2009-10-08 by  Hemal Patel

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Branding is an important aspect for some of you guys who want to go beyond making some extra cash each month and really starting a web hosting empire.

Lets step away from web hosting for just a second and talk about branding in general. When I tell you the color “red” and the word “soda”, do you automatically think “Coke”? I’m not gonna go into to much detail, but you can understand that from years and years of branding and marketing, Coke has imprinted their product into your mind.

Back to reseller hosting, lets say you want to grow your business beyond a few hundred bucks a month, branding will be crucial to this step. The name, logo, color scheme, and the way you present your business online will leave a lasting imprint in your customers memory if it is something attractive and easy for them to remember. What if their friend wants a website, and asked them to recommend a hosting company? Wouldn’t you like to be on the top of their list of recommendations?

So what tips do you have on creating a memorable web hosting company brand?

I’m gonna go straight down the line and tell you should and should NOT do..

• DO create a unique brand that resembles your personality, people don’t always want that corporate look.
  
• DO create a unique name that does not closely resemble that of your competition.
  
• DON’T go overboard on creating an insane logo for your company, that more than half of your customers cant remember, let alone understand what it is!
  
• DO set up a color scheme that resembles your brand, and is still easily readable.
  
• DON’T find your idol web hosting company and mimic everything they do!
  
• DO implement the type of specific service you want to offer, into your business name. For example, if you want to offer exclusive web hosting services for wordpress bloggers, a name like “Blognation Hosting” might sound reasonable. Dont pick that name, its just a quick example I thought of =]
  
• Do test out your company name, logo, and color scheme with friends and family to see if they can easily point out what it is and what you are trying to sell.

Tell me more about “Logo Branding”

A lot of you might easily assume that a logo has to be a crazy cool picture of something that will instantly catch your customers eye, right? NO!

That could not be any farther from the truth. What do you think of when you hear about businesses like “Coach” or “Sony”? They might have a logo, but people tend to think about the way their name is designed. What I mean is the font they use that is unique to their company, and is not used by other companies. This goes into the field of typography. My web hosting business is successful and I dont even have a flashy cartoon or gator (like Host Gator!), but I do have a simple and unique font that I constantly use throughout my website, everywhere I market, even on the invoices that are regularly sent to my customers.

I would recommend that you get out a piece of paper and make about 5-6 equal boxes throughout the page, and design something different in each box. Then show it to some of your friends, upload it and email it to everyone, and get some feedback. Before I started my company, I had already picked out the company name, but did not yet build a brand for it. So I sent out an email to a couple hundred people to go to my site and look at 7 different fonts that I chose as my finalist fonts, and vote on the best. Several hundred votes later, and I got a font that had SO MANY more votes than the other 6 fonts combined, so I knew I had a real winner.

I did this for color as well, but to a lesser extend, and I was on my way to building my brand for my company.

So what do I do now?

First think about a name for your new hosting company, get inspiration from the things you would want your company remembered as. Or pick a name based on the exclusive service you are going to offer to your customers (IE. if you intend on offering services catered to wordpress users, or vbulletin users, etc.) Get out a paper and pencil, draw up to 6 different logos (can be different fonts also), and get that looked at by at least 20-30 people you know. Once your done with that, look around at different websites to get inspiration for your website color scheme. I really like Colour Lovers, and I often visit that site whenever I need help picking a single color or a palette of colors.

As always, if you have any questions you can always post a comment below or send me a personal message by going to my contact page.

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