Blogging Tips

In part one and part two of this mini series, we have explored how Blogger can be used as a means of publishing a business-based website: from choosing and using the best template for your site through to designing important informational pages, contact forms and more.

For this third installment, we will look at business branding and how we can apply these principles to a Blogger powered website including:

• Choosing and linking your domain name
• Choosing visual elements which represent your business brand
• Setting up email updates for your customers to receive news and updates related to your business

Why is branding important?

“Branding” is an important marketing aspect of any business, big or small. For the most part, consumers don’t realize the importance of branding, and yet when you think of a business like Google, there are many details which spring to mind (the colorful Google logo; the meaning of the brand name; and possibly internet searching in general!).

When you brand your business effectively, consumers will come to recognize and be influenced by this, resulting in more sales and increased interest in your products and services.

Branding applies to most aspects of your business: from the actual name to any slogans, the logo and colors used in stationary, uniforms (where applicable) and most importantly, to the design of your site.

Consider this: there are potentially thousands of consumers who could discover your small business through your newly developed website. These people may never have encountered your business before this point and therefore will not be aware of other branding mechanisms you have used. Therefore your website should incorporate any branding of integrity to your business brand in order to reinforce a sense of identity offline as well as online!

Your Business Name and Domain

When building your business website, choosing the right domain name to reflect your business brand is an important consideration. Wherever possible, it is advisable to choose a domain name which is synonymous with your business. For example, if your business is called “Cat Lovers” then catlovers.com would be a perfect domain for your site.

However, this is not always possible to achieve: since the huge rise in online business sites over the past few years we have seen many of the best domain names have already been reserved. So what should you do in a situation where your business name is already in use?

Think about how potential customers would search for a business like yours. If you operate a national or local business, for example, try to include the name of your town/country in the domain name. Using our Cat Lovers business as an example, we could try the following possibilities:

• catlovers.us
• catloversnewyork.com
• americancatlovers.com

Another possibility is to use important keywords which are relevant to your business in the domain name instead of (or in conjunction with) your business name. In the UK, one of the major retailers for DIY projects in B&Q; however, the inspired domain name for this business is DIY.com!

The key here is to think outside the box: while such short and succinct domain names may be difficult to come by, creative domain names can reap the rewards in search engine queries and result in potentially more clients than your business name alone.

Where and how to purchase your domain name when using Blogger

By far, the easiest way to set up a custom domain for your Blogger powered site is to purchase your domain name through Blogger. This method costs $10 per year, and allows all settings required for linking your domain to your blog to be set up for you automatically. Here is a video which explains the process in detail:

If you already own your domain name (or simply prefer to purchase and register your domain on your own terms), you will need to configure the DNS settings on your domain to point your custom domain to your Blogger blog. To do this, you will need to create  a CNAME in your DNS settings which points to ghs.google.com; then enter your domain in the ‘Custom Domain’ option on the Settings>Publishing tab of your Blogger dashboard.

Depending on the domain provider you have used to purchase your domain name, the process of adding or changing your domain name may be slightly different. On the Blogger Help pages, you can find details for the major domain providers which explain exactly how to configure the DNS settings for your domain provider. Here are some other useful pages which explain how to link your domain name to your blog:

• How to use a custom domain name with Blogger
• How to set up your Blogger custom domain
• How to set up your custom domain with GoDaddy

Whichever option you use to purchase and set up your custom domain name for your Blogger powered site, it could take up to three days for the domain settings to come into effect. This is because the DNS settings need to be propogated across the internet. Most domain name configurations are completed within a few hours (and some within a few minutes). While the changes to your DNS settings are being processed, you will not be able to access your domain name, so it may be worthwhile to do this at the weekend when traffic to your site is least busy.

Visual branding for your business site

If you have already established a brand identity for your small business, you’ll likely have a logo and color scheme which reflects your business brand. It is important that these visual branding elements are reflected in the design of your business website too, in order to reinforce the sense of identity for your small business site.

Most Blogger templates allow the color scheme to be altered and a logo to be uploaded to the header. Using these settings, you can easily transform a generic template into something unique and reflective of your own business brand.

Some Blogger templates are easier to configure than others. The easiest templates to alter visually will offer “variables” within the template code which allow you to change the font, text size and colors of your design in the Layout>Fonts and Colors tab of your Blogger dashboard. These templates also offer a preconfigured space in the Header widget for you to upload your business logo.

However, some templates (particularly the highly advanced ones) will only enable you to change the color scheme by editing the template directly. In this case, the author of the template should offer some instructions for how the template may be altered in the accompanying ReadMe file, or through a page on their website.

