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Lots of Tips for Low- (or No-) Cost Branding

February 6, 2007

Aviva Directory gives us a very thorough (and often clever) list of Little Known Ways to Brand on the Cheap.

And there are a lot of them...99 to be exact. Here are a few of my favorites:

5. Mix your off-line personality with your online world. Straight-laced professionalism is so passe. Throw some of your personal life/ flair into your blogging to give your site personality and start developing your own brand. But keep in mind that the brand you develop through your blog will carry over to your primary site. So don’t go so informal that you discredit your products or service.

6. Respect yourself, it’s contagious. Treat your work as authoritative if you want others to. That means citing your past articles in your current ones, mentioning work you’ve done on related topics whenever interviewed, etc.

14. Clean up your web history. If you have things in your past that show up bad when someone Googles you, clear those things up (by creating good pages, such as press releases, which then rank). If something is really bad, consider trying to solve the problem with whoever is disgruntled.

19. Leave valuable comments. Every blogger’s goal is to develop a vibrant community on his blog. So if you leave valuable comments on others’ blogs without overtly marketing your own site or product, you will earn the trust of that blogger as well as some of his/her readers. When you write comments, you should always insert your site’s URL and consider using your site’s name as your username. But beyond that, no extra self-promotion should be done.

29. Use sitemaps. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft recently agreed to follow one standard sitemap format. A well-built sitemap can help your site get indexed regularly and fully, but its primary purpose is to give users an easy way to find a particular piece of content. Remember: by catering to your visitors, you not only create a site brand associated with quality and ease of use for those same visitors, you also increase the possibility that your regular readers will help spread your brand by dropping links to you on their own sites.

47. Use consistent style. Use consistent grammar, linking style, etc. Expert Said Rouhani refers to this as “repetition” in his article How to Brand your Website. But whatever you call it, the basic point is that consistency in web design = trust. And trust = a strong brand and more regular visitors.

72. Hold a contest to develop an opt-in mailing list. Give something away in exchange for building a contestant email list. Artists can raffle off illustrations or paintings, booksellers and writers can offer free copies, et cetera. A opt-in subscription list of email recipients is flat-out invaluable.

Check out the whole list...there's bound to be something new to try for you and your business.

filed under: Good to Know, Handy Dandy, Pulling It All Together

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