A lot of small business owners might not give much thought to branding. It seems like an abstract concept that’s only applicable to widely distributed products backed by big marketing budgets from large corporations. But if you want to grow your business over the long term, then you should start seeding your brand into your customers’ minds even when you are still small.

Where should you start? Before we explore ways to build your brand, let’s start by looking at the question, “what is a brand, anyway?”

From Wikipedia, “A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service.” This might be a really good textbook answer, but chances are you won’t remember it in a week.

In essence, a brand is the images and ideas that people remember you by. The images are visual, like your logo, color scheme, mascot, etc. For example, you might remember Nike’s “swoosh” logo. For Fedex, you might remember the purple/orange/white color scheme. The ideas can be as simple as a single word. What do you think when you hear Wal-mart? Cheap! How about a Volvo car? Safety!

If you are able to get those images and ideas into your customers’ heads, everytime they see the images or think about those ideas, they will automatically think about your company and your products. Next time, we’ll look at some general guidelines on building your brand.

A common question asked by business owners is “how can other people find my website?”  After all, even if you have the best website in the world, if no one knows about it, your business doesn’t benefit.

One common way is to hope people find you through Google or other search engines.  But say, if your company sells cheese, how many results will turn up if they search for a “cheese company”?  Hundreds of thousands.  Chances are your company won’t even show up on the first few pages, unless you do some search engine optimization (SEO) on your website.

SEO is a big field that requires a lot of knowledge in both the web technologies and how search engines work.  If you want to learn more about SEO, there are plenty of tutorials out there.  But as a starter, if you just want someone to take a quick look at your website and tell you what you should change, you can take a look at WebSite Grader.

Website Grader is a free online tool for SEO beginners that tells you how effective your website is, and how you could change it to get a higher Google ranking.

It’s free, so give it a try.  What’s your grade?

You’ve probably heard of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia and the 8th most popular site on the internet.  The main idea behind it is that anybody can contribute knowledge by adding a new article or editing an existing one.  This idea has allowed Wikipedia to grow enormously quickly, with broader content and faster updates than traditional encyclopedias.

Have you ever thought of setting up a mini-Wikipedia within your company?  This is a great way to organize all sorts of information.  You can share it with other people, especially newcomers, and anybody can update it, so it’s easier to keep complete and accurate.  No more digging up old emails to find information that might be obsolete.

With an internal mini-Wikipedia, you can collaborate and keep information on almost anything:
- A checklist for the order-taking process
- Ideas for new products to carry
- A list of advertising opportunities
- Your quality inspection guidelines when receiving products
- A list of employee expenses to be reimbursed by the company
- A selection of customer testimonials for marketing purposes
- Phone numbers and email addresses for everyone within your company

Here are two websites that allow you to do this for free, while controlling who has access to the information:
- PBwiki
- Google Sites

Try it out, and enjoy improved information sharing within your company!

Compare these two sentences:

“In the author’s opinion, it is in most peoples’ best interests when excessive verbiage is avoided by people who are engaged in the act of writing.”

“Don’t fluff up your writing.”

They say the same thing, but the second one is much more direct and memorable.

Whether you’re writing website content, instructions, or an important email - every word costs your readers time and energy.  If it doesn’t pay off quickly, you will quickly lose their attention and potential business.

Pack a lot of content into a few words.

If you’re not convinced, here are some illuminating resources:
- Mark Twain said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
- Google cuts words mercilessly.
- If you add 100 words to your website, people will read less than 20 of them.
- A book On Writing Well

Most small businesses these days have a website up to share information and attract new customers.  If you don’t, you might want to consider getting one designed.

If you already have one, have you ever wondered what kind of people are visiting it?  Where are they from?  What do they click?  How did they get there?  How many come back?  Answering these questions helps you understand how people interact with your website, so you can improve on weak points and promote your selling points better.  Luckily, there are free tools online that can help you track how people use your website.

Google Analytics gives you detailed information on how your users browse your site.  It can tell you what time of the day you get the most traffic, which countries the users from, which page is the most viewed, etc.  The nice thing about it is that the graphs are all interactive, allowing you to drill down to find the exact information you want.

Quantcast shows you the demographics of your users.  Information like the age group, average household income, the gender percentage, etc.  How could you target your marketing message better if you found out that most of your visitors were women over 50?

Using these tools is very easy if you already have a website.  Simply sign-up for a free account, and follow their instructions to attach a small piece of HTML code on your website.  You might be surprised by how your website is being used.  We know we were when we saw Malaysia in the top 10 countries visiting us.  Time to go international, anyone?

Listening to your customers is critical in identifying how your business can improve.  But usually, you only hear from either your greatest fans or the customers having the most trouble.  What do the rest of your more moderate customers think?

An online survey tool can help to gather more feedback and help you organize it to decide how to improve.  You can make your own survey, invite your customers to complete it, and then generate reports with graphs and charts on their responses.  For example, you might find that only 30% of your customers know about your latest product, and decide to improve that by showing it more prominently on your website or sending out a newsletter.  Most of these tools are free to start, but will charge reasonable rates if you have a large number of responses.

Here are 2 of these online survey tools:
- Survey Gizmo
- Survey Monkey

Give it a try today.  What your customers think might just surprise you.

Having a professional e-mail address and telephone number will help you make a good first impression when you hear from customers, but having a nice logo and website will make them more likely to contact you in the first place.  As a businessperson, you don’t need to be a great designer if you can find someone who is.

Traditionally, hiring a designer involves first finding someone you can trust on quality, style, and budget.  This is not easy.  A new alternative is to host a design contest for your logo or website, let designers around the world submit entries, and award the prize to your favorite.  This way, there’s no risk of getting tricked into hiring a lousy designer.

Two websites that make it easy to host these contests are:
- 99 designs
- Crowdspring

Ballpark costs are about $250 for a logo and $500 for a basic website design, including the contest prize money and administrative fees.  The average turnaround time is about a week, with somewhere around 25 entries.  Of course, you’ll get more entries with a larger prize or if your contest guidelines spark the designers’ creativity.

If you want to touch up your company’s look, holding a design contest may be a good way to do it.