Branding is a crucial element in the success of a company, and it goes way beyond logos and graphics. Don’t get me wrong, memorable logo design is important but branding stretches much further than your company insignia.

It’s one thing, having a bright yellow brand that screams for attention — like What Storage. And it’s a totally different thing for a brand that commands attention through clever marketing.

Branding is everything that involves customer experience and is usually the determining factor to someone becoming a customer. Although the importance of branding hasn’t dulled, the digital economy has changed the way businesses establish their brands.

Successful branding isn’t done overnight with an announcement of the change, it takes time, strategy, and a trustworthy reputation.

Why is digital branding so important?

Branding today is important because it’s the way everyone is going to perceive your company. There are entrepreneurs who are consumed by the bigger picture, but it’s the details that’ll create the customer preference for your company. Things as small as the way you answer the phone, social media experience, and user friendliness are things you should be aware of.

The main goal of branding is to get past the products and services that you’re providing. It’s about tapping into the emotional side of your business that’ll set you apart from the rest.
Let’s be real. Your products and services can be duplicated, and they probably are. But brand awareness gives you the emotional leverage that will attract loyal customers.

And loyal customers is what you need to thrive as a business. Getting those repeat transactions from people that know, like and trust your brand can make all the difference to your business.

Case in point:

Amazon is an absolute titan in the world of e-commerce. When you think of online shopping, Amazon probably comes to mind for you.

Heck, even for affiliates, Amazon has a comprehensive associates program that allows almost anyone to promote their products and earn healthy commissions.

The first thought of branding that comes to mind is a textbook rental platform that I absolutely loved. They did everything the same as every other book rental website, but this one focused on branding.

They had big buttons, user-friendly platforms, a beautiful website. It got better when they sent the sweetest personalised emails during the semester just to wish you luck with classes. It’s the little things that matter.

Creating a strong brand will help your company become trustworthy. When your customers have a positive and straightforward experience with your business, they’ll always expect that when they return. It’s important to remember that your brand represents you. What do you want people to say about you? Then reflect those attributes to your company consistently.
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of branding, let’s talk about how branding has evolved in the digital era.

How has branding changed in the digital world?

The main change in branding is that there is a tonne of ways to reach out to people. Which can be great for your company. When people shop, they make their purchases online through social proof. They’re looking at who supports you, what people have experienced, and especially your company’s blog.

It takes a lot more than just claiming you’re a certain way. You need to give them proof. Consumers are becoming smart in the way they shop, and digital marketing tactics are getting harder to reach consumers. It’s important to remember that reviews, blogs, and your engagement with people on different platforms are all forms of social proof for your brand.

Your website is now the face of your branding.

Your company’s website it’s the most important form of branding and marketing online. When people come to your site, it only takes them a few seconds to form an opinion about your company. First impressions matter. A lot.

What does this mean? When people land on your site it needs to be simple, beautiful and inviting. Before they even read the words on your site, they’re going to notice the layout. If it’s ugly, it won’t benefit your brand. It’s that simple.
Along with a beautiful and simple layout, it needs to be straight to the point and provide the answer to any question they may have. Your landing page/home page should start off with what you offer and what they need to do, to start their process with you.

Best practices for branding in the digital era

Today’s practices for branding today are going to be completely different to before, so let’s jump right in:

You’re going to need to differentiate yourself from competitors. Start by looking at your customers and finding out what they find valuable in a company and prioritise it. This could mean making a process easier and personalised or working on your customer service.

Be authentic. There are lots of options for consumers and you aren’t going to win their business by bad mouthing other companies or using negative marketing. Focus on the customer and make them feel like you care, by actually caring for them!

Share your passions, goals, and the mission of your company. Being authentic will help the consumer understand your values and how important they are to you. This includes the promise you make to customers and how important it is to fulfil it.

Connect with your customers emotionally. The emotions your customers feel when they interact with your brand is just as important as the quality of the product you sell. Create an emotional trigger for your customers that solves a problem or inspires the prospect.

Know your target market. Study your target demographic and find out what’s important to them. When you fully understand your audience, you can start to market directly to your ideal customers.

Interact with your customers. Talk with them and listen to their concerns. Take reviews seriously and constantly tailor your business to what works.

Branding is getting more important every day as competition grows online. Although there are different methods in branding, it all has the same roots. Be authentic, provide value, and constantly improve. Your customers care about the details, and so should you.

Affiliate marketing and branding aren’t terms that you see being put together too often. Most affiliates that build niche websites don’t make the effort to build a brand or establish themselves as authorities in their particular area of expertise. If you own affiliate marketing websites you should definitely look into how branding can make your site the go to site in your chosen niche. We’ll explore this topic in this article.