Three important elements of visual branding for your Blogger-powered business site

In my opinion, there are three particular elements of visual branding which affect the overall impression of a website above all others:

• The site logo
• The background/major color blocks
• Imagery (in posts and other areas of the template).

Of these, your business logo is probably the most important: this is the visual prompt which encourages association with your brand more than any other. For businesses which already have a logo, it is highly advisable to use this in the header section of your site. If you don’t already have a business logo, take a look at Kevin’s 100 Great Blog Logos article for inspiration when designing your own.

Most Blogger templates feature a background color (or at least some major blocks of color in the design) which should also be a part of your business brand. Generally speaking, a color used in your logo or one which complements your logo scheme is best, as this reinforces the sense of brand associated with your businesses online presence.

Finally, you should never overlook the importance of imagery, both in articles posted to your business site and in the sidebar/other elements of your layout. Wherever possible, you should try to make the style of these images consistent and in some way indicative of your business brand.

For example, if your business offers cutting-edge technologies for home computing, you could use stylish stock images in a consistent color scheme; for illustrators and artists, use examples of your own work or even thumbnails in each article to reinforce the sense of identity concerned with your site.

Also, it is a good idea to ensure your images appear as professional as possible: if your digital camera skills are in short supply, try using stock images rather than your own photography. There are many sites which offer copyright-free stock images at low prices and even some which are free (though be sure to check licensing to ensure you are permitted to use these for commercial purposes!).

Reinforce your business brand by offering a newsletter

Although all Blogger powered blogs produce a blog feed (which can be read in a feed reader), it’s not always likely that your potential customers and visitors to your business site would understand what it means to “subscribe”. Therefore, for small business websites, it is better to offer updates and product news via an email newsletter (since most people these days have at least one email account!).

When using Blogger, the simplest way to offer an email newsletter is to utilize Feedburner. By burning your blog feed through Feedburner, you can easily create a widget for visitors to enter their email address and subscribe for updates to your site by email; what’s more, you can reinforce your business brand by using your business logo and choosing the color scheme which will appear on the subscription page and all email updates which are sent.

How to set up and email newsletter with Feedburner

Firstly you need to burn your blog feed through Feedburner. To do this, visit the Feedburner home page and click on the “Get Started” tab. You will need to enter your Google Account details to continue (this is the same username and password which you use to log in to your Blogger blog).

Choose to burn a new feed and paste the URL of your site feed in the space given. The URL of your blog feed will be in the format of http://[your-domain-name]/feeds/posts/default. Simply replace [your-domain-name] with the URL of your blog. You will be given the option to choose part of the URL for your Feedburner feed and to dedicate the name of your feed (for example, the name of your business).

Once you have set up your feed with Feedburner, log in to your dashboard and click on the Publicize tab. In the left hand column of this page you will notice a link for “Email Subscriptions”. Scroll down the “Subscription Form” section until you see the section which says “Use as a widget in…”. This drop down menu allows you to choose Blogger as your publishing platform and add a subscription form automatically as a widget to your Blogger powered site.

The title of the widget will appear above the email subscription section, so ensure you use a title which lets visitors understand what they are signing up for.

Finally, choose to add this widget to your blog by clicking the “Add widget” button. By default, this widget will appear at the top of your sidebar, though you can change the positioning by going to Layout>Page Elements in your Blogger dashboard and dragging this widget where you would like it to appear.

Branding your Feedburner email newsletters

To add your business logo to your email newsletters, you will need to upload your logo to an external host (eg: Flickr or Picasa Web Albums). Copy the URL of your hosted image to your clipboard.

Then on the Publicize>Email Subscriptions tab of your Feedburner dashboard, look in the left-hand column for the section which says “Email Branding”: this is the page where we can add our business logo to our email newsletters and style HTML emails according to our brand.

Here you can choose the subject/title of all emails sent out (ie: Our Site Newsletter); paste the URL of your business logo and change the color scheme of your newsletter using the color picker. You will be able to preview how your emails will appear near the base of the page, and save all of your changes once you are happy with the design.

Final Thoughts

In this third installment of Building a Small Business Website with Blogger, we have explored practises of branding our websites, from choosing and linking a domain name for your site to visual design and newsletter subscriptions.

I hope that this mini-series of articles has helped you to understand the basics of utilizing Blogger as a means of publishing a low-budget yet professional site for your small business. Please feel free to offer your thoughts and opinions on this series by leaving your comments below.