How to make your brand appear professional

When you start your own business, or decide to go the self-employed route, impressing your client is super important. You want to show them your best face, and the same way you try to look good in the morning before a client meeting, so should your company. Yes, appearances matter. You can offer a stellar product, but if you do not look the part, you may not get said part. How can you do that? Start with your online presence.

What you want first and foremost is for a potential client to be able to find you easily. Sites like Wix.com offer a lot of options for you to create your own website, in just a few clicks. By selecting a theme that is relating to your profession from Wix’s extensive options of ready to go templates, you know your website will have all the necessary widgets to showcase your business in the best light possible.

For example, if you are a guest house or a restaurant, you want your clients to know your opening hours, location, and maybe be able to book a room or a table online. If you have an online store, you want to add a credit card payment button as well as an option for clients to easily register with their social media profiles. It all depends on your business. And while your business is your thing and requires a lot of time and dedication, creating a website using Wix.com should not take you more than a few hours. Then you are all set, and not depending on a webmaster whenever you need to make a little tweak to a page.

The next thing you want is a neat logo for your company. Something that stays in people’s minds, looks pretty and professional. Remember when people used little GIF images you would find in Word or Excel? Yeah, that’s not cute anymore. And no need to hire logo designers for thousands of dollars either. You can design your own logo for free.

Once again, Wix comes to the rescue with its new Logo Maker. Click on that link to be redirected, and log in with your Facebook account or create a new account if you’d like. You are ready to start designing your own logo!

Then you have to tell Wix which kind of business you run, and describe your brand in a few adjectives.

The system then asks you if you like this and that kind of logos, in order to determine your style. Do you want your logo to be timeless and formal, or fresh and fun? You can pick as many adjectives as you like.

and computes all of that and suggests different logo ideas. You can edit each logo to make it truly your own.

Now that you have your own logo and website, it is time to showcase your business to the world!

Ideas include:

• Print some nice business cards with your new logo in the highest quality you can. Remember when you get other people’s cards, what do you think when it is a bland black and white affair printed on bad quality paper? What I tend to think personally is that the person either is not taking their business seriously, or they are doing so poorly they can’t even afford proper business cards. Don’t go overboard either, or that sends the wrong message. But a clean, nicely printed business card goes a long way.
• Try to rank higher up in search engines. Your website could be called plumberdenvercolorado.com for example, to match the main type of search your potential clients do when they look for your services. Write a few blog posts about your services, again trying to cover all the services you offer. Are you just a plumber or do you also install septics or solar water tanks? Your niche may be a bit crowded for the main keywords, so try to rank for the secondary ones instead of spending a fortune in ads to beat the competition.
• Print good quality headers for your customer mailing. Do the same electronically so your neat new logo appears on every PDF document you send.
• Ordering mugs, t-shirts, pens,… and other promotional items that you can give away to your customers, or use yourself.
• Buying magnets for your van or vehicle. They can be peeled off when you are going out on the weekend, but I would take them everywhere anyway. You can print your logo, company name, quick description of your services and then a phone number and email to be able to reach you.

Promoting your brand and looking professional is essential if you want to grow your business, and for people to take you seriously. So what are you waiting for? Get online, start a website, design a logo and introduce your business to the world!