May 24, 2017 See What You Need to do to Build your Brand Online

Building your own brand online contains a lot of small steps (and a few big ones) intended to put you in a position to gain trust and authority for yourself online. You may have the best shop downtown, but if you don’t have an online presence, you won’t exist for anyone that doesn’t know that or searches online.

In order to take your brand online you need to do some very basic steps to get going.

Let’s see what four of those steps are and help you get your business and brand online in 2015.

Four steps to start building your brand online

Here are some of the basics you need to secure in order to successfully take your brand online.

Know who your audience is – You might have a good idea of who you want to appeal to, but this is the time to do some research and see not only who your ideal customer is, but who you will be in competition with for their interest.

Secure your Web properties – Getting a domain name for your brand that accurately reflects your business is crucial. Have a website built. Don’t choose a free site you see advertised, as this will severely limit your alternatives and you won’t really own anything. Bite the bullet, secure web hosting, and get a site built that you can be happy with for a while.

Establish Social Media accounts – Social media is very important these days, because it can have a positive effect on traffic, authority, search ranks and a lot more. Deciding which social sites to employ is up to you, but most likely you’ll be using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Create a presence on these sites and be certain to have consistency in your contact information across each of these as well as your website. Having this last element wrong could really cause search engine problems so attend to it!

Begin to post content and engage people – Once all of your properties are set to go, it’s time for you to begin to populate them with content. This is a necessary step, and one to take care with. It is where your authority, search engine ranks, and traffic will ultimately sprout from. When people begin to engage with you through comments, be sure to keep up your end of the conversation, and thus help begin your brand’s authority online!

December 19, 2014 Get a Handle on Managing all Your Visual Content Assets

These days businesses are creation visual content at an incredible rate, and the question soon arises, where and how to manage these assets? The sheer quantities of images, infographics, videos and creative web art bring into play the need for a cohesive strategy for keeping it all organized should and when you need it.

Assets they are, good for use down the road and as part of your company’s intellectual property. Should you ever want to sell the company at some time, it would be smart to have your visual content assets managed well.

The time savings alone that will occur if you didn’t have to search low and high for that particular image or video can be worth it. Not to mention the need to ensure you have proof of your ownership for these images should a copyright infringement action come against you. That would be an expensive mistake, and one that is totally preventable. Let’s have a quick look at how you can get a better handle on your company’s visual assets.

5 Tips for managing your visual content

Develop a system – Whether you purchase a digital management system and adapt it for your use, or have one designed in-house, it’s imperative that you have a software system that allows you to manage this digitally.

Use your own naming conventions – Make sure you name your image files in a way that depicts what the content is. It saves a ton of time if you name something “old small logo” as opposed to IMG3899976236.

Limit access and establish guidelines – Make sure that you have some control over who accesses your files. This can change as time passes, but keeping up on it is preferable to having problems down the road.

Centralize your storage – Resist the temptation to have files in several different locations. Having your assets in one centralized location, with appropriate backup systems enabled, will make your life a lot easier.

Create access protocols – Not everyone may need the same type of access, and you should be able to control access so that your content is not accessed outside of your company, or by employees no longer employed by you.