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Branding, as a whole, is essential for any serious business because quite simply a companys brand is what distinguishes it from its competitors. In todays computer age, not only is it essential for many businesses to have an internet presence to stay competitive but also to create a brand online that your target consumer market will recognize. An effective internet branding, just like its offline counterpart, helps bring awareness to your unique business offering and drive customer demand.

While Internet branding offers vast opportunities for business, in order for it to be effective one must be able to attract and engage its customers doing this over the Internet is not an easy task. Internet branding is not as simple as putting up a website and adding your company logo and slogan. Your internet branding strategy should make your online brand visible and distinguishable.

Internet branding makes use of technological tools to create an online presence for your business. Graphics and animation, a compelling web copy, and overall website design that reflect your companys brand are some of the important elements that will bring your online brand alive. Additionally, an attractive website that helps customers easily and quickly find the information they need is the key to get customer interaction and eventually, business. Your Internet branding strategy should incorporate good design elements and ease of use to create an effective overall impression of your company.

A strong online brand image will make the difference whether a customer will buy from you online or switch to your competitors. Remember, that online customers can just leave your site and go to your competitors in a click of a mouse. Therefore, a lot depends on the impression that they get from your site. Internet branding seeks to deliver an immediate unique message about your business to your target clients.

Visibility is also crucial in the online business world. There is no use to having a website if Internet users are not aware of it and because of the vast number of websites, businesses are competing to appear at the top pages of big search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Most customers do not look past the first few search pages when they make a search query so ranking high in these pages gives you better chances of driving customers to your site. That is why optimizing your site is another major consideration in Internet branding.

As you can see, there are many requirements for a successful Internet branding strategy. For small or large businesses, hiring an Internet branding or marketing specialist will be helpful to give you focus on your efforts in creating an online presence that will become a valuable asset to your business.

For more articles and information or to view a selection of business articles and information and entrepreneur articles and information visit Articles.net.au - Your source for free Articles, Information and Website Content.

Establishing yourself as the expert in your field will help you gain both recognition and respect. Luckily, that recognition and respect transfers directly to your company. If people trust that you truly know what you are talking about, they will feel good about investing in your product.

How to Gain Recognition
There are countless vehicles through which you can brand yourself as an expert. Budgets tend to limit what most companies can do, however. While television and radio appearances will reach the greatest number of people and are also the most personal, most cannot afford such an endeavor. Newspapers, magazines, and other publications are a more cost effective way of gaining exposure.

The Internet has become an increasingly popular place for business owners to showcase their expertise. The opportunities for brand establishment on the Internet are countless.

A website is the best place to start. Build a professional looking site with sound and informative content and you’ll have a source of expert information to direct customers to. It is wise to upload a variety of self-written material to that website. Whether it be e-books or articles, good writing commands respect.

Remember that it is okay to give away some of your precious knowledge free of charge. Offer the customer something useful up front and they will label you as a legitimate source to go to for whatever your company may offer.

Branding on the Internet
Once your website is in good shape, it is time to attract some site-goers. Article marketing is one way to do this. Appearing as an expert in these self-written articles published on various sites will give readers the option of linking back to your site.

Article marketing is an especially effective way to gain that expert status because it gives you the ability to dispense a small number of articles to a huge number of content-rich sites. The more places your name pops up, the more people will be exposed to your site and product. You can be assured you have risen to an expert level in the eyes of consumers once these associations are made.

Another way to display your expertise is through online forums and blogs. This is a bit more casual than article writing. It allows you to remain in the first person and talk candidly with interested web surfers. The conversational tone used in such settings will put many potential customers at ease.

Not only will they view you as an expert, they’ll also feel connected to you as a real human being. Similarly, such an environment gives customers the chance to ask questions as well as giving you the opportunity to back up your product in the face of criticism.

What to Highlight
While the language you use and the information you present is most important when it comes to branding, there are other things to consider. Perhaps most vital are your credentials. Related degrees, certifications, licenses and accreditations that you may have are always good to highlight.

For instance, at the bottom of an article you have written about your clown entertainment business for a circus magazine, you might include a small blurb that says something like the following: “Tom Jones received an M.A. in the Creative Arts from Bozonion University. He is a licensed Balloon Animal Artist as well as being certified in professional stilt-walking. Mr. Jones has been successfully entertaining for over twenty-five years.”

Find the right places to gain recognition. Put yourself out there and command respect through that exposure. Highlight your achievements and successes. Branding yourself as an expert is all about getting other people to recognize something about you that you already know. It is your business and you know your industry. Get out there and showcase your expert talents!

