The 8 Simple Branding Mistakes Most Bloggers Make

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Branding is an incredibly important part of running a successful and profitable blog. However, most of us are making simple branding mistakes that could be costing us readers, customers, and money.

In this blog post, I am going to reveal 8 simple branding mistakes that you may be making. The good news is that all of these mistakes are fixable! Be ready to take notes and make some changes to ensure your blog branding efforts are paying off.

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If you have been following the blog, you know that I have primarily focused on branding this month. The reason why I chose to focus on branding is that my own branding efforts are starting to pay off. I have made (and continue to make) branding mistakes.

Part of the challenge lies in being able to identify blogging mistakes and address them. The sooner you can do this, the less damage your brand will suffer as a result.

Relevant Posts:

Not Knowing Your Target Audience

The biggest mistake most new bloggers make is not knowing your audience. Ironically, it is also the most difficult to understand when your blog is new because you don’t have a lot of content or data. In fact, Julie of Jules Design recommends waiting 3 months to start branding for this very reason.

For example, when I first started blogging, I thought that my audience would primarily be women in their thirties. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered almost half of my audience was male and the majority of them were in their twenties. I didn’t know these details until I had enough data to pull from.

Once you have three months of blogging under your belt, you can use tools like Pinterest Analytics, Tailwind Insights, and Google Analytics to better understand your audience. This is a game changer.

If you are like me, you will have to make the choice to appeal more to your original intended audience or to continue to target your current audience and curate your content more toward their interests. Either is okay, but as you can see, whichever choice you make will greatly affect your branding.

Poor or DIY Logo Design

A huge red flag for branding failure is a poor quality logo. Your logo needs to be iconic with your brand and evoke the emotions you want from your audience. If you run a food blog, you want them hungry. If you have a personal finance blog, you need their trust!

When you don’t know how to convey this in a visual design, you should really consider hiring a graphic designer for the job. An experienced designer will save you time and money on future rebranding and ensure your blog has a great start.

While your designer is working on your logo, he or she should also create a submark logo, favicon, and tagline image for your visual identity at the same time. These elements borrow from your logo and are important in establishing brand continuity.

If you have graphic design skills, by all means, design your own logo. However, if you are like the majority of bloggers, you are best off outsourcing this task to a designer.

If you don’t have the funds for a graphics designer, don’t worry. You can create a basic logo on your own, just remember to keep it very simple. For example, use the basic name of your blog in a really nice clear font that has a design on par with your brand.

Font Problems

In college, I had a desktop publishing course in which we were assigned to find an example of poor font usage in print. In the Sunday paper, I found a two-by-three inch furniture ad that had at least four fonts. That was over twelve years ago and it is one of the few things I remember from the class.

It’s memorable for me because I deal with fonts on a daily basis and it was a truly horrible and distracting ad. At that young age, I could not fathom how any adult could let something that messy and unclear make it to the printing press.

Remember to keep your readers and mind and when in doubt, keep it simple. Misty Anderson of Misty Anderson Designs suggests only using two to three fonts in your blog. Your entire blog! Also, she cautions her readers not to use unprofessional fonts such as comic sans. I can’t agree with her more on this.

Think about the image you want others to have of your brand. Having too many or less than professional fonts can appear confusing and unprofessional. It can also distract and deter your audience. That is the last thing you want.

Once again, simple is safe, but it works. If you choose a script font, be sure its legible and don’t use more than one script font. Period. Also, stick with a professional, clear serif or sans serif font for the body and headers of your text. These are easier to read and skim for readers on the go.

No one wants to read your blog post on a city bus if he or she needs to squint to read your copy. Clarity is key, especially with digital publications.

Poorly Chosen Color Palette

Have you ever visited a website and the moment you open the website on your browser, you have to squint your eyes to understand what you are reading? The kind where the color contrast causes you to see the image when you close your eyes?

I think we’ve all been there and it’s an awful experience for your audience. I most often see it on local DIY websites these days, but occasionally it does turn up in blogs.

Be sure that when you choose a color palette that you don’t go overboard. Stick with three main colors. You can use up to two accent colors and two neutrals (an almost white and almost dark) as well. However, those three main colors should be the ones most closely associated with your blog.

