How To Promote a Brand Online

As most of you know, I’m the marketing guy behind Timothy Sykes and besides creating “genius” marketing images like this, my job also involves promoting the brand and getting the TIM word out there. Recently, in one of our weekly creative/marketing brainstorming sessions, we decided we needed a bit more exposure from other bloggers and web personalities. So, we made a list of some of our favorite bloggers and podcasters and decided to email them individually and get them to interview Tim. Because of my past relationship with a lot of the top bloggers, this task was relatively simple and within a day of contacting them, we had about 7 interviews lined up. You’ll see a lot of these audio and blog interviews come out in the next few days over at TIM.

So I’ve been thinking - what other techniques have I used in the past to promote a brand? And with that question, this blog post began. I’m going to list three of my favorite and proven techniques that really help get the traffic and recognition a blogger needs when he or she first starts out. So go grab that coffee and make yourself comfortable; here we go:

1. Linkbaiting - If you’ve never heard of this magical word before, let me be the first to introduce it to you. Head out to Smashing Magazine and check out THIS great post that teaches you everything you’ll ever need to know about linkbaiting. If you’re too lazy to read an entire post on it, essentially linkbaiting is the art of creating original content (could be videos, images, blogs, stories, rumors etc) that is so damn good that it will bait your readers to link to it from other websites (like facebook, myspace, digg etc). Want ideas on how to linkbait successfully? Read HERE.

2. Use Twitter and Twitterfeed - Twitter, in-spite of all the outages, is still one of the better online tools out there to spread your word (ofcourse, in 140 characters or less). Add friends, follow strangers and use Twitterfeed to automatically update Twitter with your blog posts. Read Problogger’s very detailed post HERE that highlights some of the advantages of Twitter.

3. Print T-Shirts - Yes, it works! Who doesn’t love good tees, especially when you have hotties like Lisa and Justine sporting them for you! I wear my PALLIAN DID IT tshirts everywhere. From the gym to grocery shopping to camping… it’s always PALLIAN DID IT. Before you know it - people are googling Pallian and they end up here. On that note, we’re producing about 100 TIMMAY tees for TIM - so if you’re a big Timothy Sykes fan, get in touch with me and I’ll reserve you one.

Hopefully these three techniques will give you a jump start with your brand. I’ll blog more about marketing and promoting 101 in the following weeks as we launch new projects. In the meantime, if you have a project that needs some immediate professional help, you know who to contact :)

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