Johnny Albertson is a musician, blogger and writer. Visit his blog, Beatin’ the Blues for more insights and pearls of wisdom. Johnny is a big fan of Article Marketer, an online article distribution service.

We go about running our businesses 24 by 7. We handle all of the customer issues, we make sure the numbers are right, we coordinate all of our resources. If there’s one thing we forget to do though is let the world know how uniquely we do things. I think the reason for this is because we get so involved in the business.

The bottom line is this-because we don’t communicate how we’re different, consumers assume that you’re like everyone else. In the marketplace, people generally perceive that one accountant is like the next, one landscaper is like the next, and one electrician is like the next.

The truth of the matter is that you and other businesses are different. But a majority of the time, businesses simply don’t communicate this. They go about their businesses every day and wind up in the same position that other businesses that don’t communicate how they’re different-the position of competing on price. And let me tell you that this just isn’t a good place to be.

The worst case scenario is a slow languishing death as you keep cutting the price to get business. I’ve seen this in pretty sizable companies whose long-term “strategy” was to gain as much market share as possible then sell. More often times than naught, however, these same companies wound up filing for bankruptcy. I’m sure you would agree that there are few benefits to competing on price.

Part of the foundational marketing strategy is to identify what makes you different. The truth is that as you are different, your business is different as well. Whether this difference, this uniqueness, has to do with your offerings, or your processes or your customer service, you need to pinpoint them (I suggest finding three ways that you’re different), and package them creatively.

By showing how you’re different on a consistent basis, the value to your ideal audience will rise. When your value rises, the sales cycle shortens and your customers are more likely to pay higher prices. This a much better option than competing on price, isn’t it?

Before I go on, I want to point out that years ago, having better customer service, or having a good product line, or having reasonable pricing might have been a difference. But in today’s world, all those things are expectations. Assume that you must have all of those things just to stay in business.

So what are some examples of difference, or uniqueness? It’s a financial planner who provides auto detailing while performing an annual evaluation. It’s a roofing company who provides a thorough inspection before offering pricing. It’s a real estate agent who sends a gift basket when she gets a listing.

Oftentimes I find that companies already have differences in their businesses and it’s just a matter of identification and, in some cases, enhancing those differences.

Does that make sense? Finding this difference forces you out of the commodity business and immediately begins to communicate how you are unique.

Scott Campbell owns Impact Marketing, Inc out of Atlanta, GA. He installs a marketing system, called the “Ultimate Marketing System”, into businesses and practices in the Atlanta, GA area.

Learn more about Impact Marketing and its solutions here at http://www.impactyourcompany.com.

The business world is all about first impressions. If a customer likes what they see right away, they are likely to invest. This is what makes branding so important. Your brand is what consumers will initially encounter when introduced to your company. You want your brand to entice potential customers to dig deeper and further explore what your company has to offer. With any luck, they will like what they see!

How to Develop a Brand
Begin by identifying your target market. You branding strategy will depend heavily on this factor. For instance, you will choose different approaches depending on whether you are marketing to wealthy, retired men or adolescent girls.

The spending habits, interests, age, gender, education level, and many other factors will play into your branding plans. Similarly, your target market will also dictate where you make your brand visible. If a wide margin of you potential customers read the New York Times, you’ll want to advertise there. If they are a more tech-savvy bunch, making your brand well known on the Internet will become a priority.

Once you know who you are trying to speak to, you have to figure out how. Decide what makes your company unique. What distinguishes you from the other guys? Why should a customer come to you instead of the competition? It is in developing those unique selling points that gives a face to your company.

Perhaps it is dependability, innovativeness, or creativity that sets you apart. Regardless of what it is, choose a couple of stand-out qualities and focus on them in the branding process.

Getting Your Brand Noticed
There are several ways to make your brand known to customers. The two main methods are the visual approach and the verbal approach. Any company would be wise to utilize both.

The visual approach involves a specific look to your brand that will be recognized no matter what the context. The best way to do this is through a logo. While it is helpful to have several versions of your logo to fit into different promotional settings, it is essential that a common “look” is maintained throughout.

Remember: what the eyes see, the brain remembers. Whether it be an identifiable font or a memorable graphic, the visual side of branding has become increasingly important in our media-saturated culture.

The verbal aspect of branding is directly connected to the visual. Sometimes they are one in the same, other times the words appear alone, away from the established “look.” The wording involved in the brand becomes evermore vital when separated from the visual.

Choosing a good name for your company is part of the branding process. Be sure to choose a name that is descriptive. Don’t get too creative with made-up titles that “sound cool.” They might be pleasing to the ear, but they won’t be remembered by the brain. Whether a customer sees the brand name with your logo or in a newspaper article in plain text, they should instantly recognize it.