Now:

Affiliate’s are potentially missing out on a lot of traffic, leads and sales by completely neglecting branding.

After all, what’s branding all about?

Separating yourself from the competition by providing and unique selling point.

Your brand is the difference between you and the competition. It’s what separates the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. If you don’t establish yourself as a brand then why should someone invest their time on your website when they can read your competition’s content instead?

People don’t realise that many big internet brands are just affiliate’s with a twist.

You guessed it, the twist is that they’ve established their brand in the marketplace. They’re recognised for their brand, not for their affiliate marketing strategies.

In most cases, people don’t even know that these brands are nothing more than glorified affiliates. They don’t make any of their own products. They just provide value and help recommend the best products and services for you to buy.

Comparethemarket.com

Compare the market is a big brand comparison website in the United Kingdom. They provide a service that allows yo you to compare things like credit cards, loans, house and car insurance and the list goes on. Compare the market is instantly recognisable in the UK because of their meerkat branding…

Compare the market provides value in two big ways.

The first thing is that they provide a comparison tool that helps you find a better deal on things like insurance, loans and broadband.

People that are in the market for any of these things usually start with a price comparison websites like Compare The Market.

The second thing is that they provide useful guides on the things they compare and they package this in a way that is fun and easy on they eye. They openly state that things like car insurance are boring so they put a unique twist on things by making the boring bits fun and the complicated things simple…

By approaching a boring topic in a unique way they differentiate themselves from the competition.

There are plenty of price comparison websites out there, competition is fierce in the marketplace for these businesses.

Things like meerkat’s really help with remembering a brand. A funny talking meerkat is more likely to stick in your head than a man talking about comparing insurance (yawn).

A culmination of a variety of factors like great content, comparison tools and USP’s help websites like Compare The Market separate themselves from the competition and generate huge amounts of traffic to their brand sites.

Takeaway For Affiliates

Affiliate’s have been looked at in a bad light for a few years now with many people assuming that Google hates affiliate marketers. This just isn’t true. Google hate’s shit affiliate’s, people that produce crap content so they can rank and make money, without caring about quality and actually helping people out.

Branded affiliate sites are the way forward. Make an effort to separate yourself from the competition by going above and beyond what other people in your niche do.

Affiliate marketing has evolved. You better believe it! You need to have the ability to adapt and flow with the changes or you may end up getting left behind.

The prospect of online business can certainly be a daunting one. Let alone building a successful brand. For someone starting from scratch, the level of overwhelm one can experience is mind-boggling.

In this article, we will explore the best practices and frameworks for finding the online business opportunities that will suit you best.

Here are some of the most common questions asked by people who are looking to get started online:

Do I need a massive budget?

The straight answer is no. You don’t need to invest thousands of dollars to get started in online business. There are stacks of business ideas with low investment requirements that you can start in a very short space of time. Business models such as drop shipping and affiliate marketing enable you to start an online business on a shoestring, without having any of the drawbacks that many traditional businesses do.

What Kind Of Businesses Can I Start Part-Time?

Many of us lead very busy lifestyles and will struggle to find the free time to start an online business. This doesn’t mean that we can’t get started online by putting in a few hours a week. But do note that the more hours you put in the faster the results will come. If you’re only willing to dedicate 2 hours a week to your part-time business then it isn’t something that’s going to produce results for you anytime soon. When it comes to online business, you want to be able to dedicate at least 10 hours a week to it at the minimum if you want to see tangible results after a few months.

Bringing it back to the types of businesses that you can, affiliate marketing and drop-shipping again are the most popular online business models when it comes to having that flexibility to work where you want and when you want.

Useful Articles for part-time online business ideas:

45+ Real Passive Income Ideas that Don’t Suck – (Bengu)

101 Side Business Ideas To Start While Working Full-Time – (ryrob.com)

55 Internet Business Ideas – (selfmadesuccess.com)

Don’t I Need To Be Some Sort of Expert Or Have An Amazing Idea?

Most people that start an online business leverage other people ideas and focus on learning the marketing skill sets and business mindsets they need to succeed. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to promote other companies’ products, so you don’t have to create one yourself. This is something that massively lowers the barrier for people looking to get started online.

You don’t need to be an expert either. There are hundreds of amazing training courses that will take you by the hand and teach you everything you need to know to create a highly profitable business on the internet.

Don’t be discouraged if you’re don’t know a lot about computers. Most of the technical hurdles are now irrelevant because we have tools that make everything so much easier.

