Article in General Business

Part of being successful online is building your persona in a way that you create a recognizable and trusted presence where people want to listen to what you have to say. There are those affiliate marketers that want to be hidden and want to keep everything they do a secret, and that’s fine for them. But a majority of affiliate marketers, bloggers and small business individuals benefit greatly from the social, networking, and viral aspects of doing business on the Internet.

With all that said, there are two main ways to build your business and brand recognizability on the web. They are done by advertising to get traffic and advertising to brand yourself and they are somewhat different in their nature. Strict advertising is done for the main purpose of driving traffic to your site or affiliate deals in the hope that you will make money and be able to eat a decent meal 3 times a day. Or if you have a blog and are trying to build your reputation online for future endeavors, traffic is still a bedrock issue. If you don’t have traffic, you don’t have an online persona. You have nothing.

Great ways to drive traffic to your site are through article marketing, Adwords, commenting on other blogs, guest posting for other blogs, submitting posts to StumbleUpon and other social site and a whole host of other things. All these are great and will bring you traffic, get advertisers for your blog, get clicks on your affiliate links and earn you your next payday.

Going beyond that though, takes a different mindset in that what you are trying to achieve is name and brand recognition and may for some time mean little to no traffic. This can be a little trickier and in the pre-internet era, was only available to large companies with huge advertising budgets. Wasting money in the days of what Seth Godin calls interruption advertising, was almost a requirement, or at least it was fashionable.

In today’s world of literally millions of places to display inexpensive ads, the cost of branding has been brought down to a level where a small business or individual blogger can even afford to do it. Some effective ways to promote your brand are to have a recognizable logo and buy up lots of 125 x 125 banner ads on various blogs and use the same logo on every one. You can also have t-shirts made and sell them at cost or give them away in to any blogger who writes a post about you and links to your blog. I’ve received a few t-shirts from bloggers and constantly have people asking me about them when I’m wearing one.

Write tutorials for products or services you use, publish them on your blog, and notify the companies behind these products by email about your work. These quick emails can end up in interviews and other opportunities for your business. Another great way to brand yourself is to write an ebook about some difficult aspect of your business and then give away the book for free asking all who download it to share it with others. Even traditional business cards also come in handy when going to tradeshows and industry events. Pass them out to every one you meet just to get your brand in front of more eyeballs.
The whole point of advertising in this way is to get your logo, company or what you do to be the product, rather than the actual rendering of service or selling of you product to make money. You become the product because you are selling yourself or your business.

If you are smart with your money in the area of promotion, people will eventually begin to recognize your brand more than you as an individual and that’s not a bad thing to have happen. You can then get the added benefit of more recognition when people discover that you are the person behind the brand. Promotion is the name of the game on the web and maybe someday we’ll see your brand, and get to meet the person behind it.