For Internet Marketers: Why is Branding your Business or Website Necessary for Making Money

Branding your website or internet business that’s spam-free, clean, and adheres to modern industry practices simply means having a personality for your website and social media channels.

Without branding, you’d be all over the place with no consistent framework. Now, I understand that most of the internet marketers are not skilled in graphic design, which is an essential skill you need to design banners, features, social media covers and posts, email newsletters, etc. Although these can be done with the bare minimum, like certain online design services, that’d still be being all over the place

As an internet marketer you need to learn design in order to brand your website. If you’re already very successful, you can simply hire someone. In the last section, I’ll be talking about the tools you need to learn and how.

But why do you need to go this extra mile?

Time and again, I've seen people focus on short term goals and completely disregard any long term aim whatsoever. When you create a new website or start a new project, the short term goals are very important for getting results but once you've set up your business model and are sure that you have something stable, then you will find that branding will help you a lot, especially for achieving long term aims. It's extremely important to grow and you cannot grow if you don't have branding.

Based on my design studio's experience in branding businesses both small and big, in this article are some things to keep in mind to get better growth.

But before any of that, it’s important to learn one simple fact.

What is branding?

Branding is not your logo, website, business card, and everything else taken together. Branding is what your customer or potential customer imagines when your name comes up.

In other words, building good branding is all about building an image. Currently, a brand's image can be "unreliable" or "spammy". What branding will do for you is change that image.

How you do that? That's through designs and tools like your logo, tagline, marketing material, social media posts, banners, ads, website, flyers, standees, and even product catalogs or brochures, etc.

Why is branding important for making (more) money?

As Elizabeth Smithson wrote back in 2015 on Brandingmag,

Branding can change how people perceive your brand, it can drive new business and increase brand awareness. The most important reason branding is important to a business is because it is how a company gets recognition and becomes known to the consumers.

It clears the concept for sure. But there’s more to it.

Branding means you have a particular image. When you control what that image is, there will be ample opportunities to scale and grow. For example, if a business has no branding then people can bounce off due to multiple reasons starting from a confusing positioning to not being what you want to offer.

To control that image, you need to learn the design tools. I’ll be explaining about the tools in the last section.

Letting your name seep inside your customers mind is the whole game you need to ace. Once that's done, your customers actually become your brand advocates and spread the word around.

Good branding takes time

Whether it's just an online ecommerce store (like we worked on Ethik (check what we did here) - which is digital only, and we did its marketing through social media, Google ads, made a nice website, newsletters, and some offline promotion material) or a full business that's growing at a steady rate (like we worked with Cell, a stationery brand with a huge turnover), good branding always takes time.

It's more about the concept of your brand and doing ample planning for it rather than just making designs. That's where a brand strategy differs from the run-of-the-mill projects.

Run-of-the-mill projects hire freelancers individually. You need a logo, you get someone on Fiverr; you need an animated explainer video, you get someone else; you need a website and SEO, you get someone from a marketing forum.

But they are all just after some bucks. They don't have a vision or the required clarity to build effective branding. And the vision and clarity are key.

Effective branding can only be done when all design work is handled by the same team so that synergy is maintained (like same colors), style is preserved (like the design scheme or fonts), and so on. Promotions and marketing will be done on top of a good branding and it will have much more impact.

So, always look for teams if you plan to hire.

From an operation to a brand

To actually make more money, you need to think brand, not operation, business, or project.

Any promising idea can become a brand, the person behind it needs to have the dedication. If you're going to be stuck to the business ideology then let me tell you that your growth will be limited.

I've worked with agencies in that past that had no idea what a brand was. I check their website now and they're still exactly where they used to be.

Even if you have a simple idea, there are innovative ways to present yourself or find an edge over the competitors. It's not at all hard. Some of those agencies have even closed shop.

On the other hand, a number of the brands we're working with currently are startups and still able to pick up so much work and sell so much that they have their loyal customer bases ready in 5-6 months. It all depends on how you approach the idea.

Know your positioning

You need to know who's your customer to have someone design impeccable branding for you. If design isn’t human-centric, it fails long-term.

A brand's positioning and audience differs even from its closest competitors in many cases and only if you refine your brand's individuality through design systems can your brand beat the competitor's.

Good branding is extremely unique

What I've learned is that even if you talk about two businesses in the same niche, branding has to be different. The colors, typography, icons, and the overall design scheme that works for YouTube won't work for Vimeo if you just change the logo and names.

Both have different positioning and audiences.

You need to understand that the prerequisite for transforming your project or idea into a brand and beat your competitors is uniqueness. Only after this clarity should you ideally invest in any kind of design work or identity design work. Even a logo should only be made once you have this clarity.

To wrap it all up, branding helps you in many ways in order to stand out. It also builds awareness for your brand, which helps you grow faster, way faster, than your competition. And even if you have a simple idea, there are ways to innovate and come up with exceptional branding.

Tools an internet marketer will need to learn good branding

First and foremost, you need design software. Adobe Illustrator (vector) and Adobe Photoshop (raster) are the industry standards. These are full-fledged software and once you explore them in depth, you’ll understand why online design platforms are just that – simpleton platforms.

For Linux-based systems, Inkscape (vector) and GIMP (raster) respectively are the preferred tools.

As a very simple explanation, here’s what vector and raster mean:

Vector graphics

Vector graphics are scalable. If you increase their size, they don’t lose value. They don’t become aliased or “pixelated”. A logo must be vector, for example, so that it can be scaled from 16x16 pixels to 2000x2000px.

Raster graphics

Raster are pixel-based graphics. They will tear up when upscaled abnormally. But some effects and some work can only be done in raster, like editing photos. If you’re working with photos or need powerful effects, you’ll need to choose raster.

Once you have your tool of choice, you need to learn it. YouTube is the best place to start, and so are online articles. You don’t need to learn the entirety of a software. You only need to know what the basic tools do.

That’s how every designer grows.

I’ve had started with a less used vector software years ago. I had my brief stint with graphic design while designing cards and book covers for my personal projects. Over time, I understood how to play with shapes, what fonts pairings are aesthetically pleasing, and what colors imply or set what moods for the audience.

As much as design is a creative thing, it's also a technical one which is as quantifiable and true as mathematics. There are principles, special ratios, you name it. As such, it can be technically learned and improved. Over time, a designer develops an eye for good design. It's as scientific as maths, again. It's not a purely creative talent that only a few possess. This eye for good design is also quantifiable.

After the tool and tutorials, and hopefully some practice, you need to experiment. Different colors, different fonts, maybe experiment with photos. You need a fresh logo, a banner, maybe a featured image that needs to have your website's branding - go for it. Choose some elements, some common icons that you'll repeat, and you'll be good to go.

There are tons of resources for a beginner. Although I might not use these now, but they've been an important part of many a designer's journey.

• Colors: Use Coolors to generate color palettes. Once you have a accent/brand color, you can build more colors around it by using Paletton.
• For most of your requirements, go for Dafont for free fonts. But there are many more sources. As you're not aiming to become a full-time designer, there's no necessity to invest in paid fonts unless very important.
• Unsplash and Pexels are both good sources for high-quality photographs.
• For icons, you can either go for Standart in case you have a technical niche or desire a minimalist look, otherwise you can find an icon for almost anything over at The Noun Project.

These will be more than enough to start your journey to brand your own business or website. From there on, you will only grow. Check out some of our work for reference purposes and try to copy them. We’re very passionate about design and if you need guidance or feedback, you can actually drop a message and we’ll help you out the best we can!