Marketing and Maintaining Your Brand

Once you have?Created Your Online Identity and Brand, then you have to figure out some way to get the information out there.

Your logo, company story, philosophy, and values can all exist on your website, but unless someone?has a reason to go there, you aren’t going to be able to spread your message very far.

If you want your online identity to affect your bottom line,?you have to do some marketing.

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We have already discussed a few ways that you can do this in our last post on?creating your online identity, such as?answering questions?on “expert answer” websites like Quora.

We will go into these methods in a lot more detail below.

Keep in mind that you have to set up your online identity before you do any marketing work.

That includes:

• Uploading your logo and company information to all relevant social media profiles
• Registering with the appropriate forums
• Adding visual aids and signature links, as well as
• Any other activity online that will place your brand in the public view

Maintaining Your Brand

The next step after ensuring that you have a?social media presence?is marketing and maintaining that brand.

These are seemingly two separate things on the surface, but in a way, they are?nearly the same.

Most or all of the steps listed here are done for both purposes simultaneously.

Both to market your company’s identity and maintain it so that you have a good reputation as a strong, trustworthy brand.

The Importance of Googling Yourself

If you want to find out what the current state of your identity is, there is no better way to do so than by?googling yourself regularly.

Type your company name into any search engine and see what comes up.

You might come across some?positive customer reviews?from sites you didn’t even know existed, or you might find that there are some?negative reviews?out there that you can address.

Finding out?what is going on with your business?online is quite easy with internet search engine.

Especially if your company name is something?unique?that isn’t going to bring up a bunch of non-relevant results.

Blogging

Blogging is?one of the best ways?to market your company online and any intern marketing guru will tell you so.

Blogging does several things at once for your company.

1. It presents you as a human being or group of human beings.

When people read your blog posts, as long as they are well written and personable,?they will see a person behind the words.

2. Blogging helps to establish your credibility.

People will see you as an expert if they come across your blog post and it?answers some question they had.

3. Blogging continually adds keywords.

Search engines will index you for these keywords, meaning that you’ll get?more visitors to your website.

Click on the image below to grab your?FREE GUIDE?on how to turn one post into multiple pieces of promotion content.

Professional Associations

Professional associations can also give you a great deal of?credibility?on the internet.

If you belong to a professional organization that is recognized by others in the industry, then you will?be seen as more of an expert?in the field, and more people will want to buy from you because of that recognition.

Google Alerts

You should also set up Google alerts so that you can?get notified?whenever your company name comes across the Google news wire service or the other locations that the alerts notifications will monitor.

This will allow you to?stay in the know?and respond quickly should a negative piece be published.

Domain & Social Media Names

You also want to claim domain and social media names as much as possible; and as quickly as possible.

This includes variations of your company name with your .coms and social media profiles, as well as your actual company name with all of the standard extensions out there.

This will help you?build brand dominance?over your name.

Signatures & Descriptions

You also want to use email signatures, forum signatures and any other listing online to your advantage as much as possible.

Maintaining these can take time out of your undoubtedly busy day, but it can be worth it.

For example, when you change your forum signature to reflect a new product or any other changes to your company, the?changes are reflected across the entire site, on every post that you have ever made.

This means potentially thousands of eyeballs just for changing a single forum signature.

That’s also another reason why being active on forums is such a good idea.

Forums and Q & A Websites

We have already discussed why forums are a terrific place to market your company and?build your online profile.

What forums you choose will depend upon the industry that you are in and what kind of expertise you want to build.

There are other websites that you should focus on as well; those are the?question-and-answer format sites.

Yahoo Answers is an example of this, although that service is mostly defunct now, the most popular out there is definitely Quora.

Quora has questions on?every single topic?you could think of, and the number of unanswered questions likely number in the millions.

Quora is a great place to build your expertise because you can put your company information in every single question you answer.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that you?simply have to create an online identity?if you want to make it in the world of retail or internet marketing.

People don’t just visit the internet anymore;?they actually live on it, doing most of their shopping online, using the web for entertainment, and in many cases, working online.

Your identity needs to meet them where they are because they won’t come to you.

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