Certain products and services just stay in your mind.  How do they do it? How do they stand out from the crowd?

Branding.

Branding is a way to make your blog memorable and recognizable.  It involves taking multiple elements of your blog – your content, your look – and making them all stay consistent with each other.

Mainly, then, it’s about repetition. But be careful, because there’s a subtle difference between repetition and redundancy.

When you first create your blog, no doubt you picked a particular theme.  Cooking, maybe, or technology or sports, whatever.  Branding goes a little bit further, though, and includes things like the tone you write with and the layout and colors of your design.  All of these things need to come together to create one unique package.

To start branding your blog, you want to use a particular design, theme and repetition that help your “brand”, or style, stick out to your readers.

Here are some steps you can take:

1. Choose your subject and your angle

Pick something that you know a lot about and that you are passionate about.  Let your enthusiasm for the subject bleed into your writing.  This can help your readers get excited about what you’re saying and keep them coming back for more.

Say your subject is cooking.  There are different ways you can talk about cooking.  For example, you can write from the point of view of a mother trying to find healthy ways to feed her family, or perhaps from the point of view of a vegan looking for tasty recipes.  The subject “cooking” is a little too broad, but if you stop and consider what kind of “angle” you’re writing from – and this will depend on who you are – then you’ll take one more step towards developing your unique brand.

2. Think about your audience

What type of audience are you looking to appeal to?  Different people are attracted to different types of themes.  Perhaps you’ll want a more “cutesy” theme, or perhaps a technical theme.

3. Make your layout match your subject

Two blogs could be about cooking, but one might have a more sophisticated, high class look while another might have a more fun and homey type of look.  Your layout is important for creating an atmosphere, and you want to make sure that that atmosphere matches your writing style and the goals of your

4. Create a logo

The logo should match your layout (or you can design a layout that matches your logo).  The logo is a KEY element to branding.

How to Get a Logo:

• Design it yourself
• Run a contest on your site
• Ask/pay someone else to create a logo for you

When you design your logo yourself, you have the most control and you’ll know what you want.  The problem of course is that you may lack the skills to create what you want.  If you don’t know how to do graphic design, then you can look at these other options: run a contest, pay someone else, or (website that helps create logos?)

Which option should I choose?

When running a contest, you can’t guarantee that you’ll find anything that was what you had in mind.  You’ll have to choose a winner, but there’s no guaranteeing that you’ll really want to use the winning logo as your logo.  Maybe it’s the best… but still not quite what you wanted.  Of course, you could approach the winner and tell them this (politely of course).  Explain that theirs was the best, but ask if they would be willing to make a few tweaks (be prepared to try offering them something extra)…. Of course at that point you might as well just pay someone to create something for you.

Another thing to think about is that you’ll need to provide some sort of prize.  “Bragging rights” might be enough for some, for others perhaps the prestige of winning and the publicity it provides will suffice.  However if you are not well known yet or don’t have a big following yet, you may want to actually offer something

When you’re paying someone else, you can have a dialog and explain to them what you’re looking for; if it’s wrong, then you can easily ask them to fix it; after all you’re paying them.  The downside though is that this will cost money.

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Remember, it’s not just about the logo, it’s about the “feel” of your site.  Your layout, your writing, your logo, your colors – all these things come together in one package to create your brand.  Everything should match and remain cohesive.