Building An Online Brand - Essential Tips for Personal Branding 🚀 (2024)

With more and more businesses moving on to the online space, we are now witnessing a shift of branding away from brands themselves and more toward people. This phenomenon is collectively known as personal branding. Nowadays, the collective consciousness of customers in many different fields is drawn towards people rather than brands. The success of many celebrities and online personalities in the recent decade through their building of online brands has led to a craze among the general online population to replicate this success by launching their own personal branding campaigns.

Building an Online brand takes work. It is closely interwoven with other types of branding, namely online branding. For anyone to succeed in online branding, they must have a set of requirements and talents already locked in even before they can attempt to create an online presence in personal branding. But what are these requirements and skills? How can you build an online brand? In this article, we will go over some basic definitions, and will provide you with a list of talents that you need to have, as well as tips to create a successful online branding website of your own from a more technical perspective.

What is Personal Branding?

To understand personal branding, you can look at one of the best examples of the last decade: the YouTubers KSI and Logan Paul. Although these two successful YouTubers started as simply content creators, they were able to leverage their online fame and brand to become the heart of separate, unrelated businesses. To take their brand online, all they had to do was to advertise themselves. Earlier this year, they launched their hydration beverage known as PRIME. While PRIME is the name of the brand, the success of PRIME is not represented by the brand but by the people behind it, KSI and Logan Paul.

To build an online personal brand, you first and foremost must attract attention, particularly on the online platform and then convert that attention into brands that will sell whatever personal business you may wish to establish. A successful online and personal branding campaign will lead to sales and income generation with the focus and reasoning of purchase centered around you. One of other successful personal branding examples is the Kardashians with their different cosmetic brands, where the sales and branding are pushed forward by the people owning it, rather than the brand itself.

Building Online Brand: 5 Things You Need to Have

Now you know the gist of what building online brands is all about. So, let’s look at the five skills that will go a long way in ensuring that you will succeed in online branding. You don’t need to have all of these skills at the same time to succeed. Even so, I would say that you need expertise in at least two of them to ensure that you can successfully build an online brand. Let’s review the options!

Social Media Presence

By far, the most essential aspect of building an online brand is to have a meaningful, effective, and attractive social media presence. Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok are the pillars of online branding. Once you are established in some of these platforms by your meaningful and interesting content, you can redirect your audience towards whatever income generation method you have in mind. You can make a successful website and redirect it there or get sponsorships and advertising. The possibilities here are endless, provided you can maintain a robust social media presence.

SEO

Now here comes the dark horse of online branding in general. Although many people prefer to avoid the idea of SEO and often skip it, I cannot stress how valuable asset search engine optimization is. It is vital to say that all the other four categories in this section are directly affected by it. SEO techniques such as using correct keywords can boost social media presence. Getting a higher SEO score leads to the potential for creating an online network. SEO analysis will give you insight into recent trends, and finally, when you want to create a website, it’s the SEO that’s going to help it get a better index on search engines. So do not neglect SEO. Use it, even if it’s annoying, and even if you use it at surface level, you will notice the impact.

Setting Up an Online Network

This is another critically important factor in taking your brand online. If you stick to your guns and avoid collaboration and making friends with other content creators and people hoping to create their online brand, your chances of success will be greatly reduced. On the other hand, if you assertively reach out to other people in your related field online, the established link between you will eventually create a large online network. This online network will generate publicity for both you and the other members of your network. Some people on this network will have online brands of their own. And this enables them to advertise for you. Other members can later be incorporated into your brand as employees; with a good online network, the possibilities are limitless and the potential is enormous. So start building your online network right now!

Stay With the Trends

This is a tip that will go a long way in both helping you create your brand and push it into relevancy as well as helping you stay in that spot once you have achieved it. There are tons of brands and personal projects that, despite their original popularity and attention, failed to remain relevant precisely because they were unable to keep up with the trends, or made their jump too late. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Google Trends to see what’s on the mind of the general online populace and use it to maintain relevance in your online brand. If you are active on social media every day, your online network will also be a massive boost in letting you know which points of attention to utilize.

Create a Website

Finally, we have created a website. Unlike other steps that can be done without an established infrastructure using social media tools and online tools, creating a website requires resources, attention to detail, and careful execution. Generally, creating a website has two purposes when building an online brand. The first is to redirect the already generated attention towards a domain of your own. And secondly, it is used to establish a professional online outlet dedicated to your online brand. This outlet can then be used as a blog, newsletter, an online shop, an advertisem*nt platform, and much more. Now I will cover the most critical aspects of starting your branding website, starting with the domain and its importance and then getting to design and hosting.

Once your online brand is off the ground, you can take it to the next level by introducing eCommerce elements through our list of the best free Shopify alternatives!

Your Domain: Make or Break an Online Brand

Your domain is the website address that represents your brand on the world wide web. But why is a domain so important? Because not only is it the address that your audience will interact with every single time they want to access your material, but it also represents not only the brand but the creativity behind the name you may choose if it is different from your actual brand name. A good domain name takes time to come by. Good domain names are either already taken or otherwise need a lot of creativity to come up with.

Here I will address the top level domains and how to find the best domain name for your website.

What is a TLD?

A TLD or Top level domain is part of the domain name that ranks in the highest section of the domain online hierarchy. A TLD almost always comes after the final dot in your website address. So in “cloudzy.com”, the “.com” part is the TLD we’re looking for. Here are some other examples of a TLD:

• .org
• .net
• .gov
• .biz
• .edu

These TLD options are known as generic TLDs. This means that they signify the use case of the website. For example, “.com” is usually used for commercial websites, and “.gov” is used for governmental websites. There are also other TLDs known as country-specific TLDs. “.co” for example is the TLD used for Colombia. But it is used so often that it ranks highly by Google. Some other popular examples are:

• .tv (Tuvalu)
• .cn (China)
• .uk (United Kingdom)

Is TLD or Top Level Domain Important?

