I think it’s fair to say that today, most business owners understand the importance of building a brand online. What they don’t understand is how to do it.

I’ll share some good news and some bad news…

The good news is that building a brand online is incredibly simple. The bad news is that it’s very difficult. If that sounds like a contradiction, let me clarify. It’s simple because the process is not complex, but it’s difficult because it requires consistent hard work over a long period of time. In other words, there is no “secret” to it. Consistency is the most important part of this equation because it keeps your brand in front of your potential customers. This includes:

• blog posts
• media coverage
• paid advertising
• guest posts
• interviews
• social media
• reviews

Most business owners start with the best of intentions, but unfortunately, they often set unrealistic expectations. They make a plan to publish blog posts too frequently, try to build a presence on too many social networks at once, or dabble with paid advertising, but don’t allocate a reasonable budget or give up shortly after starting. In most cases, they don’t appropriately plan for the amount of time, effort, and money their goal will require, and before long, it quickly disappears from their task list and they end up stagnating where they are.

Are you guilty of this? Don’t feel bad, it happens to the best of us.

But you need to understand that this prevents you from building and maintaining brand awareness—staying on the mind of potential customers, which means that when it’s time for them to make a buying decision, they’ll choose one of your competitors who have.

If you want to successfully build a brand online, here are the components and what goes into them:

Blogging

Do you regularly publish new blog posts that visitors, whether they buy from you or not, will find valuable? This is essential because it gives you a library of useful content to share on social media, but it also creates an opportunity to earn more organic traffic. If your content is really high-quality, it helps you to earn inbound links, which in turn, helps you earn even more organic traffic as well as referral traffic. You can come up with a lot of blog post topics just from the questions potential customers frequently ask you, but you should also develop a more robust keyword strategy to develop a steady stream of valuable content to help keep your brand in front of your audience.

Paid advertising

Once upon a time, you could drive a ton of traffic organically through social media, but those days are long behind us. Between algorithms and saturation, organic reach on social media has been whittled down to the low single digits. Likewise, paid ads are continuing to steal more of the space available in the search results, resulting in fewer click-throughs for organic listings. This makes paid advertising essential for building and maintaining brand awareness.

Media coverage, guest posts, and interviews

This is an absolutely vital component of building a brand online because it bolsters your credibility through third-party sources who already have a built in audience, but it’s not going to just happen. If hiring a PR firm isn’t in your budget, you’ll need to do it the old fashioned way by reaching out to media sources and bloggers to pitch them why your story would be valuable for their audience. Don’t be discouraged—this will be a lot of work and you’ll face a lot of rejection, but it’s well worth it. I suggest engaging with people long before your ask them for anything, otherwise, you’ll sound just like everyone else who begs them for favors.

Social media

Are you regularly sharing valuable information on social media? That includes your own content as well as content from other publishers. Do you use your social accounts properly to engage with followers, or do you use them more like a megaphone to simply shout about your products or services?

Reviews

Do you take the time to thank customers for positive reviews every single time? And how do you respond to negative reviews? Do you ignore them, or worse yet, attack the reviewer? Or do you try to solve their problem? How you respond here has a tremendous impact on whether potential customers decide to do business with you in the first place. You should have a proactive reputation managemen strategy in place, which includes asking customers to post a review on the websites that matter in your industry, as well as responding promptly to every review, whether it’s positive or negative.

It’s human nature to want to be liked, but it’s also a reality that not everyone will like you. In fact, the harder you try to be liked by everyone, the less your brand will stand out, and that will literally kill your business.

From this point on, you need to not only accept that some people won’t like you, but also not give a shit about it.

Here’s why…

In any market, you will encounter:

1. a small percentage of people who already like you
2. a large percentage of people who may like you if given a reason
3. a small percentage of people who will never like you

The people in group #1 already like you because they’ve found some commonality. It might be your personality traits, like high-energy, playful, or intellectual. It could be your background, like military service or activism for a particular cause. Or it may even be where you’re from. It could be almost anything.

The people in group #2 may like you if you give them a reason. Something that creates a connection.

The people in group #3 will never like you, and you won’t be able to change their minds. Think about someone you dislike. Is there anything they could ever do that would make you change your opinion of them? Nope, right? Everyone else behaves the same in this regard.