The three colors I use most are a peachy rose, a warm darker grey, and a warm taupe. However, I also use a light warm grey that is almost white and a dark grey that is nearly black. I don’t really use any other colors unless I’m performing a Pinterest experiment.

For the body of your blog, stick with a light, almost white or white background color and dark, almost black text. Never have a dark background with light writing or fonts and backgrounds with high contrast or low contrast. None of these are easy to read and will cost your brand customers and followers.

Lack of Branding and Poor Blog Design

If your brand isn’t obvious from the second a page loads on your blog, you have a huge branding mistake on your hands. Add to that poor blog design and navigation and you have a recipe for disaster. Simply put, your brand will not make it!

You need your audience to visit your website and see your logo, recognize your color palette, and associate it with your brand. Imagine if you were to visit any page on Amazon, Ebay, or Zappos and you didn’t see the brand’s signature colors or logo.

When you visit Amazon, you expect to see that little yellow or black smiley face/arrow under the name of the business. If it’s not there, you would think you were visiting the wrong website. Maybe the Amazon website was hacked or maybe the link you clicked was a hoax.

You would know within moments that it wasn’t right, right? How? Their branding will let you know immediately. Effective branding is a big deal. People who recognize your brand, build a relationship with it and become fans will begin to recognize branding on your images and ads very quickly.

It is important that your blog’s design makes your brand clear from any page. It also needs to give your reader all of the information they need to trust you. You need easy access to your About page, contact information, and legal pages.

These pages improve your branding because they say you are a legit business. It sounds like such a small part of your blog’s brand and design, but consumers expect it. If you fail to make this information readily available, your brand will lose its credibility.

A Weak Visual Identity

In today’s online business world, your visual identity plays a huge role in your blog’s branding. One of the worst branding mistakes you can make is having a weak visual identity.

If you notice when you go to my blog, the first thing you see is my header and logo. These are all created using my brand’s fonts and color palette.

Then, I have some buttons using images, fonts, and colors that stick with my branding. Following these, I have a branded opt-in offer, then my most recent blog posts, which include a branded featured image. The headers are all using Raleway font and are in my brand color scheme as well.

This may seem like overkill to some, but it creates a strong unity of all of the visual elements of my blog. If any of your elements are off-brand, it weakens your brand’s visual identity.

If you struggle with visual identity and branding images, try using templates. In her ” The Ecommerce Maven Podcast” episode, “The 5 Branding Mistakes We’re All Making,” Kristi Soomer of Kristi Soomer suggests hiring a graphic designer to create branded templates you can use over and over again (at the 17:10 timestamp). This is a small, but worthwhile investment into branding your bog that you can use over and over again.

Another suggestion is that you use the same filter for all of your images. This will give all of your images a consistent appearance that supports your visual identity.

Branding Inconsistency

All successful bloggers promote their blogs across a variety of social streams and media. A problem that arises from this is not continuing your branding consistency between platforms.

For example, you need the same picture of yourself on your blog that you use on all of your social media. This lets your reader know immediately that the profile belongs to your brand.

Failure to do this can cause confusion and, once again, weakness in your branding. I try to use the same image across all of my social media platforms. This helps create consistent branding. I even use my branding colors, logo, and fonts in my email marketing.

Whenever and wherever you have the option to support your branding, do it. Don’t choose your most recent uploaded selfie and a cute header for your social media. Instead, use the same images from your blog and a consistent profile picture.

Incomplete Branding

Recently, I answered the question “Should I Brand Images That I Use On My Blog?” My answer, of course, is yes. In this post I went into detail about how this supports your brand and protects your images, but it also completes your branding.

Above, I mentioned that in order to keep your brand’s visual identity consistent, you should use templates and the same filter. One of the components of your templates should be a logo, submark logo, or a branded URL. These clearly mark your images with your branding.

Not branding your images leaves a huge hole in your brand. It is a weakness that you must fix in order to have the strongest brand possible.

Branding Mistakes Aren’t a Death Sentence

Most of us make branding mistakes on our blogs. Often, these mistakes are simple and easily corrected. Don’t take this post as saying, “Your brand is junk.” Instead, use it as a springboard to improve your branding and make your brand strong and durable.

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