5 Commandments to Blog Branding
If you’re a blogger, then you know the importance of a blog brand. It’s not enough to just have an excellent blog with loads of followers and great content. A strong match that matches who you are and what your blog represents is just as important.
In this blog post, we’ll walk through the steps of an effective branding process to help you develop a brand marketing strategy for your blog.
Develop Your Personal Branding
Before you come up with your blog’s brand strategy, take a look at the branding of your business. You will want to follow the same guidelines as your other branding efforts.
Below are factors that are intrinsic parts of your blog’s brand style guide:
- Goals and objectives – What does your blog strive to achieve for its audience. Why did you start your blog, and what do you wish to communicate to readers? Your answers here will help you narrow down the concept for your blog logo design.
- Vision and mission – What does your blog currently do (mission statement), and what will your blog hope to accomplish in the future (vision)?
- Colors – What colors best describe your blog? Here, consider the different color psychologies to help you decide the colors that reflect your values and qualities.
- Font – Striking the balance between readability and uniqueness for your logo is something you should strive for. Most readable fonts are pretty standard, while some unique fonts are not as legible.
- Niche – Knowing your industry allows you to refine your brand naming process and determine other brands in the market vying for the same customers and readers.
Business niche market and specializing in a smaller opportunity as an individual dart going a different way as a metaphor for strategic planning as a 3D illustration.
Your personal brand should reflect your unique qualities: who you are and what you do, as well as align with any other branding efforts that go alongside it, like social media profiles.
Your goal will be to create a memorable identity for yourself in the blogging world and make sure every part of your brand voice matches your writing style to create quality content that resonates with your target audience.
Now, if you’re doing things the opposite way, i.e., you don’t have a blog yet and want to set up your brand equity first, make sure that your brand name hasn’t been claimed yet. You want your blog name to be as unique as possible to help establish your brand identity even before typing a word on your blog.
Create Visuals for Your Brand
If you want to design your brand, using an easy-to-use design tool to help bring your logo to life goes without saying.
Unless you have the design chops to use software for creating more sophisticated logo designs, free logo maker tools that include Canva and Crello should be enough.
Choose from the templates available for both editors, so you don’t have to start from scratch. But if you decide on doing so, using either tool’s drag-and-drop builder should make designing your assets much more accessible.
If you don’t have the time to create the design yourself because you’re becoming a full-time blogger, you can also hire someone to take this task off your hands. Just make sure to get a logo design proposal from the designer to help you decide which among the different applicants get the job from you.
Logo
There are lots of reasons why creating a logo for your brand is necessary. One of them is because it will make it easier for users to recognize and share. It’s also a great way to build brand recognition!
For instance, you can use your icon logo as your site’s favicon, as well as your social media profile since they require you to submit an image file type with square dimensions.
Most importantly, the icon version of your logo relies mainly on visuals instead of words due to the space allotted for an icon design.
For instance, Chik-fil-a has one of the best restaurant logos for several reasons, and one of them is because of the “C” in the name. It takes the appearance of a chicken’s head which is toasted on the bread of their sandwiches. Not to mention, it is also used as the site’s favicon.
Therefore, your ability to distill your logo into a memorable icon is a skill you need to learn to create the best possible icon design for your blog.
Also, consider coming up with different variations of your logo designs as it allows you to explore different visual identities. For example, use a specific color scheme for one variation and a different scheme for another. You can also play around with stylish fonts, layouts, and feel for each variant to give you different looks for your blog’s logo.
Blog Design
A timeless design will never go out of style. Your blog should be just like that. It’s essential to strike a balance between simplicity and complexity, and you can do so by pairing two fonts with different styles.
Most of the time, keeping your design as simple as possible by only using up to three colors max and classic font styles is the best way to achieve a timeless logo design.
To help you plot out your design ideas correctly, you may need to use mood board and mind map tools to help you make sense of your ideas as they flow endlessly from your well of imagination. Designing a logo can bring out the best from creative people, so make sure to document your thought process every step of the way to not miss out on anything.
Let Your Audience Speak Up
If you’re torn with some of the logo design variants you have, consult your community or readers to help you decide which is the best one for your blog.
Since they’ll be the ones who will read your blog, giving them the decision as to which logo they want to see on your blog makes sense.
Also, take this opportunity to ask for feedback regarding the logo you have. Maybe they have insights regarding the design that you weren’t aware of beforehand. This way, you can make the necessary changes to your logo design that’s agreeable to you and your audience!
The most important thing you want to establish by giving your target audience a part of building your blog’s brand is trust. Once they feel part of building something more significant than they are, you can build long-lasting relationships with these people.
Thus by establishing a strong brand name with your blog, you can develop better customer loyalty with your blogging!
Put Your Brand in Display
Once you have set up your brand, it’s time to showcase it for all to see. Aside from your blog, you can promote your brand on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
If you don’t have an account on these platforms, you can create one and upload your logo on each. Take note that each platform has different sizes for the profile picture you can upload and the cover photos, post images, and others. So be sure to create images with the correct dimensions for each social media site.
Also, if you’re considering creating marketing materials for your blog, i.e., business cards, letterheads, posters, et al., use your branding logo and colors here.
Finally, considering that you will use your across all your marketing materials, such as your intro videos and paid campaigns, you need to come up with something that stands the test of time.
The idea is to get more people acquainted with your blog branding. The more they are exposed to your logo and theme, the higher the retention rate becomes. As a result, the audience will be more familiar with your brand and what it represents.
Consider a Brand Refresh
If you think your blog has outgrown your current brand, then it’s time for a brand refresh. What happens here is you reimagine your blog’s brand and adapt it to what your blog has become today.
For example, let’s say your blog was about mountain bikes. Its brand consisted of a mountain bike as part of the logo and colors related to biking.
However, over time, your blog grew to cover outdoor life and camping, both of which are somewhat related to mountain biking. To accommodate your new audience from both topics, you may need to change up your brand.
From here, you can simply follow the previous tips below to help set up your branding.
Conclusion
As you can see, you don’t need a branding expert when creating a brand identity for your blog. There’s a lot that goes into the process of coming up with a brand strategy you can be proud of, but following the valuable information outlined above should help you get the most out of your blogging efforts.
To help you get the most out of your branding, there are branding blogs out there like Branding Strategy Insider, World Branding Forum, Logo Smith, and other blogs that you can turn to for relevant content.
Their blog posts talk about creating a brand, branding advice for many bloggers, and others can help refine your developing brand identity that communicates your blog to your audience.
Once your blog hits big, your audience will associate your blog with its logo. So whatever you come up with in your design process, you’ll mostly be linked to it for a very long time.
Therefore, make sure to take your logo design seriously. Good luck!
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