A TLD is absolutely important for your overall ranking on a search engine and Google in particular. Let’s say you want to make website called “randomsite.com”. Now if this domain is already taken by another website, you may choose the “.co” TLD and register it instead as “randomsite.co”. Now someone who knows your brand but not your particular address, may go for the “.com” TLD when looking you up and completely miss your website. The choice of TLD matters both because some TLDs are better than other and get more traffic, and also because an inventive combination of TLD and your prefix name can inspire creativity and a cool website name.

Do consider that generic TLD options are becoming more and more popular and in the future TLDs will not be as important, but for now it’s much safer to stick with a popular TLD and use it to give your online brand exposure.

How to Find the Best Domain Name?

Are you stuck with finding a good domain name for yourself? Follow these short tips and steps to get yourself a proper domain name:

• Keep it Short
• Keep it Simple
• Use Keywords
• Reflect your Brand
• Settle for a Good One, not all Domain names can be perfect.
• Get Creative with TLD Combinations

A Website for Personal Branding: What to Look For?

Now that you have everything in order with your domain, you are ready to create a website to enhance further the building of an online brand. But before you move further, let’s quickly evaluate several critical issues. First, you need a place to host your website. After that, the website has its concerns including design, website mapping, and interconnectivity with your social media platforms. Let’s go over these essential steps one by one!

Best Way to Host a Website For Your Online Branding?

A place to host the website is the most crucial factor in creating the website itself. A bad host will hamper the performance of the website by causing issues like slow loading, buffer, and stuttering, and let me tell you, nothing turns away a potential audience member like a butchered website load. In the past, your options for hosting a website were more or less limited to using dedicated server providers, which used their hardware as a service to host your website. However, there are better options that allow you to do several things as part of a single package.

Chief among these newer technologies is the VPS or virtual private server. A VPS for website hosting service is much cheaper than a dedicated server since you will only get as many resources as you need. Since a VPS allows you to install an OS on it and directly wrest control over your server, you can modify it with several different add-ons and programs to make hosting and management more efficient. If you’re considering a VPS for website hosting, here’s a great offer!

Cloudzy specializes in providing VPS web hosting services. There are more than 15 different data centers worldwide to choose from and a host of varying OS options that you can immediately get access to, including Windows and many different Linux distros. You can even get a cPanel VPS that allows you to not only host the website on our servers but to simultaneously manage it as part of the WordPress platform in a fantastic all-in-one format, featuring the constant support of our technical backup team at any point. The payment and billing are diverse to accommodate new users and you can pay with whatever you like, including cryptocurrency! Cloudzy makes VPS website hosting simpler than ever. Get yours now and start your own personal brand journey with the best VPS web hosting out there.

Uniform Design

Now that the principal issue of hosting is out of the way, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: the design. The design is where many people either do not know what they want or resort to templates and pre-configured designs. While generally, using a template is not all that bad, when building an online brand, you need to maintain an element of uniformity. This means that your brand’s icons, logo, and the general color palette of your brand need to be incorporated and reflected as part of your website. Whether you handle the design yourself or outsource it to a designer, ensure that it always reflects who you are and what your brand is.

Website Mapping

Here is another crucial step often neglected when creating a website for online brands. People with experience in building an online brand often think that their established online persona which will give them traffic to their website is enough to make the website successful. This is false. Not only do you need to make sure that your website has an enjoyable design, even more than that, you need to make sure that the website’s mapping has all the required sections like “About Us”, “Services”, etc. Incorrect and messy website mapping will make the experience bland and will lead to a very high bounce rate. So make sure that the website is correctly configured.

Social Media Linkage

And finally the most neglected part about having an online personal brand website: Linking social media to your website. A lot of people with successful experience building an online brand believe that because they are likely to divert their traffic from social media to their site through advertising and self-promotion, they do not need to promote their social media on their site.

But the reality is that once a website gathers enough traffic via a diversion from social media, it gains a higher SEO rank and starts getting unprompted clicks from people looking for related content in search engines. When this happens, you miss the chance to capitalize on a vast additional audience by not having links to your social media on your website. So always make sure that you are promoting yourself both ways.

Conclusion

Building an online brand from scratch is tough and requires comprehensive effort. Not only is promoting yourself on the web fiercely competitive, but you also need to always make sure to stay ahead of the curve and augment your efforts with additional steps like creating a website. Creating a website on its own has additional pitfalls to avoid and needs careful attention in domain name, hosting, and design. With this article, you can get a clearer picture of what lies ahead if you start building a personal brand. You can use this info and our VPS hosting offer to alleviate at least some of the headaches!

FAQ

What’s the Percentage of Online Brands that Succeed?

Around %90 of online brands and personal brands fail, which is not the most heartwarming statistic. The fact is that most online and personal brands are successful due to great fame and previous resume, so building one from scratch is going to be complicated.

Is a Website a Must in Building an Online Brand?

While in the first steps of establishing yourself in the online platform you do not need a website to succeed, as time goes on and your audience grows, professionalism dictates that you need a solid website to control and manifest your brand in a centralized format.

What is the Most Important Aspect of Creating a Personal Brand?

Without a doubt, personal brands are made and broken on different social media platforms. Businesses, online and personal brands these days almost always start in popular social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. and then convert the garnered attention into a brand.