Do you believe that you can sell yourself with your words, image and looks? Many marketing and advertising firms believe this, that’s why they make a heck of money through words, image and looks.

How can you brand your business start-up to become a leader in today’s highly competitive web industry?

Here are a few tips…

Name

The name of your start-up should be unique if you are to build a successful brand. If you take a look at successful internet giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, you will notice that their names are different from some conventional words and phrases that saturate the web space. Have you ever wondered what Google or Yahoo means? Well, the truth is: They both have no dictionary meanings. But they mean many things today on the dictionary of the web. So can you coin a word for your start-up that would become a household name such as Google?

Perhaps, you can’t coin a word just like that. But can you fuse two exisiting words together to form a unique name? Take a look at Microsoft, for instance. ‘Micro’, which means ’small’ has been fused with ’soft’ (short for software) and has built a brand name as the world’s leading computer software. Also YouTube, my favorite video-sharing site brought two words together ‘You’ and ‘Tube’ and tells you to “Broadcast Yourself”. Little wonder Google bought into the idea.

Or maybe you can modify an existing word by removing a letter. For example, Flickr - the photo-sharing site removed the letter ‘e’ from the word ‘flicker’ (meaning flash or sparkle or simply the flick of a camera button) to form the word flickr (pronounced the same way as ‘flicker’).

Again, the leading social networking site, Facebook has used its unique name to build a brand for itself. One might wonder how the word, Facebook relates to social networking? Well think of a book (or album) with many faces, hence the idea of sharing your photos (faces) with millions of people in a book - Facebook.

Other sites that have built a brand through their names include social networking site - Hi5, News site - CNN, Social bookmarking site - Digg, Tech blog - TechCrunch, and Blogging platform - Blogger or blogspot, etc

Some notable African brand names include Afrigator (a fusion of the words ‘Africa’ and ‘Aggregator’, Muti (meaning “tree” in Zulu), Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili), etc In Nigeria too, we have Sturvs (coined from the word ’stuff’).

So if you are interested in building a brand for your Nigerian site and are confused about what to name your start-up, you can contact me for more tips.

Logo

Your start-up’s logo is the image of your site. It is the face of the site founder(s) and adds to the branding of your site. If your logo is not a product of MS Photoshop or similar image designing softwares, it may hardly have the aesthetics or features that a quality and brandable logo has and may not grab the attention of users. This also applies to photo-saving formats such as JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP and PNG. I recommend that you save your logos/images using the PNG - Portable Network Graphics Format.

The logo of your site should also be flexible and adaptable to different situations. For example, Google always modifies its logo during important celebrations such as Haloweens, Christmas, New Year Day, etc, events such as FIFA World Cup, Olympics, etc and recently Google changed its logo to mark its 10th year anniversary.

Thus, after choosing a brand name, you should design a brand logo for your startup to help you sell your site better. Remember that people remember faces and your logo is your face on the web, so make sure you use good make-ups for your webface (hmm…that’s a nice coinage - web-face:)

Also, when designing a brand logo, always use the right colors that would appeal to many people. For instance, when desiging the logo of StartupsNigeria, I put into consideration the unique colors of the Nigerian flag (green and white). Then I asked myself: What do I want to blog about? Startups. Thus, I embedded an oval-shaped cirle on the word ’startups’ that further highlights the purpose of this blog.

Although, I’m not very good with Photoshop, you can contact me if you need tips or ideas on desiging cool and brandable logos. Whatever you do, don’t use other people’s logo idea or concept. Be original. Be unique. Be you.

Design

Ok. You have chosen a brand name and designed a brand logo. Its now time to create a brand design. Yeah, your looks are very critical if you are to impress a girl or guy, am i right? Sometimes you even need to wear high quality designer clothings in order to attract people, is it not? So think of your website the same way you think of your looks. Find a good website design company or an individual to create a unique template (using PHP, etc) that would get people visiting your site more often. I recommend Antigravity Inc. Those guys at Antigravity really create simple and smart websites and web applications that might move users to make your site their default homepage.

Again try to keep it simple. That’s one thing I find unique about Google. It’s not bothered about design, yet the site’s looks can be remembered moments after you have visited the Google home page.

Thus, you can choose to design a template, tweak a free template or buy professionally designed website templates and modify to your taste and preference. If you are interested in starting a business blog, you can choose from an incredible selection of free Wordpress themes or custom Wordpress themes that can be purchased with a fair price. You can also add functionality to your blog by using plugins, widgets, etc that help boost your sites search optimization and usability.

So use your words, image and looks to attract people to you and to your site and successfully build a brand name for your site. Don’t envy sites that have built a brand name. Instead, start and build your own web brand.

Image Via: inthepicturedesign