Some Common Mistakes To Avoid:

Not Investing In Yourself Through Mentorship

Having a mentor will hands-down be one of the most valuable things you do for your business. Having someone there who has knowledge from experience is super valuable for you, especially when you’re just starting out. When people don’t take the time to find a mentor they stumble and fumble over the most obvious obstacles. It makes the online business journey much harder when you don’t have someone there to take you by the hand.

Getting Stuck In Education Mode

With the sheer volume of information available to us in this day and age. It’s very easy to get stuck in “learning mode”. Many of us get stuck in this state where we just feel like we need to know everything before we can get started and this is completely wrong. The worst thing for you to do is become a learning junkie who never takes any action. What’s the point of learning anything if you aren’t going to implement it?

Ideally you should spend 20% of your time learning and 80% of your time implementing what you’ve learnt. This sounds like drastic numbers but it’s the fastest way to learn things and build a successful business at the same time.

Don’t Sweat The Little Stuff

It’s easy to spend hours tweaking that little logo of yours to get it just right but this isn’t a money-producing activity. This isn’t going to help you grow your business. All those little things can wait until you’re generating a decent income in your business. Your sole focus when you first start out should be to learn the basics of what you need to know and spend most of your time executing on what you’ve learnt. There are plenty of things that you can only learn from experience so don’t be afraid to get stuck in!

Start Your Email List Straight Away

Your email list will be one of the most valuable tools in your marketing arsenal. Many online business owners regret that they didn’t start their email list earlier. This is because an email list of loyal subscribers is a fantastic way to generate an income in your business. This applies to just about any business model out there. There are plenty of email marketing solutions out there that offer a great service for a reasonable price. ActiveCampaign is a great example.

Listen Wisely In Your Spare Time

Plenty of us waste our time listening to meaningless music in our spare time. Why do this when you can tap into endless wisdom in the form of audiobooks, podcasts, interviews. You’ll gain amazing insights from people that have built successful businesses just by taking the time to listen to these people. It also helps keep you sharp and keep your brain active!

Many marketers are completely obsessed with generating leads and making sales, they completely forget about the branding of their company. Investing in branding your online business can pay off in a big way for your company.

Let’s find out why:

The Value Of Branding

Many marketers assume that investing in your brand online is all about chucking loads of money at it when this isn’t the case. Building a brand is all about creating an entity that your customers can relate to. A brand is something that builds a relationship with customers and creates loyalty and trust for your products.

Building your brand online will boost company awareness and foster customer loyalty. Online branding can help you achieve your company financial goals by driving incremental revenue for the business.

In summary, if you want to grow your business online you need to look at growing your brand.

Here are three important strategies for you to successfully build your brand online:

Research Your Target Audience

To successfully build up a brand on the internet you must have a good understanding of who your target audience is. It’s important to do this before you start creating content strategies and other plans in your business.

There are a plethora of tools out there to help you discover your target audience. Products from companies like Nielsen and Compete provide tools that enable you to learn more about your target demographic.

Get Your Media Mix right

To build a brand successfully on the internet you need to be utilising the various media channels that are available to use now. You can use content networks to grow your brand through awareness repetition. When it comes to organic search, ensure that your brand name and messaging is consistent with your website title tags and meta descriptions.

Make sure your brand is consistent with messaging across all channels being utilised. Creating consistent messaging allows your consumers to recognise and recall your brand, making you the clear choice when people are ready to buy!

Build Your Reputation

Growing your reputation is like going to a networking event, it’s just not as easy, and more time-consuming. It’s essential to have a clearly defined strategy for reaching your target audience.

Once you’ve got this strategy in place, the next step is to identify the tactics you plan to use in the process. For example, making sure that you take advantage of any offline partnerships you have in order to grow your online reputation. Doing this will help you to increase your organic search presence by attracting links from the partnerships that you have.

 

Forget about your products and services for a minute. Let’s focus on what really matters in your business.

You know, the thing that keeps your company going month after month. This concept applies to any type of business. Whether you’re in affiliate marketing, app development, or drop shipping, it’s a universal principle that applies to all…

You can have the best product in the world but if no-one knows about it you’ll still fail.

On the flip side, you can have an average product but if you market it well you’ll still sell by the boatload.

Lead generation is the backbone of any business. Period.

Those who generate quality leads consistently are the winners in the world of business. This method doesn’t only apply to business. It can apply to every field of your life!

Here are five ways you can generate more leads for your online business:

Engage With Your Leads 

Directly engaging with your prospects should be one of your top priorities.

