Making Money Online - Brand and Profile - HubPages

Brand is exceptionally important in any quest to make money, whether it be on-line or in the physical world. I think all of us know this but for some reason we lose sight of it's importance when it comes to our own on-line efforts. All big business places their whole strategy on the development of brands. When a company is sold the major factor in determining its value is the brand's that the company own - the goodwill factor.

So why do we as on-line marketers of our products (articles) not make branding our number one priority?

I think it is because we lose sight of our real objective and think that the articles are the brand. Wrong. Our articles are but a tool in the quest for income. We are not selling articles, we are selling, just as in all cases of selling, ourselves. We are the product that a regular reader buys into. You are the person that your audience has an affinity with. Your article may have the information in it that the searcher is looking for but to get them coming back again that information must be presented in such a way as to grab the reader sufficiently to make them want to come back for another fix at a later date.

You and I are our brands. And brands are our chance to run with the big boys. Why? Because they too must develop an on-line brand just the same as you or i. Sure they have the financial clout to achieve greater brand awareness but are they as savvy as we can be in developing a world-wide brand? No, because they have focused on real world methods. We have the advantage and we should exploit that. And anyway I don't see them getting into article writing just yet.

So, the importance of brand cannot be overstated.

"How do I develop my brand?"

A brand must be developed from the outset. As soon as you think of something you wish to do on-line you must think what the branding must be. The only way to do this is to think what you are trying to achieve and with what. In my case I am trying to achieve world domination with but a concept - joke - but almost. I wish to make a living writing articles about subjects I know and some that I love. I only have my brain and an ability to extract the essence of a subject and present it in my own inimitable style - joke 2.

So, how am I developing my brand?

At the outset I knew that some of my articles would be to do with green issues, my understanding of the world and my interaction with that world. My world view is based on Humanism and the Gaia Hypothesis. So, Hey Presto what better brand for me than to create a new word that would not have been used on the Internet before - the birth of Humagaia.

Now it may not sound much to you now and you may think that I would need to explain the meaning of this new word to make it relevant to branding. Not so. The only thing that is necessary is that it is unique and that you are not stepping on anyone else's toes. Do you see the relevance of "Mars" or "Marmite" to the products that they are the brand name for? Of course not.

So the first lesson in branding is to think of a unique "product" name that you can work on to your best advantage.

"How do I make people aware of my brand"?

This is the easy bit to explain but the most difficult and time-consuming aspect to achieve.

First and foremost you must advertise the brand everywhere you can think of. By advertise I do not mean Google adwords or banner advertising or billboards. I mean get known as your brand wherever you go on the Internet. And ensure the widest coverage by being an Internet traveller. Many Hubs will give you guidance as to the best places to visit - but don't just lie on the beach relaxing in the sunshine; take in the culture and revel in the language and converse wherever possible.

More on where to visit later.

Secondly, everything you produce must have the brand associated with it. That's easy on HubPages as your brand is your user-name or alias. Brandish it with pride. The important aspect here is that your brand is made recognisable across every Internet Continent that you visit. But not as a lager-lout - as an a ambassador of the domain that you represent.

Once established as a brand that your readership wishes to follow that brand should be readily available for them to find wherever you may be at any particular point in Internet time. The only place on which it is really necessary to be known is Google because once established there you will be found. It is your shop front on the high street of the Internet generation.

Check your brand name out regularly with a Google search. You should be aiming for your brand name to be at least the first 100 on the single matched brand name. And all searches should point to your articles, with one exception: your brand has arrived and become established if there are reviews of your articles. You know the reviews publicise your brand otherwise they would not appear in the brand name search. They have widened your audience by opening their readership to your brand - that's when your brand goes hyper.

I don't know how many HubPage hubber profiles I have viewed but the majority are sorry affairs even for those hubbers that have been around some time. You know who you are. You arrived at HubPages took a cursory glance at the profile page and thought no, I'll get started on some Hubs - that's where the money is. Then some time later you thought I've got a little spare time between Hubs - I'll go and stick something in my profile. And stick you did. And that's how it is stuck - in a time-warp swishing about in the pre-cambrian ooze with so many others. It is time for your profile to evolve.

Now this is the clever bit and the most important bit! Read this several times so that it is ingrained in your mind.

Your profile IS your brand. Once, twice, three times .......... has it sunk in?

I don't know if you have ever looked at your Google Analytics page but if you have not I suggest you do. I am pretty sure that everyone's will look the same in the first few months. The page with the largest number of hits is? You guessed it - your profile page! Why? Because everything you do on HubPages allows the reader of whatever you have done, to go direct to your profile - they do not need to pass Go! on the way. They can travel down the worm-hole and bypass everything else that would otherwise be in their way.

Why is this significant? Well, what do they see when they get there? You got it in one - the sorry piece of writing that you deemed good enough to present you as a writer to the world.

So what are you going to do about it? My guess is, for the majority, absolutely nothing! And that is why you will never develop your brand sufficiently to ever earn even a moderate amount from your writing - no matter how good that writing is 'cos too few readers will ever pass your way to make writing a viable earning mechanism for you.

"What do I need to do to make my profile a good anchor for my brand?"

• Keep it up to date and fresh.
• Remember that it is spidered by Google more than any of your other pages.
• Make it spider-friendly and keyword rich just like you have been informed by the SEO guru's on HubPages. You can earn from Google Adsense on this page as well you know!
• Use it as your own personal site-map for all your Hubs. It took me five weeks and fifty Hubs to realise that the links to my Hubs at the bottom of my profile were not comprehensive. As soon as a certain number have been displayed the rest disappear into the ether. I have now taken the time to set out all of my Hubs into categories that I think they fit into and hyperlink to the appropriate Hub. This has a two-fold effect

1. The peruser of my profile can see all of the hubs that I have written on a subject in the order in which I wish them to be presented. And they can also see articles on other subjects that they may just be interested in.
2. The search-engine spider is given the best opportunity to follow the links and spider the rest of my articles, including new ones that I have just created.

• When publicising your brand new Hub the first place you should publicise it is on your profile. After you have established yourself as a writer that Google wants to have in its lists (this should take no more than 2 to 3 weeks on HubPages if you write original good quality Hubs) then as soon as you publish the spider will be around looking for the fly that you have just let loose. This will then lead to your profile and your other Hubs will be scanned once again (keep all Hubs as fresh as possible so that there is something new for the spider to spider).
• The content of your profile that tells the world what you are about can be utilised, in part, across all of the sites that you use to get your brand established.
• Once you have established a number of sites that your brand has been uploaded to you should return to your profile here at HubPages and place all of the links somewhere on your profile. Why? Because that will give the spider somewhere else of yours to spider. It will establish cross-reference links and create a neural network of synapses that will allow the Dopamine of the linkages to cause the neurons of the Internet to fire consistently.

One thing that would be good as an accessory would be to have HubPages show posts that you make elsewhere on the Internet, just like Bebo does. This would open up further possibilities for the spiders and also save time and effort on the part of the article writer in publicising any writing that they publish.