A tagline can also be helpful in bolstering the brand. Taglines should always be short and sweet. Something clever or catchy will stick in the memories of customers the same way an attractive logo will.

Marketing With Confidence
You thought coming up with a brand was challenging, now try maintaining it. A devotion to your brand displays a devotion to your customers. It also shows that you have confidence in your product. Consumers will perceive that confidence and subconsciously internalize a feeling of trust for your brand.

It is that positive gut-reaction that you want. A creative, confident brand is generally the face on a creative and confident company, and that is something any customer will notice and remember.

Johnny Albertson is a musician, blogger and writer. Visit his blog, Beatin’ the Blues for more insights and pearls of wisdom. Johnny uses Article Marketer, an online article distribution service, to build a brand name for himself.

What do all websites need to be successful? Traffic! Do you know that one of the cheapest, easiest and quickest ways to generate traffic is by using traffic exchanges?

The way they work is that you earn credits by surfing other peoples websites. Your earned credits are then used to show other people your website. To join, you need to submit your name, email and website. Your website will then go into rotation with the other websites that have registered with that particular traffic exchange.

When surfing on a traffic exchange there is a counter that counts down a certain number of seconds and when the counter is done you have to click on a number to move to the next site. They operate on a credit system and you get credit by spending time on a particular website. Your credit gets reduced when another member of the exchange visits your website. Increasing your credit gives your website a more effective and wider reach.

A good tip is to use a multi tab browser. This will allow you to surf many exchanges at the same time by running several websites in multiple tabs while only one window is open for viewing in your browser. The Firefox Browser and newer versions of Netscape will let you surf multiple exchanges at once.

Here are some more tips on how to get the most from traffic exchanges:

1. Try to use only about 3 to 5 good exchanges. It is difficult to keep up with too many and this will allow you to focus your efforts on productive advertising.

2. You must take the time to surf and build up credits. Plan to stick with it for a couple of months at least.

3. You can also advertise your traffic exchange referral links from one exchange to another and build your downline while also getting more free credits.

4. Do not just use your main website on the exchanges. Advertise additional pages off of your main website page that have special offers or other related services.

5. Be different and offer something for free, such as an ebook, software, etc. There is nothing wrong with being nice and offering people a free gift for visiting your website.

6. If your offering a network marketing or affiliate program then do yourself a favor and create your own opt in form. Something new will attract more attention.

7. Leave the selling for another time. Try and get as many emails as possible and then worry about making the sale. Offer a newsletter related to your website.

When determining what traffic exchanges to use it is important that you are able to promote multiple URLs. You want the capability to promote other services or programs other then your main one. Since you will be using a number of traffic exchange programs you can promote one traffic exchange on another exchange. This will make it easier for you to get free credits by referring others. Do not forget that you also may want to be able to promote any affiliate programs that you may be involved with.

Some of the free traffic exchange sites may only let you add a few pages, but you can get around this by changing the ones you are promoting at any time even though it is more work. If a traffic exchange program is sending visitors to your website then the extra work is worth it.

As with any other form of advertising on the internet you have to do some research to determine the best traffic exchanges for your needs. Here are some helpful tips for finding good quality traffic exchanges:

1. Find out which ones rank high on Google, and also in the paid ads. A traffic exchange site that is worth your effort will be able to afford to get a high search engine ranking and be able to pay a lot of money for paid classified ads.

2. Use Alexa.com and check the rankings of the exchange sites. If a site has a high Alexa ranking, then they probably have lots of traffic. If you join that traffic exchange then you now have your website appearing on a highly visible site. For example, Trafficswarm has a high Alexa ranking.

3. You can try to find reviews online, but that may not be a good idea since people are going to promote a program because they want to sign you up through their referral link.

4. Select exchanges with many members and try to determine whether the exchange already has alot of websites that are similar to yours, if they do then move on!

5. Try to use traffic exchanges that have categories available for you to place your website in. This will give you more targeted traffic.

The real key to free traffic exchanges is that you do not have to upgrade or spend any money to buy credits. You can always stop using them if you do not get any results.

A good traffic exchange program that is free should be able to get you some results, if not then do not waste your time!

Even if you do not get lots of traffic, your site is being seen by real people and this helps to get your website and name in front of as many people as possible so that they may remember your website in the future.

For your website to be successful it needs to be seen by as many people and as many times as possible.

Copyright 2006 by Joe Rispoli

Joe Rispoli has been involved in online marketing for over 10 years. He would like to invite entrepreneurs to start using his online marketing information and free advertising resources to help them promote their home business all over the Internet! Visit his website to find out how to advertise your business for free.