Many businesses go with in-direct methods of engagement, such as FAQ’s. This isn’t a good way to engage with people.

Directly engaging with your customers are things like live chat, forums and help centres. Places where real people are on hand to support your customers in real time.

Better engaged customers means more recommendations for your business. More recommendations means more customers and ultimately more money!

Leverage Outbound & Inbound Marketing

Outbound marketing has been proven to be more effective than inbound marketing, this doesn’t mean you should neglect inbound marketing though. Look at using both methods in a balanced way to increase the leads you generate in your business.

For inbound marketing, personalise your emails by taking advantage of marketing automation systems. Also, make an effort to solve customer problems. This will help you establish a level of trust with your customer as well as generate more leads.

Use Twitter To Find Leads

Twitter can be a great source of leads for your business. There are systems out there that can help you with your lead generation efforts on social media platforms. Followerwonk is one of them. This service gives you the ability to analyse information about Twitter profiles, allowing you to reach the audience related to your niche and help you find the influencers in your industry.

Create Outstanding Content

Content marketing is the new way to build up a following of raving fans for your business. If you aren’t blogging in 2017 then you’re crazy. You’re literally missing out on 90% of your leads if your company doesn’t have a blog.

You need to create content that is informative and actionable. Big key takeaways work very well in the blogging world.

High-quality content can be an amazing asset for your business. So much so that the buzzword of 2016 in the SEO and content marketing world was “linkable asset”. This basically entails creating a piece of content that is just so damn good, people can’t help but share it.

Start Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great way to leverage the following of other companies and yourself in front of them.

• There are a few things worth noting before you start guest posting:
• Your articles must be relevant to the audience.
• You send people back to a relevant landing page on your website.
• Your post contains unique information that provides value.

 

When you decide to enter into affiliate marketing, you may wonder where to begin, as there are so many things to consider when choosing strategies that will work for your business. The tips in this article can provide you with what you need to know to be a successful affiliate marketer.

Make sure you understand what you are getting into before you buy a domain. There usually isn’t a big commitment when it comes to affiliate marketing but make sure you do your research before diving into something.

Your Affiliate Income

If you’re depending on affiliate marketing for your full or even part-time income, good time management is essential. It’s easy to get caught up in researching your product or even in reading your email. Track what you do each day, including how long it takes you to complete each of your tasks so that you can see how your earnings breakdown compared to the time you’re spending.

Your affiliate earnings will be a direct comparison to the value you provide to your audience. The more value you provide, the more money you’ll make.

The most profitable path to take when it comes to affiliate marketing is to sign up to high paying affiliate programs. These are some of the best affiliate programs the internet has to offer. They give you the opportunity to net high-end commissions for products and services that are worth much more. It takes the same amount of effort to sell a $50 Ebook than it does to sell a $1000 course so it’s a complete no-brainer.

Know Your Audience

To get the most out of an affiliate marketing program, it’s vital to know your audience. Find out why people are coming to your site and what they are looking for. Provide affiliate products that meet their needs. Focus on things that are relevant to your site and are more likely to catch people’s attention.

To succeed at affiliate marketing, you should always try out any product you are recommending first. This will help you to write an honest recommendation rather than a sales pitch that sounds like baloney. It also gives you an idea of what steps your customers will go through, and you can offer tips to make sure they complete the transaction.

It’s Not a Push-Button Solution

Make sure you understand that affiliate marketing isn’t a get rich quick scheme. You will have to put a lot of time and effort into forming quality affiliate campaigns if you want to be successful. Learn about different ways to provide value to your audience if you want to reap the long-term benefits of affiliate marketing.

Staying Up To Date

To keep up with the trends in affiliate marketing, make sure that you read some of the top blogs in the industry. This will help you to stay current so that your style is not outdated when you are developing your writing. Stay up to date if you want to increase your capabilities.

Picking An Affiliate Program

When reviewing affiliate marketing programs for your website, it is important to take your time and carefully consider what the options are for different products and services. What will your readers be most interested in? It may take some time to figure out what the right products and services are, but it will be worth the time you invest to figure it out.

Picking a Niche

Be an affiliate for a subject you know about. It can be tempting to go for the best converting products or the ones you can make the most money from, but there is no substitute for knowing your market. Knowing the subject well will help you create a better website and offer site visitors the information they want. Therefore you have a greater chance of success.

To summarise:

As you have seen, affiliate marketing has different tactics, but it all shares the same goal which is to help sell your products and services. All it requires is some research, hard work, and basic knowledge to decide what can work well for promoting your business to become a successful affiliate marketer.

