Are you Branded?

What is this "Branding" that we hear so much about these days? Being a country girl, my first thoughts go to the marking of livestock with a familiar symbol to show ownership. Then I thought about brand names of the products we use on a daily basis.

I suppose that internet branding is a bit of both. A product or service provided by a familiar source is more likely to get my attention than one shown to me by a source I know nothing about.

For the longest I had been reluctant to put up a real picture of myself on the internet, even knowing that it was important to "Branding" me. Then after a while I began to see the same faces in the different traffic exchanges that I surf, and I felt like I knew them, like maybe they were "friends", if you will.

Tim Linden, owner of StartXchange (Traffic Exchange) wants to know what my favorite post on his blog is. Besides the one where he shows all of us a picture of his new baby daughter, my favorite is the first one that he did with a video of himself talking about a conference he had just attended in DC. The reason it is my favorite is quite simply, because it allowed me to get to know Tim a little better. It made him more of a real person than just seeing photos did. So when Tim Linden, the owner of one of the longest running traffic exchanges online today, did that first video, it gave me an even better sense of what kind of person he is.

That's what branding is all about. Making yourself and/or your business known and more familiar to your audience. Building trust. Establishing yourself as a competent, reliable source for providing a service and/or product of value.

Yes, I think it is important to be "Branded".