I hear you talk a lot about branding, how important it is and so on. But I’m a part time online seller, I don’t have much money to invest, I’m not a designer and at the end of the day – I don’t even know where to begin to create my own “brand”. What is branding and why it’s so important?

Branding is one of the most under-valued terms in online business, especially if we’re talking about new ventures, small “one man band” companies. For many online sellers branding starts and ends with a logo design. In many cases – a bad one.

But in reality, branding plays a huge role in your overall success running a successful online business. Faulty is assumption that branding is only for big, multi-million companies who can spend huge amounts of money on advertising, branding and marketing in general.

In fact – I think that small online businesses are in a much better position to brand themselves as they can make huge changes to design, layout of the website, customer relationship processes etc. They have much smaller risks to take and they can test changes in more precise way than a company like Coca Cola could ever imagine.

So what is “Branding”?

“Branding is all those processes you put in place to make your customers buy from you over and over again.”

This involves several things, like:

•    The name of your company;
•    Logo and slogan;
•    Colour scheme and layout of your website;
•    Loyalty Program;
•    Special offers;
•    Product packaging;
•    After sales service, guarantee;
•    Community;
•    Customer Support;

First thing you should do is decide what kind of brand you want to create. Do you want to be cheap or expensive? Family oriented? Do you want to emphasise your strongest points, like “Eco Friendly”, “Cheapest”, “Best Customer Service”?

You have to know this and draw a portrait of what you want to see in your brand even before coming up with a name for your company as if you do that before – it may not be connected to your branding strategy. For example, “VIP Pool Tables” won’t be a good name for a company that wants to position themselves as “cheapest on the market”.

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