The following is based on a presentation I gave at the Perth Podcamp the weekend just gone.

For everything that is new in online marketing, some things never change. The old school notion of branding is very much alive online today as it ever was in the offline world. Any marketing related graduate (mine was a B.Com with a double major in Marketing and ECommerce) knows the basics, but many people dont.

What is a brand

When people ask me what a brand is, I nearly always say Coca-Cola, arguably the best known brand world-wide. A brand is a business name that goes to the next level, a name that is the center of the product and service. Amex, Visa, Pepsi, KFC, McDonalds...they are all brands. You know them because the brand is bigger than the people who created them.

Why you should establish a brand

The better question is why shouldn't you! Building a brand is key to building any online business. You want people to remember your site and product, don't you?

Branding Basics

The are some basics you should adhere to with your online brand. The following is adopting from what I was once taught for the offline world:

1. it should be short and sweet: ideally your name should be short and catchy, but most of all it should be easy to spell.

2. You should own the .com name: there are very few areas where you shouldn't own the .com name for your brand.

3. It should sound nice: this sounds corny, but a rough word on the tongue doesn't help your image..make it sound nice. It's hard, but you can do it

4. It should make for a nice logo: every now and then you hit words that are hard to brand in graphical form. If you're shortlisting names try to imagine them in a logo...if you cant don't use the name!

The Advantages of a brand

My first blog was a site called The Blog Herald: I don't think for the first 12 months I once used my name in a post (it was always editor) and as a consequence when people linked or quoted it was always "The Blog Herald quoted...The Blog Herald reported" as opposed to Duncan Riley reported etc... I could pretend it was a brilliant marketing strategy (which in retrospect it was) but I just didn't feel comfortable putting my name to articles, particularly given at that time I was in full time work unrelated to the net.

The key moral from that story is that the brand can be bigger than the person. This has two benefits: it helps greatly if you ever sell the site (as I did with The Blog Herald) and it also helps in building the site as the authority as opposed to yourself, particularly if you're known prior to the new site.