Here’s where most people screw up. They can’t handle the idea that someone doesn’t like them so they go out of their way to convert group #3. Except it always backfires, because when you try to appeal to everyone, you don’t give anyone a reason to choose you. You become a grey man and blend into the crowd.

You alienate people who already like you because you dilute what drew them to you in the first place. Out of fear of turning off some people, you dilute your brand to the point where you blend in, so you don’t give anyone a clear reason to choose you. And you don’t change the minds of the people who have already decided they don’t like you.

Here’s the thing—if you’re not turning some people off entirely, you’re not giving anyone a reason to be passionate about your brand.

Here are a few examples of brands that do a great job of giving people a reason to be passionate about their brand:

Counter Strike Coffee

Counter Strike Coffee, a veteran-owned business, has built a loyal and passionate customer base by primarily serving the veterans community. Veterans, especially those from the infantry, have a particular love for coffee because it kept us going on long missions.

Their brand doesn’t appeal to the average person because their language is rough and filled with military terminology. Check out their instructions for making coffee to see what I’m talking about. Or watch this video. (Speaking of which, Brandon, you need to turn the instructions for making coffee into a video, brother!)

Counter Strike Coffee’s founder, Brandon Buttery, knew this wouldn’t appeal to everyone. He wasn’t afraid to turn off the type of people who wouldn’t connect with this message because he knew fellow veterans would. In fact, by being true to his brand, he has built a community of veterans who proudly help him to promote it. If he had created another coffee company blathering on about their eco-friendly, negative carbon footprint, fair trade, hippie hippie rainbow coffee beans, they would have been drowned out by dozens of bigger coffee companies.

Hospitality Environments

Hospitality Environments has transformed how hoteliers of 4 and 5-star hotels purchase beds. Nearly 3 decades of refinement has produced a bed that revolutionizes sleep and serves as a new profit center for hotels whose guests are eager to pay a premium to enjoy it.

These beds, more accurately titled sleep systems, aren’t for your typical consumer, though, because their price point is in the $10,000 range. They don’t offer special sales, a payment plan, or a less expensive model with fewer features. If you can’t afford it, you aren’t who they want to sell to. And they are completely happy turning away customers who aren’t the right fit.

Walter Viveiros, Hospitality Environment’s CEO, has positioned his brand in a way that enables them to sell these sleep systems, both to hoteliers who are accustomed to buying traditional beds at less than 1/10 the price, and to general customers who are accustomed to buying specialty beds at about 1/2 the price.

Ties.com

Ties.com sells, as you might have guessed, ties and tie-related accessories. Nothing else. If you’ve visited their site and noticed that they sell socks and cuff links, you might be thinking “Hah! They don’t just sell ties and tie accessories! You’re wrong and they are trying to cater to more people!” Well my slovenly-dressed friend—socks are a tie-related accessory because many men match their socks to their tie. Which they also match to their pocket square. (They sell those too.)

While most business owners would be tempted to add more products, like belts, shirts, or shoes, they’ve stuck to ties and tie accessories.

It might seem limiting, but when you’re looking for a tie that really expresses your personality, are you going to look at your local department store, or a place that literally specializes in ties? Add in the fact that you can find socks and a pocket square to match your tie—which can be a challenge in even the best-stocked men’s clothing stores, and it’s becomes a no-brainer.

Does this mean some people won’t like them? Damn right. That guy who wants to buy a cheap blue tie can find what he’s looking for at Walmart, and pick up a quart of oil, a pair of blue jeans, and some Cheetos while he’s there, and they don’t mind because he’s not the type of customer they’re looking for anyway.

Bottom line—stop worrying

Some people won’t like you and you shouldn’t give a shit, because the reason one person doesn’t like you may be the exact reason someone else is passionate about you. Give them a reason to connect with you and the right customers will be drawn to you.

Stock photos can either be a blessing or a curse.

Choose the right ones and you can look like a rock star while avoiding an expensive photo shoot, but choose the wrong ones and you risk looking unprofessional, cheesy, or silly.

Before you rush out to buy the cheapest photos you can find, take some time to determine exactly what message you want to convey, then invest enough time to find quality images that really convey that message. Get feedback from employees, friends, and maybe even clients. Most of all, make sure the photos match your company’s culture instead of trying to emulate another company or chase trends.

