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Branding is one of the most important aspects of creating a successful product.  Brand identity often revolves around simple visual cues.  There are several types of visual cues that can be used for branding.

One simple way to brand is color.  When you UPS did a major campaign a while back “what can brown do for you?”

Another is style.  Site Sketch 101 might be about how to blog, but it is the hand sketched style and appearance that give it such a distinct branded look.  Nick is an awesome example of how to brand.

Logos are probably the most commonly used visual tool used for branding.  If you tell me you don’t recognize the logo to the right, I’ll call you a lair.

Building a brand around a logo is easy with clothing and apparel, but how can we make our logo an easily recognized image online?

Make A Gravatar To Build Your Brand

One of the most simple methods to establish your brand online is with a Gravatar or a globally recognized avatar.  Basically, you can setup an image that is linked to your e-mail address on any blog that you comment on (provide they support Gravatars).

Having a Gravatar makes you easy to spot for other readers.  When they see you commenting on many of the same sites, they might be inclined to check out your blog or product.  Also, your image may start being associated with quality which is always a good thing.  (Provided that you make quality comments.  If you don’t, maybe it’s a bad idea to have a Gravatar…)

Additionally, Dave from Website-in-a-Weekend points out that if you get caught in the spam filter, your Gravatar will make it easy to recognize you and correct the problem.

At the end of the day, the more people see you, the more they recognize you and become familiar with you.  We didn’t learn about Nike overnight, the world won’t learn about us overnight either (unless they are stalkers… ugh).

Use A Favicon To Build Your Brand

The little 16×16 image to the left of your URL in your browser  is called a Favicon.  It turns out when someone bookmarks your site, that little icon shows up next to the page name.  It also shows up on tabs for people who use tabbed browsing.

The more places someone sees your logo, the more they will remember it.  Furthermore, when looking at bookmarks, a bookmark with an attractive favicon is more likely to get the attention of someone than a site with the default/no favicon.  The same is true about tabs.

Coming up with a good looking 16×16 image on your own using MS Paint is kind of tricky.  That’s why I recommend using a Favicon Generator Tool.  This tool lets you upload an image, and it will automatically resize, reformat, and rename the image to be used as a favicon.  Just be sure to double check and make sure the image looks good.  Sometimes a little extra cropping goes a lot way.

You can now either search on Google for how to implement your Favicon manually, or you can just installed the Admin Favicon plugin for Wordpress.  With a couple of quick clicks, you now have a new sleek and sexy looking Favicon that will differentiate you from the rest (or help you keep up with the pack depending on the circles you run in).

Your Gravatar and Favicon don’t have to be the same image (or even your logo), but they should be easy to relate to.  For example, I use the same image for my Gravatar as I do for my Twitter profile.  It’s easy to know I’m the same person.

Not only do these two things help build your brand, but they also help establish credibility (or rather, keep you from losing credibility).  If you want to be taken seriously, take care of these two things when you first start your blog.  It doesn’t take much, but it goes a long way.

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