5 Commandments of Blog Branding

Posted by
Christopher Jan Benitez

Updated on October 7th, 2022

If you’re a blogger, then you know the importance of a blog brand. It’s not enough to just have an excellent blog with loads of followers and great content. A strong brand that matches who you are and what your blog represents is just as important.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through the steps of an effective branding process to help you develop a brand marketing strategy for your blog.

Develop Your Personal Branding

Before you come up with your blog’s brand strategy, take a look at the branding of your business. You will want to follow the same guidelines as your other branding efforts.

Below are factors that are intrinsic parts of your blog’s brand style guide:

•  Goals and objectives – What does your blog strive to achieve for its audience? Why did you start your blog, and what do you wish to communicate to readers? Your answers here will help you narrow down the concept for your blog logo design.
• Vision and mission – What does your blog currently do (mission statement), and what does your blog hope to accomplish in the future (vision)?
• Colors – What colors best describe your blog? Here, consider the different color psychologies to help you decide the hues that reflect your values and qualities.
• Font – Strive to strike a balance between readability and uniqueness for your logo. Most readable fonts are pretty standard, while some unique fonts are not as legible.
• Niche – Knowing your industry allows you to refine your brand naming process and identify other brands in the market vying for the same customers and readers. It will also help you determine how often you should post new content and how to promote your blog posts.

Your personal brand should reflect your unique qualities — who you are and what you do —and align with any other branding efforts that go alongside it, like social media profiles.

Your goal will be to create a memorable identity for yourself in the blogging world and make sure every part of your brand voice matches your writing style so that you can create and schedule quality content that resonates with your target audience.

Now, if you’re doing things the opposite way — i.e., you don’t have a blog yet and want to set up your brand equity first — make sure that your brand name hasn’t been claimed yet. You want your blog name to be as unique as possible to help establish your brand identity even before typing a word on your blog.

Create Visuals for Your Brand

If you want to design your brand, it goes without saying that you’ll want to find an easy-to-use design tool to help bring your logo to life.

Unless you have the design chops to use software for creating more sophisticated logo designs, free logo maker tools such as Canva and Crello can offer a big assist.

Choose from the templates available for both editors so you don’t have to start from scratch. Using either tool’s drag-and-drop builder should make designing your assets much more accessible.

You can also look into content marketing tools that help you create visuals that complement your posts and their promotion, such as infographics, charts, and landing pages.

If you don’t have the time to create the design yourself because you’re becoming a full-time blogger, you can hire someone to take this task off your hands. Just make sure to get a logo design proposal from the designer to help you decide which applicant gets the job.

Logo

There are lots of reasons why creating a logo for your brand is necessary. One of them is that it will make it easier for users to recognize and share. It’s also a great way to build brand recognition!

For instance, you can use your icon logo as your site’s favicon, as well as your social media profile since they require you to submit an image file type with square dimensions.

Most importantly, the icon version of your logo relies mainly on visuals instead of words due to the space allotted for an icon design.

For instance, Chik-fil-a has one of the best restaurant logos for several reasons, and one of them is because of the “C” in the name. It takes the appearance of a chicken’s head which is toasted on the bread of their sandwiches. Not to mention, it is also used as the site’s favicon.

Distilling your logo into a memorable icon will help you create the best possible design for your blog.

Also, consider coming up with different variations of your logo designs as they allow you to explore different visual identities. For example, use a specific color scheme for one variation and a different scheme for another — experiment because brand colors convey meaning. You can also play around with stylish fonts, layouts, and vertical or horizontal shapes to give you different looks for your blog’s logo.

Blog Design

A timeless design will never go out of style. Your blog should be just like that. It’s essential to strike a balance between simplicity and complexity, and you can do so by pairing two fonts with different styles.

 

Most of the time, keeping your design as simple as possible by only using up to three colors max and classic font styles is the best way to achieve a timeless logo design.