If you’ve recently started out on your online business venture check out this article on getting started online.

Useful resources for affiliate marketing:

http://benguonline.com/affiliate-marketing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

http://benguonline.com/learn-affiliate-marketing

Having an effective email marketing campaign can mean the difference between a profitable business and one that just about breaks even. It can also be a great way to communicate the value of your brand. To implement an email marketing campaign effectively you need to have a strong understanding of copywriting and human psychology, what makes a person want to open up that email?

Ask For Feedback

Ask your customers for feedback on your emails. Since your customers are the most important part of your campaign, it is important to know if they are pleased with the emails they receive from you. You could ask them to fill out a short survey with a few questions on what they like and what they dislike. Incentivise them to do so by offering them something of value in return for their time.

Provide Value

While you want to use your email marketing to improve your sales. The only way to get potential customers to read your emails is to provide something of value to them, this could be something like a free E-book or a white paper.  To do this, your emails should always contain concrete, useful information and relevant links, and not just generic sales fluff. Your aim is to build a relationship with your customers, not to spam them with offers!

Email Marketing Providers

There are various fantastic email marketing providers that allow you to automate your email follow-ups so you don’t have to spend all day manually emailing your prospects. Companies such as Aweber, Active Campaign and MailChimp provide great tools and are relatively inexpensive.

The Unsubscribe Button

Your email marketing campaign will be more effective if you make it easy for customers to unsubscribe. This may seem paradoxical, but people will tend to trust you more if you make them feel as if they are in control. Post the unsubscribe link in an obvious place so they can find it easily.

A major holiday is usually not the time for an important marketing campaign. This is because people are usually out of their office and not next to their computers, so they won’t notice your emails. Of course, you should adapt this to your target audience. Black Friday, for example, is one occasion where a date relevant campaign is warranted.

Beware of including attachments to your email marketing! Mass emails with attachments are instantly suspected as spam by most spam filters. As well, these days many types of computer malware and viruses are carried in email attachments, and people are aware of this. Your email is in jeopardy of being immediately deleted when they see an attachment without even being read.

When people opt-in to your email marketing list, you need to let them know what to expect up front. Tell subscribers how often they can expect to hear from you and what types of communications you will be sending them. If they are expecting the volume of mail you will be sending, they are less likely to get frustrated and unsubscribe.

While in the opt-in process, be sure to ask for the names of your customers, especially their first name. Having their name to reference makes any further communication you have with them more personal and more likely to catch their attention. This will help build customer relationships.

Keep all of your branding in your email consistent with your business. Don’t make your email appear as though it belongs to another business. Try to stick with your usual colours, voice, and fonts so that the readers can recognise that the email is from you and so they will read it.

These tips can upgrade your campaign in a huge way, but you need to use them to see results! Use them with your current projects or use the tips to start a new campaign altogether, and you will soon see much-improved results with your email marketing campaigns.

The higher you rank on search engines, the better your website rankings and traffic numbers will be, translating into more leads and sales for your business.

Once you have learned the basics of search engine optimization, you can apply that knowledge to improve your website. The search engines use formulas and algorithms because there are millions of websites to rank. The search engines can’t scrub your site and understand that the quality of the content makes it the best site on the subject.

Search engines use complicated automated ranking techniques to determine where your site falls. This is where search engine optimization can help.

Proper optimization of your site allows it to communicate its suitability for a high rank in the SERP’s.

Many factors work together to determine how search engines rank your website. One thing they look for are keywords in your headings and on your site. Another thing they look at is the activity on your site and the links to and from your site.

It’s a Long Game

High rankings in various search engines take time. You should be doing everything possible to make your website attractive to these engines. Keywords, placed throughout the text in your website, can help with Google recognising what your content is all about. If your keywords aren’t getting you the ranking results you want, you’re most likely lacking in the backlinks department.

Backlinks are essential to achieving rankings in the search engines, and not just any backlinks.

Google values backlinks from quality, authoritative domains. Earning backlinks from powerful websites in your niche is the best way to sky-rocket your position in search.

Not all visitors will have found your website on purpose. Many visitors will stumble across your site from somewhere random. These visits very rarely yield a sale. Garbage traffic comes from all over the place. This is why effective marketing strategies are so important. You want to attract visitors that have a need for your products and services. If you optimise your page correctly to rank for certain keywords, you will find your audience more easily.

Websites are good for all businesses. If the main goal of your business is to offer a product or service online to customers, you need to make sure you’re ranking in high positions with the major search engines if you want to make any sales organically.

Looking for ways to build your brand? Check out this article.