Years ago I shared a very small office with a man simply know as “The Jeffrey.” He agreed to share the office with me because neither of us could afford the rent on our own. He was a telecommunication consultant and I was a customer service trainer. Even though we were very good at what we did, neither of us knew how to generate new business without spending money on advertising or making sales calls. Unfortunately, those things didn’t really work for us either.

Jeffrey was an interesting guy. He was forever trying to figure out how the most successful people got to the top of their profession. Often after work, we would sit and talk about how we could earn a million dollars doing what we loved while avoiding the things we didn’t enjoy - like advertising and cold call selling. Then one afternoon, out of the blue, Jeffrey looked up and said, “I’ve got it!”

“You’ve got what?” I asked, concerned at what he may have contracted.

“I know how the highest paid consultants got to the top of their professions and I know how we can get there too,” he said throwing his feet up on my desk. Apparently my health was safe. “They’ve learned how to position themselves as expert problem solvers in the minds of their customers! Here’s what they did.”

For the next five hours we talked excitedly about what these highly paid professionals were doing to generate such astounding incomes. They were earning between 10 and 100 times what we were earning without spending a dime on advertising. They didn’t make cold calls or prospect for new business and the demand for their service was so high that they were turning customers away. Their marketing was ingenious and yet so simple. We went home that night confident that we could to the same thing - only faster.

Three years later our customers recognized us as expert problem solvers. Our income went up by a factor of twenty and we had more customers than we could handle. We did it all without advertising or investing our time in low return cold call selling.

Here’s How We Did It
The key to getting to the top of your profession and earning the income that accompanies that spot is to position yourself as the most well known problem solver in your industry. And how do you do that? You do it by making yourself visible as a problem solver to the people you are trying to serve. Here are five ways to get that visibility.

Write an Article
I love reading articles that help me solve a problem. Take a moment right now and sketch out an article idea that your customers will find interesting. Start by identifying the problem your readers have and show them how to solve it. Use examples, stories and terminology they understand. Encourage them along the way. Provide a tag line at the end of your article with your credentials and contact information and send it out to potential publishers. Submit it to article directories on the Internet for distribution and make it available on your website, but don’t stop there. Send it as an email attachment, print it and send it to your customers through the mail or send it to the local newspapers or trade journals and watch what happens.

Be a Guest on a Radio Talk Show
There are 40 million Americans who listen to talk radio every day and the hosts of these shows are always looking for interesting guests to fill the airtime. Are you an expert on a subject that a radio audience would find interesting? If so, there are thousands of radio stations just dying to hear from you. Write out a description of what you can talk about along with ten of the most commonly asked questions people ask. Fax or email you’re page to the radio stations and follow up with a telephone call. If you’re subject is interesting, unique or timely there is a very good chance you’ll be invited on as a guest. It’s not only fun, but profitable as well.

Build a Resource Website
Most professionals have what’s known as a brochure website. This is a site that talks about what they do, how much they charge for their service and where their office is located. Problem is, people don’t visit brochure sites more than once. There’s no reason to do so.

If you have a brochure site, think seriously about converting it to a resource site. Load it with tips and articles and links to other great websites. Add your own articles and comment on what’s going on in your industry. Make your website a place where people will want to come back time and time again. Let them see you as the go-to-guy or gal in the process. As an added bonus, search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo will place you near the top of their search pages when they see the changes you’ve made.

Stand Up, Speak Out
Look for opportunities to speak at meetings where your customers and potential customers are likely to gather. This includes associations, corporations, churches, PTA meetings etc. Virtually every organization needs speakers who have something interesting to share with their members. You can find these organizations listed in the newspaper, on the Internet and through the people you know. Ask yourself who would be interested in what you have to say and give them the chance to invite you to speak at one of their meetings.

Write a Book
Writing a book is arguably the best way to position yourself as an expert problem solver. It separates you from the masses. Imagine sitting on an airplane talking to your seatmate about what you do for a living and they ask, “How do you know so much about thus subject?”

You can answer by saying, “I wrote a book on the subject!” I like the sound of that, don’t you?

Writing a book is a big undertaking but not so big that it’s impossible. Think of your book as an accumulation of many smaller ideas (chapters). Create a file for each of these ideas and begin to gather your information today. Spend the first few weeks accumulating and sorting your stories, facts and statistics and placing them in your file. You will be amazed at how quickly the information piles up. Soon you will have enough content to write a single chapter and then another and then another until you’ve written an entire book. Now imagine one of your prospects picking up your book and seeing your name on the cover. Bingo! They’ve just reframed you from salesperson to expert problem solver. That’s quite a transformation.

