Building a brand and establishing your online presence on the cheap

As any cost conscious entrepreneur can attest, there are a few key areas that any startup must focus on to get established online. Sure there's the business entity formation and related federal, state, and local city licenses and filings, but that is not what this post is about. In this post I would like to focus on the topic of building and establishing your brand and online presence -- and how to do it for under $1k.

Traditional approaches to building a brand/logo and related marks for your business used to entail bringing in high cost (and potentially low value) PR and advertising agencies to establish and promote your brand. This might be true of startups that have already had a funding event, but for the bootstrapped startup, this simply isn't an option. The bootstrapped way of doing it is as follows.

1) Register your desired domain. Try to get .com and if its not available, consider alternative names. Even though you may be able to secure an alternate domain name like .net .org .us .biz, you are setting yourself for a mess down the road. If someone else owns the .com or other more popular domain variant, it could be difficult and costly to secure those domains in the future. Avoid domain name conflicts with other persons or business entities at all cost.

2) Once you have your domain, build a web presence. It need not be complicated or fancy at first. Just get your name and brand out there and get the google bots to crawl your site ASAP. Then focus on content. The more original content you can generate the better. Making it pretty can come later. Get your message out for others to discover. At StratusQ we choose to work on our content in the following order:

- About - Describes your company in a few short paragraphs. Explain why you exist and what you're business is all about

- Team - List the names, Titles, LinkedIn and Twitter, Facebook pages for everyone on the exec/founder team. Craft a short concise paragraph description that describes why each member of your team is awesome. It is wise to put together an advisory board or team of informal or formal advisers who you can and should also list on this page. Make sure you sake for their permission first. Try to include some heavy hitters or people with proven track records, as this demonstrates that you and your team have a solid network of connections.

- Services - If you are a consulting company, describe what services you offer or plan to offer. Each service should have at least one paragraph that explains the scope and intent of the service.

- Products - If you are building a product or SaaS offering, describe the range of products, apps, and service offerings (different from consulting services) that you offer or plan to offer. I recently read a post where the author suggested that it wasn't a good idea to use the tradition title "Products" for this page, but I've yet to think of a savvy alternative.

- Clients - If you already have customers, list them he. It is vitally important for early stage startups to establish a beachhead with paying customers on the books. It doesn't matter if they are mom and pop clients/customers or a fortune 500 company, the important thing is to have people using your services or products. This is what angels and investor types will look for. List each client and link to their site.

- Partners - If you are working with any third party vendors in your endeavor, ask their permission to use their brand and logo on a partner page. Where possible, try to get an attributable quote from them. This provides independent validation from external vendors that you are for real and that you are working with other vendors to further your cause.

- Contact - Whip up a simple contact form that sends email to a team group or alias. The important part of this page is your response time. Make sure enough members of the team monitor activity sent from this page so you can follow up with potential leads and related inquiries in a timely manner.

- Press - While not required if you haven't had any public press releases, if people start blogging about your company, provide titles and links back to the original posts.

3) Brand and logo - As I said above, it can be expensive to build a brand and logo using traditional PR firm. The bootstrapped startup takes a different approach. We opted to use http://99designs.com and crowd-sourced our brand/logo. For about $500 and a lot of effort on my part reviewing and interacting with the 99designs  community of graphic artists, we had over 220 designs submitted. I was blown away by the entire process and am VERY happy with the one we selected as our winner. In addition to a logo/brand we asked the winning designer for a custom version for our WordPress blog, favicon, business card design template, and a Twitter background. Again, completely satisfied with the process and am now working with the winning designer on our next design project. Then used VistaPrint to order 500 business cards

4) Blog - Any startup needs a blog to communicate and interact with their community of users. We opted for our own hosted WordPress and a custom theme.

5) Email, docs, collaboration services for employees and founders - This was a no brainer. Google Apps for domains is powerful, effective, and most importantly, free.

6) Social media presence - create accounts on Twitter, a custom Facebook page, Flickr, and whatever other sites you feel the need to use to connect with potential users, investors, press, analysts, and key influencers.

7) Networking - get involved in the local tech scene. Attend events where you will have the opportunity to meet like minded peers, but more importantly, focus on attending events where key influencers, bloggers, and potentials investors may show up. The goal in networking is to meet potential customers, partners, competitors, key influencers, and most importantly investors.

Focus focus focus. Don't spread yourself too thin and keep your eyes on the prize.

That's a pretty good list and I'll conclude with a recommendation to apply the concept of bootstrapping to everything you do - including your personal lifestyle. Every decision, purchase, meeting, and action should be questioned and reviewed. Go get Tim Ferriss' book, The Four Hour Work Week. Then go re-read The chapter on bootstrapping in Guy Kawasaki's book, The Art of the Start.

Until next time...

BDE

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