and reading 2 of her posts, I could agree on one thing – that Kate knew what she was writing about.
At this point, I felt it good to know more about Kate and started following some of the links on her blog. I read her “about” page and got to know that she is indeed a fashion blogger who wrote about fashion and fashion tips at Drop Dead Gorgeous Daily (Now that’s a catchy name. I wonder how they find these nice domain names). I am not a lot into fashion but her blog had something that could hold your attention and I spent another few minutes reading some of the articles that she had published there.
Importance of Branding Yourself – Learning it from Kate
While I was clicking through the different links on the blog, I happened to click on some of the social media profile links as well, that Kate has put in there. There were links to Facebook, Instagram and Youtube.
I first clicked over to her Facebook page. The page had more than 10K likes. She ensures that she posts every other day or, so. And I could find a lot of quotes amongst her posts.
Kate was pretty active on Instagram and I could find pretty much all the image quotes that she had posted on Facebook, at Instagram too. Then I clicked through to her Youtube Channel. She has a show called “Blog Tip Tuesday” where she talks about simple blogging tips. Kate had quite a few videos on her channel and seemed to be pretty active on Youtube.
And finally, I clicked over to her other blog at “Drop Dead Gorgeous Daily”, which was a normal fashion blog. Nothing extraordinary. But the blog had some nice and informative articles on a variety of topics. Most of these were helpful tips on aspects that would form a part of your daily lifestyle. The blog was popular and you could know that by doing a little research on the statistics for the site.
After spending about an hour or, so on all of these web properties, I decided I will sign up to the SBB newsletter. And since Kate was providing a lot of value in her blog posts, I knew that her emails would also do the same. And I was not mistaken. All of her emails indeed provided a lot of value and a few of them promoted some of her products like the blog planner etc.
This is one of the emails that I received from Kate..
The entire experience of browsing through SBB was worth it.
Now while I did all of that, there was something that was happening to me, though I never realized it. I am sure, after you saw all of the images above, about all of Kate’s properties you too would have felt the same thing.
What is it that you can notice on all of the above images?
I asked my wife, this question and she had an instant reply. “All of these look so similar as if they are all part of the same book”, she said. And that is precisely what had done that magic inside my head.
Whenever I see an email mentioning “Kate McKibbin”, I could visualize her blog, social media profiles and even the newsletter. There was a specific image that would pop-up when I saw that name.
Visual Branding – The Best Branding
You would have experienced this a lot of times. Talk about McDonalds’ and you will visualize the big “M”. Think of Google and you can visualize the multicolored alphabets in the term “Google”. Think of Nike and the first thing that comes to your mind is the “Tick”.
Why?
Because all of these brands have built a brand value for themselves. And they did this by creating a visual branding for themselves.
It was the same with Kate’s blog and all of her connected web properties. Everything from her blogs to her social profiles had the same header banner with the same logo. She even used the same fonts and font colors at most of the places. She did it so uniformly that you could visualize it even without actually looking at them.
Kate built a brand of herself by branding her blog and her business. She knew the importance of branding herself and especially in a tough niche like the ones that she was in, it was all the more important.
There could be hundred different ways of branding your business. But one thing that I learnt from Kate is that the most important thing in branding is the visual aspect of it.
Visual media has a lasting impact on the human mind. We realize its importance and hence use a lot of images on your blogs, because they catch the attention of the readers.
In exactly the same way, if you have a visual branding of your website, blog or, business, you will be able to quickly catch the attention of your readers and clients. And this attention will have a long lasting impact. It will establish yourself as somebody who is serious about their business. Establishing yourself as an authority, will not be difficult then.
Now its Over to You
What’s your idea of branding? And how do you plan to brand yourself?
Internet marketing business is all about authority. And in order to establish yourself as an authority, it is important to establish your brand.
Start from the the foundation – the most important part in branding. Your website design and logo. Take it with you wherever you go – both online and offline. This in itself should take care of the major part of your branding.
Let me know your thoughts, suggestions and feedback by commenting below. You can send me your questions, if any and I will respond to it. Don’t forget to share this post with your social media circles using one of the sharing buttons below.