Network Solutions – Small business conversations and working together for small business success

Building your Brand 101 Series

My first series was an outline of Building your Business Online and listed the steps to get a presence established online. The last step was marketing. Establishing your brand online is a bit different than doing it for a brick & mortar. The virtual world allows for more creativity but it also offers some new challenges too. Establishing Word of Mouth is the ideal goal where your customers talk about your products & spread the word.

Building brand is something that you start doing & then build on it. It can be as simple as the suggestions in the Word of Mouth article. As you have success you can add to it. The nice thing about establishing your brand & marketing your business online is that it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. But it will require you to consistently invest time.

For my example I’m going to use a niche business & customer segment that I worked with for almost two years. Let’s consider a professional photographer that wants to sell her photos online. She has created a site for posting proofs from portrait & event shoots. And she also has created a section where she displays her nature & landscape photography that’s for sale.

So, she’s ready for business right? Her clients can view their proofs, place them in the cart & order them. But how can she get the word out about her service & her nature photography?

Here are a number of ideas that you can use immediately. Some also work for your personal blog. In upcoming articles I will be covering the following:

Brand Monitoring & Responding

Having a blog (forums for more conversation if it makes sense)

Monitoring Site Traffic & Trends

Newsletter

Listing Sites

Online Press Releases

Participation in Social Networking sites

Utilizing an Events service

What would you add to this list?

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