To help you plot out your design ideas correctly, you may need to use a mood board and mind mapping tools to help you catalog your ideas as they flow from the well of your imagination. Designing a logo can bring out the best in creative people, so make sure to document your thought process every step of the way so you don’t lose an idea you’d like to revisit.

Design should also include an idea of what pages you’ll need on your blog and what visual elements they’ll need. You may assume that only one page is needed, but if you promote your blog or solicit sign-ups, you might need a page that aligns with GDPR requirements or other compliance regulations. Even more importantly, you could design an “About Us” page that gives you a fantastic opportunity to create a static place for you to explain your brand and give readers reasons to support it.

Also, you’ll want a design that doesn’t take up a lot of time to manage each day. The more content you plan to publish, the more important it is that your design helps you save time so you can write and publish content fast.

Let Your Audience Speak Up

If you’re torn deciding among the logo design variants you have created, consult your community or readers to help you choose which is the best one for your blog.

Since they’ll be the people who read your blog, giving them the decision as to which logo they want to see makes sense.

Also, take this opportunity to ask for feedback regarding the logo designs you have. Maybe they have insights that haven’t occurred to you. This way, you can make changes to your logo design that are agreeable to you and your audience!

The most important thing you want to establish by giving your target audience a part of building your blog’s brand is trust. Once they feel a part of building something significant, you can build long-lasting relationships with them.

Thus by establishing a strong brand name with your blog, you can develop better customer loyalty to your blogging!

Put Your Brand on Display

Once you have set up your brand, it’s time to showcase it for all to see. Apart from your blog, you can learn to promote your brand on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

If you don’t have an account on these platforms, you can create one and upload your logo on each. Take note that each platform has different sizes for the profile picture you can upload and the cover photos, post images, and others. So be sure to create images with the correct dimensions for each social media site.

Also, if you’re considering creating marketing materials for your blog, such as business cards, letterhead, posters, etc., use your branding logo and colors.

Finally, considering that you will use your logo across all your marketing materials, such as your intro videos and paid campaigns, you need to come up with something that stands the test of time.

The idea is to get more people acquainted with your blog branding. The more they are exposed to your logo and theme, the higher their retention rate becomes. As a result, the audience will be more familiar with your brand and what it represents.

Consider a Brand Refresh

If you think your blog has outgrown your current brand, then it’s time for a brand refresh. What happens here is you reimagine your blog’s brand and adapt it to what your blog has become today.

For example, let’s say your blog was about mountain bikes. Its brand consisted of a mountain bike as part of the logo and colors related to biking.

However, over time, your blog grew to cover outdoor life and camping, both of which are somewhat related to mountain biking. To accommodate your new audience from both topics, you may need to change up your brand.

From here, you can simply follow the previous tips to help set up your branding.

Of course, appearance alone is not the only important aspect of branding. Your reputation is also incredibly important, and it can be affected by how well your site works (or doesn’t). Everyone has experienced a site that takes “forever” to load or one where a button or form doesn’t work properly. Sometimes these problems can grow to the point where it feels like you need a whole brand refresh when really, you just need to pay more attention to your core web vital elements and get the help of a performance monitoring agency to fix them. Although it’s a technical step, it can have a huge effect on your blog’s brand reputation.

Conclusion

As you can see, you don’t need a branding expert when creating a brand identity for your blog. There’s a lot that goes into the process of coming up with a brand strategy you can be proud of, but following the valuable information outlined above should help you get the most out of your blogging efforts.

To help you get the most out of your branding, there are branding blogs out there like Branding Strategy Insider, World Branding Forum, Logo Smith, and other blogs that you can turn to for relevant content.

Their blog posts about creating a brand and branding advice for bloggers can help refine the developing brand identity that will communicate your blog to your audience.

Once your blog hits big, your audience will associate your blog with its logo. So whatever you come up with in your design process, you’re likely to be linked to it for a very long time.

Therefore, make sure to take your logo design seriously. Good luck!