A great blog is nothing without a strong brand behind it. If you want your blog to be as successful as possible, then it is not enough that you simply think about your blog as a website.
Instead, you need to think about it as a movement. That means that people need to be so excited for your blog that they want to be a part of it and they want to feel as though they’re involved in something bigger than themselves.
This is why you will often hear blog owners refer to their followers using some kind of collective noun. If you had a website called Online Earning for instance, you might speak to your audience as ‘E-Earners’.
Suddenly, they will feel as though they are a part of something much bigger and more important and they will enjoy the community feeling that comes from that. This makes them much more likely to want to visit your site more in future, to take part in conversations and to try and ‘recruit’ more people to the cause.
The same goes for sites that sell t-shirts with their branding on them. Now people can feel like they are a part of your brand whenever they wear your t-shirt and they can proudly show their allegiance. It’s not just about the free marketing that you get from someone walking around with your logo!
So how do you get to this point? How do you ensure that people really believe in what you’re doing and feel passionately about it?
Choose a Mission Statement
It doesn’t start with your logo. In fact, a strong brand should start with a mission statement. This is essentially a promise to your audience and a goal that you will set for yourself. If you look at the mission statements of other blogs and channels, they will normally be things like:
“To help people get stronger in body and mind, day by day”
Or
“To encourage and help people to live more harmoniously in nature, while enjoying all the luxuries of the modern world”
These are statements that have nothing to do with profit or trying to reach targets. They are statements that go beyond the basics of ‘getting abs’ or ‘going green’. Rather, these are visions that have the potential to inspire.
When you do this well, you will find that some of your potential audience is immediately alienated by your statement because it doesn’t appeal to them. This is important – the best blogs won’t appeal to everyone but will instead have only a limited appeal.
But for those few people who are interested in the ideas you’re putting forward, you will find that your blog is extremely appealing.
Creating Your Logo
Everything else should now follow on from this. The idea is that your logo will evoke the same emotions and the same ideas that your mission statement describes. This way, when someone sees your logo they should instantly know what your site is about and therefore whether or not they are likely to be interested in it.
This is how you go about creating a brand and if you do it right, you’ll be able to connect with and inspire a specific audience in a way that no generic site called ‘GetAbs’ can do.