You’re trying to stand out, right? You can’t do that if you’re copying another company.

That being said, I hope you enjoy this slightly tongue in cheek interpretation of what these stock photos really say…

When you’re not around, we mostly just stand around at the door, desperately hoping someone walks in to save us from our agonizing boredom.

You look too dumb to understand this, so I’ll read it to you…One fish, two fish, red fish blue fish.

The boss is going to be sooo pissed when he finds out we let his kid play with sidewalk chalk in the conference room again!

I just don’t understand why no one answers my calls…

We are so serious about being serious that we numbly gesture at our computers with less facial expression than Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

No, seriously, you have to see Courtney’s last Facebook post, I mean, what was she thinking?

Michael Bay plans all of our business travel.

Our day job is just a cover for our true calling—at night, we transform into a secret society of crime fighters.

I can’t afford an office, don’t have WiFi, and my laptop is filled with sand, so I can’t really get any work done. Sorry!

Who’s got thumbs and loves clichés? We do!

By the way, if you’re looking for some great stock photos, you can find tons at Dreamstime.

Developing your brand can be tough, especially when you’re first starting out.

You’ve probably heard that it’s a good idea to emulate the people you want to be like, and there is merit to that. Emulating your role models’ actions is a great way to achieve your goals faster and more efficiently, but copying their personality will come off as insincere and inauthentic.

You should NEVER do that!

If you want to build a brand people will trust, you need to be yourself because they will be doing business with you—not the people you’re trying to emulate. The “fake it ’til you make it” approach might work for thinking big, but it doesn’t work for telling people who you are.

That means embracing your real personality. If you’re dry and stiff, embrace it, and if you’re bubbly and energetic, embrace that, but never try to be someone you aren’t because you think that’s what someone else wants. They’ll either see right through that and choose not to do business with you, or the business relationship will be awkward and strained, leaving them dissatisfied. Besides, it will make you miserable.

When you pretend to be someone else, you attract clients who aren’t really a fit and things go south fast, but when you are yourself, the right clients will naturally gravitate towards you and you’ll work well together.

You can be exactly who you are and still be wildly successful. Here are a few examples of people I admire who don’t fit into the mold of a “traditional” business person,  yet are 100% authentic and very successful.

Mike Michalowicz

I stumbled across Mike Michalowicz while doing outreach for a client, and his podcast quickly became one of my favorites. The guy is incredibly smart and knows his shit, but he’s not one of those boring guys in an over-starched shirt who vomits industry buzzwords and takes themselves way too seriously. (Check out his website and watch the images as you mouse over the menu choices.) He’s goofy in a good way, funny, approachable—and most importantly, he is authentic.

You need to go, right now, and subscribe to his Profit First Podcast in iTunes, and checking out his books; Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, The Toilet Entrepreneur.

Marie Forleo

I LOVE her presentation style! Marie is another brilliant business mind that doesn’t take herself too seriously. Her B-School is an interactive video-based training program that teaches entrepreneurs how to kick ass at marketing, and I can’t think of a better medium for her use. Her charisma just draws you in…seriously, pull up her YouTube channel and once you click “play,” I guarantee it will be running in the background all day—tons of useful information delivered with tons of personality.

Rand Fishkin

Rand has a brain that would make the smartest geek you’ve ever met jealous, has overcome challenges that would make most people crumble, and has achieved amazing success, yet he’s humble about all of it. His personality really shines in MOZ’s Whiteboard Friday series where he shares SEO and marketing advice, but one of his presentations at MozCon 2012 says even more about his character. He doesn’t try to play the “big important CEO” card. He doesn’t beat his chest yelling “look what I accomplished!” In the first few minutes of this video, Rand makes it very clear how much he appreciates all of the people he works with. He cares about his team, and he lets them know, often, and publicly.

Chalene Johnson

I found Chalene’s podcast while I was struggling through some health issues, and after a few episodes, I was hooked. She is a fitness trainer turned self-help guru who always maintains an intensity level of 11 and superhuman positivity, but it’s 100% real. It’s not the “everything is awesome” mantra we usually hear from people in her industry—she’s is very open about her challenges and fears, but she just doesn’t let negativity take hold. That’s a Hell of a lot more authentic than most coaches and business leaders who want you to believe their lives are always perfect and yours will be too if you just buy their book or coaching package.