Your Brand Sucks!

Your brand sucks! A reoccurring voice in my head states this loudly before I click away …never to return again. If you want me to read a post or come back again– let alone subscribe to your feed or newsletter, you have to have the following:

• A well laid out site.
• A well designed color scheme - don’t use 13 different colors!
• An easy to read post format.
• More than two sentences that tell me to read the full post at another blog.  YES, SOLID CONTENT!
• A clear message.
• A well written About page.
• The solution to a problem or a better mousetrap.

Where does that all stem from? Your Brand. Tell me who you are, what your intention is, why you can accommodate that, why I should stick around and furthermore, connect with me. There are many other pieces that create a great web site but we are going to go through “branding” for today.

A Brand as defined on Wikipedia:

“[Brands]…were originally developed as labels of ownership: name, term, design, symbol.  However, today it is what they do for people that matters much more, how they reflect and engage them, how they define their aspiration and enable them to do more. Powerful brands can drive success in competitive and financial markets, and indeed become the organization’s most valuable assets.”

This gets close but doesn’t quite cut it. Your brand is the foundation of everything you attempt to do. The internet is maturing and not branding yourself or business is a bad decision. Having a mismanaged or sloppy brand is worse. This is the platform on which you are building your entire online presence, so take the time to create a brand the right way. Your brand needs to be consistent and relative to your market and highly recognizable. Think of any name brand company or household name. What do they have in common? Their logo is distinguishable and easy to remember. Their image and message remain consistent, regardless of the type of media they use to reach their market.

Your first objective is to bring them into your content. If your brand sucks, you won’t get them into your site long enough to get them to come back– thus preventing a relationship from forming– which is what a real business is striving for. How do you bring a new visitor into your world and keep the old visitors coming back? Well, there are actually MANY things you have to do, but branding is the first step. Unfortunately, the importance of branding is largely overlooked by the majority of website owners– to the point of 97% failure rate of internet businesses.  Why is that? Shitty branding!

Guess what? If you look like the last 18 sites I visited and won’t ever go back to, yours will be the 19th of today’s unsubscribed to websites. This means that you won’t have a chance of getting me back to read your awesome content. If you’re selling a Mercedes, you better not be doing it in a polyester suit on an out of the way side street.

A successful business (on or offline) always has a solid brand.  A solid brand:

• Connects
• Engages
• Relates
• Is visible
• Is easy to remember - (stands out)
• Is reliable and consistent

To build a solid brand that stands out from the crowd, you need to understand your market. You need to really understand your market. Did I mention that you understand your market?!? If you want to stand a chance in your niche, you MUST understand the people who make up your market. Period, end of story. That’s the secret.  If you understand your market and can relate to them, you have to connect with them and you do so when they recognize your brand. There are 900 trillion people (yes, a bit exaggerated) people in the internet marketing industry and 99.9% of them look just like everyone else.

And people wonder why it’s difficult to build a business in this field. Maybe it’s because they all look and act alike, sound alike, or come off the same way???  When you go to Home Depot, do you expect to do your grocery shopping there? Or buy baby clothes? Nope, I don’t either. When you go to your local skateboard shop do you expect to find Grandpa working behind the counter? Didn’t think so.

If you’re selling panties or Bibles on the internet, you have to at least relate to those who are buying from you. Yes, you can set up “this” tactic or “that” stream of whatever you want but until you connect with your market via your brand, you won’t really have a business

How do you build a brand that is parallel to who you really are? You use your personality for starters. Integrate some of this technology we have and be consistent with everything you do on the internet. Write an About Me page that is actually about YOU. Build a personal blog based on the things you love the most and the things in life that interest you. Your personal site is your hub and can and will become a gold mine if put together the right way. All of your social community profiles are varied summaries of that main site and your business site should be different from your personal site unless you’re Steve Pavlina. You connect your business site with your personal site so people can find out more about you and what you’re about. I know some of you are going to think “screw that” and that’s fine. But don’t be disappointed when you hit that glass ceiling and have no more room to grow. People buy all kinds of things, why shouldn’t they buy it from you?

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