Establishing Your Brand Across Many Sites and Services Online

When it’s time to start your own web-based business, it’s time to make sure you’re consistently ‘branding’ yourself online as well. With the growth of social networking to new and exciting levels, you can manage your own marketing very effectively by maintaining a consistent image and presence online. To do this, you’ll need more than a simple web site. You’ll need to coordinate several sites providing multiple avenues of the same message – your brand. To do this, you’ll want to acquire a professionally hosted web site for your basic information source and to store your images and data securely. The most cost-effective way to accomplish this is likely a shared web hosting site.

Your shared web hosting service will provide more than just the web pages that describe your home page, biography, and contact list. You’ll be buying a large amount of online storage space and bandwidth. You’ll use this space and bandwidth to store images and static files, such as instruction sheets as Adobe PDF files. Yes, you could host these on free sites, but the limits on storage size and the amount of bandwidth you’re allowed to use could potentially make the files inaccessible to customers, which is exactly the wrong image you want to portray.

After establishing your images and files on your web service, you’ll want to contract a commercial site that can act as your commercial site and shopping cart. This is a separate function from your shared web hosting site that will securely offer your products and process payments from your customers. However, such commercial sites rarely offer huge amounts of storage space for detailed product images, so you’ll be linking back to your central files on the web service. Next, you’ll be establishing your marketing presence to drive traffic to your web site and commercial pages.

By establishing a consistent presence across many social sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other appropriate networking sites, you’ll gather interest and fans. Use these social networking sites to gain personal contact, interact directly with potential customers, and establish yourself as part of your customer’s mental ‘landscape’. Another excellent way to network followers and customers is to establish a blog on which you can provide personal and professional insight in to your own products, as well as the overall fields in which your products or services fall. And, because many of these sites offer huge amounts of bandwidth but limit your storage space, you’ll be linking to the images and files stored on your shared web hosting site within the articles, blogs, links, and comments you leave online.