Writing Prompts

How to Build Your Brand

We’ll start with the basics: What is a brand, anyway?

A brand is a representation of your relationship with your customers. It determines how they view and interact with your business. Put another way, your brand is like a promise.

Since the Internet has become a critical place for traffic and information, building an online relationship with your customers through a brand is imperative as you strive to make your business successful. To improve this relationship, you need to make sure your business is doing everything possible to build the brand and create a reputation.

So how do you use branding to build your business? How do you create a positive image so customers will feel a connection and sense of loyalty?

Think about your customers first

Before you can think about how your business will look online, determine what your customers want. Think about what will appeal to your customers when you start devising a business marketing strategy. For example, the types of colors that would attract them, the kinds of messages they like to hear, and the kinds of products they’re likely to buy. Once you have an idea of what your customers want in a brand, you can craft your image for them.

Think about what makes you unique

Before your customers can figure out why they’re going to choose your business over another one, you need to determine what makes it stand out among the rest. When you pinpoint your company’s strengths, you can use them to your advantage when creating your brand. On the Internet especially, your business needs to distinguish itself from all the rest, and promoting what makes you unique is the best way to market your business.

The logo

Logos are an excellent tool to help craft your image. Logos are symbols and they can generate an emotional response from your customers, if you build the right context around them. What emotional response do you want from your customers? A feeling of calm or confidence? Excitement? Strength? Think about how you feel about your business. How can you translate that into a logo?

The slogan

To your customers, your brand represents a message, or a set of values, that they can internalize when they purchase your product. A slogan can help your brand create this message. The one-line slogan that you choose will be how customers remember your business and identify with it through a single idea. Incidentally, you don’t have to have a slogan, and you don’t have to use the same slogan forever either. Most of the hamburger chains you know and love change their slogans for every campaign.

Get your brand out there

Once you have your desired image for your brand, you need to make your business widely known. This means putting your brand in front of your customers everywhere they’re likely to be. Forbes publishes a list of the world’s most valuable brands, and you probably know most, if not all of them. Consider where you’ve seen their advertisements, and then consider who they’re trying to reach. How can you apply that process to your own brand?

Consistency

Brands become familiar over time, and can even provide a sense of comfort. Once you build a brand, you build a relationship with your customers that rests on a foundation of reliability and consistency. So long as you maintain that consistency, you will be able to maintain your relationship with your customers and build a brand following online. And that, as you can see by the numbers on that Forbes list, can be worth millions.

What is Ghostwriting?

Have you ever wondered how celebrities—surrounded by paparazzi, traveling around the world on tours, and balancing family and relationships—can possibly send out hilarious tweets every five minutes?

In most cases, these celebrities can barely spare a minute for social media or website content. Instead, they hire “ghostwriters”—people who produce content under the celebrity’s name. Many celebrities, businesses, and authors use ghostwriters to regularly produce mass amounts of content in short periods of time. By constantly posting online articles, tweets, blog posts, and other texts on the Internet, major brands keep audiences continuously engaged with the content to bring in revenue for advertisers.

Ghostwriting is not exclusively for celebrities or social media, but it’s easy to conceptualize the author-ghostwriter relationship using the analogy of a celebrity-writer relationship. The author’s name is a brand, similar to a celebrity, company, or product. This brand needs a public image. This image, in turn, needs to be positive and interactive, and one that engages with the audience and keeps it returning to increase traffic for revenue. Because the Internet is a space that offers nonstop communication and access, the brand needs to constantly maintain this image online. This is nearly impossible for one person to accomplish alone. To help the brand keep that attention, popular names will hire workers to maintain this image under the brand’s name. In publishing, the brand name is considered the “author,” while the person who produces the content under the author’s name is the “ghostwriter.” Not all authors use ghostwriters, but it is a common practice in today’s fast-paced publishing world.

Anyone can hire a ghostwriter for whatever part of the writing process needs work. For example, authors with an excellent idea might not have the time to write a book on their own, or they might lack the skills needed to put their ideas into words. This is where ghostwriting comes in: authors will hire a ghostwriter to use their preexisting idea to write the content. Sometimes, ghostwriting can be a way for authors to overcome writer’s block. Ghostwriters can also bring fresh ideas to the piece beyond the author’s initial vision. Whatever the reason, there is a large market for freelance writing work.

The process is collaborative and involves regular communication between the author and the ghostwriter. The author informs the ghostwriter of the requirements for the piece. It is up to authors to decide how much information they decide to give. They can provide the writer with as much as multiple pages of detailed research notes, or as little as a generalized topic that the writer must then research and write about. The two parties then need to build this relationship and maintain regular communication to remain on the same page.

For the author, hiring a ghostwriter provides an opportunity to focus on other aspects of the publishing process. Authors have many other responsibilities, such as promotions, sales, and contract negotiation. Writing in itself takes up a large chunk of the time needed to publish and create a brand. This time could easily be delegated to a professional ghostwriter, allowing the author to produce high-quality work quickly and efficiently while keeping the author’s original voice.

How to Write SEO Web Content in 3 Easy Steps

If you’ve recently put up a website for your business, it will not immediately appear when you search for a relevant keyword in your favorite search engine. To earn your spot on the first page of results, you need to publish SEO web content. Search engine optimization, or SEO, content consists of articles, blog posts, or other written website material that is created to feature prominent keywords. Search engines will crawl throughout the web, grab these keywords, and catalog them in an online database, where they are called up during keyword searches. The more keywords that are inserted into the content, the more frequently and prominently your website will appear in search results.

So what is involved in creating SEO web content, and how can you do it to best maximize your business’s potential?

1. Pick a topic relevant to your business

The first thing you need to do when writing SEO web content is decide on a topic that relates to your business. If you want your business to appear in more search results, you must write about topics that pertain to your product or service. You can direct the topic you choose toward a particular goal, such as increased sales, website hits, or social media shares.

Writing with a specific topic in mind is also important when deciding on your writing style. From your topic, you can determine the type of audience you want to target and write the articles with those readers in mind. The language and style used and the information you choose to highlight should draw your audience, and you need to write according to their needs.

2. Use relevant keywords

Keywords are an important part of your content because they are the key factor for SEO. These words and phrases should be carefully selected for SEO web content because they need to effectively relate to your business and appear in searches. Make sure to research the keywords that customers commonly search for when looking for businesses similar to yours.

When writing your SEO web content, also make sure that these keywords are strategically and frequently included. That way, your business’s website will appear higher on the list of search results. These words should be integrated into the content so that it flows naturally. You don’t want it to be flagged and marked by search engines as spam.

3. Use relevant promotional techniques

Once your content is published, you need to increase your SEO rating through other platforms as well. The more your website is linked to by other websites, the higher the ranking it will receive in the search results. To improve your linking strategy, create a reciprocal relationship with other websites by linking to them, and they will likely link back to your business in return.

In addition, social media plays a huge part in the SEO web content process. By sharing your content on multiple social media platforms, you can ensure that your content is reaching different areas of the web, where it will be picked up by the search engine spiders.

Publishing SEO web content goes beyond simply writing articles for your business’s website. It takes research, writing, and promotion to effectively implement an SEO web content strategy and use it to improve your business’s search engine ranking.