Is your brand just not picking up? You’re doing everything you have to do–you’re making blog posts, you’re promoting them on social media, you’re doing what solopreneurs are supposed to do. But still, it’s just not taking off. Well, the problem might not be as difficult as you think it is to solve. It could be something like a brand makeover that can push you over the edge and drive in more viewers and ultimately more customers. All it takes is some drive, a little determination, and a little bit of know-how.
In this post, we’re going to provide the know-how in list format, so you don’t have to worry about all of the details.

1) Branding Strategy

There’s a very good chance you started up your blog without an idea as to what your branding strategy was going to be. This is normal for people who are just starting out to do, as you’re like a little kitten or puppy, just now taking their first wobbly steps. You’re unsure of where to start, you’re overwhelmed with all the choices, so you just run wild.
One of the best ways to create cohesiveness is to collect your brand into a unifying look that carries across the board on your site. You can start by working on a header for the site. This is literally the first thing that a visitor will see when they click on your site, so you’ll want to make it really pop. You can then tie this header together with an icon that matches the header, at least in style and color.
You need to do a full audit of your site’s visual assets. What you should do is open up Microsoft Word or Photoshop and copy and paste all of the visual assets of your brand, all of the logos, fonts, colors, all the blog graphics and social media graphics.
Now you can take a look and see if all of the colors seem to mesh well together, if the design style follows an overall pattern that you have for your site, and then you’ll have to see about the fonts. For a fun and silly site, you can have a fun and silly font. For something more serious, you can use a more traditional looking font. It’s all about whatever works best with the job at hand.
If you answered no to any of those questions we asked, then you’re going to need to do a little bit of work. Don’t worry, though. It’s pretty easy to fix these problems once you’ve identified them.

2) Mood and Focus

Before you can build your brand, you need to figure out who your brand is for and what you’re trying to accomplish with your site. You need to look at why you do what you do. You need to be able to answer who am I serving and why do they need what I have.
You also need to answer how you want your blog to be perceived. A blog for a horror filmmaker is going to be just a little bit different than a cutesy boutique, and they’ll have different goals in mind too. The horror filmmaker will want to shock his visitor while the cutesy boutique will want to have a sugary sweet appearance to back up the rest of the content.
Get back to the basics with this one. Don’t be afraid to dig deep and answer the tough questions that you’ve pushed to the side. If you can’t answer why someone would go to your site, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board a bit. These are all very fixable things, which is the heartening fact. It’s not as if you have no choices here.
You’ll have to have focus in the material that you come up with. There has to be a cohesive element, something that brings it all together into a unified whole. This might be tricky at first, but once you understand and isolate the elements of your brand strategy you’ll be able to develop a cohesive whole.

3) Consistent Colors

To go back to our horror filmmaker/cutesy boutique example, you probably wouldn’t want to use dark blacks and reds for the boutique. By the same token, you’d probably be in some trouble if you decorated your horror filmmaker’s site with bright pink.
You should think about how the language of your brand translates into the colors of your brand. Identify the mood here too. Do you want the audience to be soothed with calming colors, or would you rather have a more striking, combative look about your site? The great thing is there’s no one answer that’s true across the board, so if you can articulate a good reason for a particular color choice, that’s all you need to worry about.
Study different colors and the meaning behind them. Different colors have different effects, and those effects will differ depending on age, sex, and various other factors too. You’ll also want to look at the color schemes used by your competitors. You don’t want to copy them outright, but you at least want to know why they’re there and what the purpose behind them is.

4) Consistent fonts

As important if not moreso than making sure you have consistent colors on your site is to make sure that you have consistent fonts, too. Fonts convey a mood, and you need to establish your mood and then pick a font or fonts accordingly.
Whatever you do, you want to make sure to reference your brand words. Use your top font for this one. You should probably start with only two fonts right off the bat, one for your headings and one for the actual copy that you’re writing. You can also use a third font if you’re feeling particularly brave, which can serve as something like an accent font for you.
The key word here is consistency. If you can find a reason to use a font that makes a bold statement, that’s fine. But you should make sure that that font matches the rest of what you’ve already developed. The last thing you want is to have one flagship font that’s then “matched” with a couple of totally different fonts that don’t make sense together.

5) Consistent Profile Images

Just as important as consistency with colors and fonts (or perhaps moreso) is to have consistency in your profile images as well. This is going to be what people see when they either look in the sidebar or click onto your about me page, so you want to be looking at your peak.
At the same time, you want something that matches the rest of your brand. It won’t do you any good to pose for an indoor photo if your blog is about the outdoors. There is a variety of ways that you can get your profile imaging right, but going about it blind is not the way to go.
Consult with your competition again on this one. We’re not advising you to copy them, but you can at least look at what they did right and what they could’ve improved upon so that you can bring that out in your own shot.
It’s really all about confidence. That applies to just about everything in life, but it especially applies here. If you feel like you know what you’re talking about, you’ll be able to speak with authority on anything. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ll likely face plant.
Have confidence that what you do matters. If you put that kind of effort and love into your work, it will obviously show. That way you’ll have people looking at you, trying to see what you did to make so much of a difference as you have.
Is your brand just not picking up? You’re doing everything you have to do–you’re making blog posts, you’re promoting them on social media, you’re doing what solopreneurs are supposed to do. But still, it’s just not taking off. Well, the problem might not be as difficult as you think it is to solve. It could be something like a brand makeover that can push you over the edge and drive in more viewers and ultimately more customers. All it takes is some drive, a little determination, and a little bit of know-how.