Affiliate Marketing Lesson #5 - Building a Brand


Although you may not be selling products that are of your own
brand, its important that you build a good brand name for
yourself as an affiliate marketer. Your brand is how others will
identify you as a standalone business from the brands which you
are promoting, and is hugely important in ensuring that you
build up your own client base and are recognized. 

Take, for example, some of the more successful comparison
websites out there. These websites are shining examples of
affiliate marketing done right  they make money off other
companies products such as auto insurance, home insurance, or
travel insurance  without having to sell a single product of
their own. But, they have a distinguishable brand which
customers can instantly recognize them by. 


Your Target Market

There is nothing more important than your target market when it
comes to designing, creating and building a brand. Take into
consideration the type of customers who are attracted to the
products and/or services which you promote as an affiliate
marketer. For example, if your affiliate site promotes baby
items, you will want it to be attractive to new moms and dads
who are looking to buy for their little one. 

On the other hand, if you sell luxury items, you are aiming to
build a brand which the people who buy these types of items can
easily relate to. For this reason, its vital to research your
target market and really get to know them. 

Find out about the values that they hold, the way they engage
with businesses, and the sort of things that they will find
interesting. Once you have this information, you can then begin
building a brand which will speak to them and appeal to them on
a number of different levels. 


Your Brand Voice

The best brands are the ones which the customers can really
relate to. Think of your favorite brand  is it easy to see them
as a person? Brands which have a human voice and are on the
same level as their customers tend to be the most popular, and
for good reason. Today, customers arent looking for
advertisements that simply throw all the good points of an item
at them  they want to know WHY they should be buying from a
particular brand or buying a certain product, and what it can do
for them in order to solve a problem or enhance their lives.
Because of this, you should aim to give your brand a human
side. This means forgetting the overly professional, robotic
wording that some brands use and instead connecting with your
customers on a human level. 

Where does your brand voice come into play? First and foremost,
your website should be the best representative of your brand and
its voice. The way in which the content on your website is
written can say a lot about your brand  for example, whether it
has a sense of humor. Along with this, its important to
remember to keep your brand voice consistent throughout all of
your content, both written and non-written. This includes
product descriptions, social media postings, emails, videos,
photographs and everything else in between. 


Visual Branding

Once you have taken all of the above factors into consideration,
its time to start focusing on building a distinct visual brand
which ties in well with the values and qualities of your
business. Your visual branding consists of a number of different
things, for example your logo, the colors that you use for your
site, logo, social media pages and more, and any distinctive
phrases or words which you use in order to describe your
affiliate site. When designing your visual brand, its vital to
keep your target audience in mind. Create designs which will
appeal to them based on what you have learned about them during
your research. You may even wish to conduct surveys, focus
groups or other research which gives members of your target
market the opportunity to choose their favorite of a series of
brand imagery, helping you to decide which would be the best one
to go with. 


Brand Consistency 

When creating and building your brand and brand image,
consistency is absolutely vital. This is extremely important for
affiliate marketers who use a variety of channels, for example a
website, blog, email and social media profiles in order to
promote affiliate products and services. A consistent brand
enables customers to instantly recognise you and helps to keep
any confusion to a minimum. As well as keeping your brand voice
consistent throughout, its also important to make sure that
other parts of your visual brand are also consistent, for
example using the same logo on each channel that you use for
promotion and customer engagement.


To Your Success,
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