Developing your Web Presence #3 - Branding! Or 'Ouch! Don't come near with me that hot poker!'

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Seriously it's not half as painful as it sounds - Branding - and it doesn't involve anything hot - except your image when people see it and love it.

An example of excellent branding would be Apple - Mac - Imac - Ipod - Iphone - all those products.  What do you think of when you hear their name?  I think of the apple logo, and I think of bright colours and cool products.  Why?  Yep, because they've done a remarkably good job of Branding themselves.  If you look around you, you'll see company logos everywhere.  They might be text - like IBM and DELL, or they might be graphics like the Apple or ReMax with the balloon.

Now, I can't say reading this is going to give you the ability to become the next Apple, but it might make you consider how you can brand yourself a little, so that your image is consistant and reflects who you and your business are.

Back to Apple for a minute, I know what to expect when I see anything related to them - it's the image I spoke about above.  If I went to Apple's site and found a grey and blue page, with no apple logo and no bright colours I might be confused - I might wonder if I were in the right place.  The same idea can help you!

Think of all those web places again.

Are they connected visually in any way?  Do they have a theme to them, or are they all bursting with their own personalities?  If you are anything like me, when you start something new you are excited and want it to look fresh and different.  What we should be considering is - 'how can I make this new thing fit with my other things'.

I'll use myself as an example for this, because I'm trying to connect my places and things with a similar look and feel.  See my header at the top of the page?  I've had that there for a while, and at the minute, my Etsy header is similar.  On my business cards I put that little dingbat logo thingy I created and that helps to tie everything together.  BUT I have a problem!  It's those darn monkees!!  Since I first created these graphics my focus has changed a bit, and somehow I don't think they quite reflect what I'm doing now - I want to include my monkees in my banners.

I signed up for Entrecard and needed to create a graphic for it, this is what I came up with -

I thought the monkees looked cute, so when I signed up for Beader's Showcase I made this for my avatar



Then I created a header graphic for my Beader's Showcase page.



See a pattern developing?

Then I signed up for the new 100 lampwork list - Wall of Flame and needed a banner for it

Now a pattern is really starting to appear!  Problem now is that my Etsy header and the header for this blog are different.  I'm going to change those as well, just as soon as I get myself on task!

Hopefully people will start to connect these images to my beads and myself.  If I make signs for shows or sales I'll try and carry the theme over to them, and if I were to do any advertising I would include similar images.  Instead of being ten different sites all over the web, I am starting to look connected, and starting to generate a Brand for myself and my beads.   I'm not going to be the next Apple either, but my web presence will at least be consistant!  ...Now I just have to hope that I don't go off monkees ;o)

If you found this helpful, I'd love to know, and again if you've got any questions I'll answer them if I can.  Thanks for reading!

Next up - Why do I need a Blog?