What is Your Branding Power?
I was just reading a new article from my good friend Sam Harrelson, over at Revenews. He was talking about how essential branding is for online marketers. He also posted a video of Gary Vaynerchuk at Strategic Profits Live 08. I was fortunate enough to meet up with Gary for the first time at BlogWorld, I then met up with him briefly during Affiliate Summit last week in Vegas. Besides being an awesome all around guy, he is a marketing genius and an excellent speaker.
During Gary’s speech, he talks about how important branding is and how you help build other people’s brand, that are bigger than yours, or ahead of you. I can relate heavily with Gary because we both have such an extreme passion for what we do.
How important is branding? Easy… what do you think of when you see a dollar sign inside of a superman logo? Shoemoney of course. The mention of “John Chow“, just makes you think about blog earnings and how much you can make online. Where do you go when you need to buy a product online? Amazon or eBay. The branding factor is amazing, and extremely important to your business or life activities. If you work with someone that’s a real jerk or talks behind everyone’s back, you don’t want to associate yourself with them.. again, that is a brand, and reputation. They both work together. Amazon and eBay would not be successful “brands”, if they did not work.
With Affiliate Summit at a close, everyone is now sharing and posting pictures of everyone they met at the conference. Once again, this is branding. You want to associate yourself with successful and well known individuals. When I was pointed out in the keynote at Affiliate Summit (along with Shoemoney), my name was never mentioned… just my picture. Yet, the majority of people at the conference already knew who the picture was of. Once again, that is branding!
Your blog is your brand. Your web site is your brand. Establish your business and blog the way you want to be seen by others.
On that closing note, I highly recommend you watch the short video of Gary Vaynerchuk at Strategic Profits Live 08.
That was a great post Zac. Gary is right, a lot of us are building the brand of people that are ahead of us. I'm constantly working on building my brand, even though I just started.
I knew times were good, but having the perspective that this is gold rush time, really makes you realize the opportunities available today. Time to build my own brand.
Branding is incredibly powerful and everyone knows that. Few people actually work to reinforce their brand though. I think you are doing quite well with it. The ASW picture, plus appearing on the expert panel will have done wonders for your brands pulling power.
This is actually a subject I try to reinforce with most of my clients. You have to live your brand. The only thing I would change to what you've said is that your website/blog is one portion of your brand. Other parts would be your logo, your illustration of yourself among plenty of other possibilities.
Just like branding a cow burns the flesh, branding your business means burning the idea of your business into their minds.
Branding is something I have not given enough thought, but I do understand what you are saying and I better get my thinking cap on.
I have created a logo but have not been completely satisfied with it. I have also been looking for someone locale that could create a caricature of me. That could be scary.
I have a lot of work to do on my blog to make it great and my own but I am getting there one step at a time.
I haven't heard of Gary Vaynerchuk before the Affiliate Summit. I was in the video session that he was in. Gary is an awesome speaker. You can tell that he is very excited about what he is doing. His passion comes out when he is speaking.
Branding starts often by itself when your product gets more popular, from that moment it's time to deploy. And many times it really doesn't matter much how your brand looks like complex, simple, ugly, etc. in order to be very popular. Things go by itself!
@eMarketing Chat – I agree that sometimes "brands" take off in a different direction than originally planned, usually for the better. However, it can be controlled to some respect, and if you're letting your brand fly completely untethered, then you don't have any control of what it becomes, which could be severe.