What I cover here is very basic and overlooked by a lot of website owners.
Branding is a synonym of quality. It conveys a certain level of trust. Just think about the clothes you are wearing. If you buy a pair of Nike shoes, you know what quality you will get.
Google loves brands and places them higher in their search results. One reason is the trust level – trusted websites get ranked higher. The other reason is lack of spam – if someone owns a brand, they are very unlikely to mess it up with spam. You don’t get any spam from Apple, do you?
Brands also carry a certain name recognition. There is a certain concept that comes into everyone’s mind when you mention a brand. This works for things other than products or services though. Just think about what comes in your mind when you hear the word Florida. You immediately think about sunshine, good weather, ocean, vacation. The Sunshine State. This becomes a standard solution when someone thinks about taking a vacation.
Now think about your niche for a moment. What is the site that has similar name recognition? The one that everyone knows? In my niche there is ExpiredDomains.net for expired domain lists, there is GoDaddy for domain auctions. These branded websites also carry authority and a link from them can boost your search ranking.
This is what you need to achieve with your website. You need to brand it to get maximum benefits. First of all you need a great domain name that is brandable. Then you need to make up a concise sentence, a slogan that sums up what your website does. It also needs to be catchy and best if it refers to a problem it solves, an advantage that immediately attracts its target audience.
For example, this website is the site where you can find out how to “Start A Profitable Site On An Expired Domain“. I invite you to work out a similar sentence, a slogan for your own website. You may not be immediately be able to do this, you may need to chew it a little bit until you get one that you are perfectly happy with.
Once you have it, you start to promote this everywhere, even after you are completely sick of saying it. Have it in your emails, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, in your webinars, on other blogs where you put guest posts. You want everyone to remember you and your site by this one sentence. This way, when someone says, “I need to buy a nice domain, but they are so expensive,” the other guy will say, “Go to Expired.Domains.com, they have premium quality domains at the fraction of the price.” Do you see how this works? Such recommendations are the best source of your sales.
Branding is one of the reasons a domain’s price can go sky high. It is a great way to increase your website’s value for the time you want to sell it.
Apple didn’t become Apple by accident. It became what it is by a planned marketing campaign. They shaped the audience’s opinion and you need to do the same with the opinion of your audience.
Of course this doesn’t happen overnight, but the first step is to create that sentence, put it on your site and promote it everywhere. But this is how eventually your site will become an authority site and this is how you will get laser targeted traffic that converts well.