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7 Ways to Promote Your Brand, Apart From the Blog

When you change your blog theme, it’s a good time to re-evaluate your overall branding strategy. Think about the places people encounter your work.

Are you presenting a consistent image to the public?

Can people recognize your work anywhere it might appear?

Here’s a few ways you can build your brand, aside from the actual blog design. Force brand recognition with repetition.

Favicon

(It’s that little icon shown in the address bar for a website.) If you’re not utilizing this important space, you’re missing out. It’s really easy to create your own favicon.

1. Create an image you like, making sure it’s a square. My suggested size is 48px by 48px. The actual favicon will be 16×16, but you can use the bigger image for other things (below).

2. Use Favicon from Pics to turn your image into a favicon. Just upload your image, and the site will give you a “favicon.ico” file to download.

3. Upload your favicon.ico file to the HTML root of your site. The file should show up automatically from now on.

MyBlogLog

You know that MyBlogLog allows avatars. A lot of sites are now including these in sidebars and comment threads. Instead of just showing your face, why not make your avatar your brand?

This is where your 48×48 image from the favicon step comes in handy. That happens to be the size of a MyBlogLog avatar.

Go to your Edit Profile page and click on “Change Picture / Avatar.” Or, you can use this handy direct link (if you’re logged in).

Now your brand will appear on any blog you visit that shows MyBlogLog avatars. Cool, right?

While you’re in the MyBlogLog profile pages, be sure update the thumbnail images for your blogs. Go to your blog’s community page, click the “Edit Site Settings” button, then click the “update” link by your screenshot. Easy.

Twitter

I’m finally getting into Twitter, since the IM version is actually working now (aflusche on Twitter). There are two things you can customize here to promote your brand.

First, update your avatar. This is in the Settings > Picture page (direct link). The Twitter avatar is 48×48, so your trusty image works here too!

Second, tailor your page’s design. Find this in your Settings > Design page (direct link). Twitter allows a custom background image and page colors. Why not change these to fit with your brand?

FeedBurner

If you’re not managing RSS feeds with FeedBurner, you’re missing out on a great tool. There are another two features here to promote your brand.

You can add an image to your feed by using the “Feed Image Burner” feature. Find this through your control panel > Optimize > Feed Image Burner.

You’ll need to host the image on your server and then give FeedBurner the link. The maximum recommend size is 144×144. I’m using a small version of my blog’s header image.

Next, customize your FeedBurner email design. Go to Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding (tiny toward the form’s top).

You can specify an image to display in the emails, as well as fonts and colors. I’m using a similar image to the feed image, but the size is a bit bigger (recommended max is 200×200).

Other ideas?

I’m sure there are other similar things that I’ve left out. These are just the ones that came to mind. Almost every site has an avatar these days. And there are other pages we can customize, such as MySpace. Why not bring your brand wherever you “live” online?

Do you have any thoughts to add here? Am I going crazy?

[tags]branding, marketing, brand[/tags]

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