These are only a few of the things you can do to position yourself as the expert in your field. There are some great books on the subject and many additional resources on the web. Strive to think differently about your business and how people see you. Remember, it’s not who you know or who knows you - it’s how people perceive you that matters most. Change the way your customers see you and it will change the way your customers treat you.

Bob Sommers is the host of The Recognized Expert Marketing show on Maui. Find out how you can become the Recognized Expert in your field by taking Bob’s popular free e-course available at:
http://www.RecognizedExpert.com

We have all learned about the 4P’s of marketing in undergrad: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. If not, you can open up one of your old marketing text books, blow off the dust and read about it there. The 6 C’s, however, is a not a concept that replaces the 4′Ps; rather, it just expands on the promotion element and provides a more granular look at consumer marketing.

CUSTOMER

In this day and age, a company’s marketing strategy needs to be customer focused. It’s about understanding the target consumer; their wants, needs and motivations. Not as demographics, psychographics or any other graphics, but as real people. Its understanding why customers do what they do (or don’t do),when they do it and why they do it. Such knowledge is critical in marketing since having a strong understanding of buyer behavior will help shed light on what is important to the customer. It’s about focusing on the target customer first and then working back to the brand. It’s imperative that companies have mindshare before focusing on market share.

CONSISTENCY

Companies need to maintain consistency in their message; a practice called integrated marketing communications, from packaging and advertising to sales promotion and publicity. This will maintain and reinforce a brand’s personality and image in a real life context and avoid doing something brainless like changing the distinctive color of the UPS truck to orange. I am sure it’s been talked about.

CREATIVITY

Creativity is imperative to attract attention in a world cluttered with thousands of messages. Creativity means laying aside the rules, and engages in out-of-box thinking so that marketers can reach beyond logic and structure and tap into their imaginations.

Creativity Informs - Marketing’s responsibility to inform is greatly enhanced by creativity. Creativity makes marketing more vivid, and many researchers believe vividness attracts attention, maintains interest, and stimulates consumers’ thinking.

Creativity Persuades - The ancients Greeks created legends and myths about gods and heroes, symbols for humankind’s instinctive longings and fears, to influence human behavior and thought. Today’s marketers are doing the same thing; they are creating new myths, heroes and symbols like Ronald McDonald, the “Can You Hear Me Now” guy from Verizon, and more recently the Gecko from Geico Insurance.

Creativity Reminds - Imagine using the same invitation, without any creativity, to remind people to try a particular product everyday for a month. The invitation would become stale very quickly. Only creativity can transform boring reminders into interesting, entertaining marketing communications. Nike is proof. Several commercials in a Nike campaign never mention the company name or even spelled it out on the screen. Each communication told a story. And, the only on-screen cue identifying the sponsor was a single “swoosh” logo inscribed on the final scene.

CULTURE

All marketing communications needs cross-cultural research to be able to succeed. It’s simple to see things from your own perspective, assuming that everyone else in the world thinks exactly like you and should understand what’s so great about your product or service. Just reading about all the mistakes made by large corporations proves that even the most sizable and experienced marketers have made errors time and again.

One of the most famous examples is Coca Cola translating the name into Chinese without back-translating it (”bite the wax tadpole”), ultimately resulting in a horrible response from an insulted society. Marketing books are full of examples like these. As David Ogilvy, known as the Father of Advertising, states, “If you are trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think”.

COMMUNICATION

This one is basic. Consumers don’t want to be “marketed to”. Rather, they want to be “communicated with”. Good marketing communication creates value with target customers, speaks in their language and tells your story. It’s about building long term, trustworthy, and profitable relationships with your customers. As Seth Godin states, it’s about reinforcing the lies that consumers tell themselves everyday (i.e. I look much better in these jeans from Abercrombie; they make me look sexy).

CHANGE

Marketing is not just a business function, but a process. There is a beginning, middle, but there is never an end. Marketers must constantly CHANGE as society changes. They should never be afraid to try something new. Marketing today is not what it was 2 - 5 - or even 20 years ago. Marketing needs to be an evolving process that considers change in the world, economy, market, consumers; as well as internal change within the organization.

Conclusion (not the 7th C)

So there it is; the 6 C’s of marketing: Customer, Consistency, Creativity, Culture, Communication and Change. I am sure that these will be published in every text book in the country within the next ten years and I will be a rich, well known author. Yeah right!

To read more about online marketing strategies, please visit our internet marketing blog. Michael Brito specializes in internet marketing and offers web marketing strategy services for small business clients.