Do you consider your blog a business? I do, although I thoroughly enjoy this it is still a business that needs to produce income.

One of the essential elements of owning a business is branding. Today I want to specificity discuss branding a blog.

I’m going to share what I believe to be two different aspects of branding.

Brand
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.

It is my belief that I have achieved this with Chef Patrick. Something catchy, unique and easy to remember. It is to the point now where people call me Chef or Chef Patrick, which by the way I am not a cook.

“Sellable” Brand
The ability to take a brand and package it for sale.

The main ingredient for creating a brand is a domain name. As I have already stated I believe I have achieved a brand with Chef Patrick but, I have failed in creating a SELLABLE brand. I would essentially have to find another Patrick to sell my blog.

When picking your domain name I want you to seriously take into consideration your future plans and possible goals. If creating a brand, something sellable then do not use your personal name. Take into consideration what your main topic will be and find a domain name that matches.

Just to give you a few examples…
If you are wanting to create a domaining video blog then go with something like DNVideoBlogger.com. It sends a clear message that if you come to this site you are going to see someone video blogging about domain names. Passionate about trains, how about LocomotiveNews.com. Maybe you love celebrity gossip, CelebrityBlabber.com is a perfect fit.

By the way I do own the example domain names so if you are interested in one just send me an email.

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What is Domain Parking?
Domain Parking is a simple way to earn money from your domains natural traffic. If you have registered domain names, but they are not currently being used, then domain parking is a great way to put those domains to work, earning you revenue. The domain is used to display relevant advertisements, every time a consumer clicks on one of the advertisements, you earn money.

No you are not going to get rich by doing this but you are going to earn extra money. If you do not take advantage of this you can believe your registrar companies will.

Here is an example of one of my domains with Parked.com, FloridaStateFairground.com, for the month of January I earned $6.37.

Let me go over what I believe to be the top three parking companies, each one is good for their own reasons.

Parked.com
My favorite of the three, I’m partial because this is who I use. In order to open an account I believe you need to have a minimum of 10 domains and that’s it. After opening an account you are assigned an account team which are helpful and friendly. On average I make about $30 per month parking my domain names here.

Sedo.com
I use them for a hundred or so of my domain names for one reason only, to save money on listing fees. If your domain is parked with Sedo and you sell through them the listing fees (normally $50) are waived. The downside to using Sedo for me has been the very low if any parking revenue.

WhyPark.com
I have not used WhyPark and can only write about what I’ve read and heard. There is an initial cost of $99 to open an account which covers 100 domain names. From what I’m seeing though WhyPark is worth the money, it’s almost like creating little mini-sites for what would equate to $0.99 each. There are a ton of site modification and options, the best part about WhyPark, you keep 100% of the revenue produced which is great.

For me parking is a big DUH, kind of like not backing up your websites. If your domain name is just sitting there then do yourself a favor and park them. You’d be surprised how much this helps, the extra cash will either pay for a few renewals or a few new registrations. As an added bonus, if the domain is making some money parked it will hold a higher value, there are niche buyers looking for parked names with revenue only.

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The Twitter application I talked about on Saturday was launched today at noon and already seems to be a tremendous success. Sorry for posting late on this, I was at Kyle Graham’s house one of the creators of Viral Tweets to find out more.

After talking to Kyle the main idea behind this tool is to build up Twitter followers. If your asking why the answer is simple, to have an audience to get your messages/products out to.

There are two versions of the application, Free and $49.

I do not recommend getting the free version. The idea behind using this product is to build your list. The paid version has an auto option to follow you on Twitter. That is what you want, you want followers, people to get your message out to. The free version does not have this. All it does is send out a one time message to that person’s Twitter followers. You may gain traffic but then miss the point of capturing them. If all you want is a tool to send out a Twitter message about a specific post then use TwitThis which is a WordPress plugin. With this plugin your readers do not have to fill in anything, they simply click a button which takes them to Twitter.

If you want to seriously build your followers then get the $49 version of Viral Tweets today. If you have any problems installing or figuring out how to utilize this tool just let me know, I’ll walk you through it myself.

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This brand new Twitter application has some huge money making potential. The form below is what the application produces. I was lucky enough to get in on the beta testing. Basically your readers or site visitors will fill in their Twitter user name and password, which is not stored and only used once. The application then goes to Twitter and submits the pre-populated message to their followers.

Here is just an example of how to turn this into a money making machine.

Hold a $50 gift card giveaway, have your site visitors complete the Twitter application form and that’s it for them. Once completed that message will be sent out to all of their followers. The message could say something like “sign up for xyz product for only 19.95 a month, visit chefpatrick.com/xyz”. The example I give is an obvious sales pitch, you can word it however you want making it sound less like a sales blast. With this simple tool instead of just my visitors and Twitter followers getting the message it is spread out to thousands and thousands of Twitter users.

Do the math with me, if I have 100 visitors complete this form assuming they have 500 Twitter followers each, then this message will be sent to 50,000 Twitter users.

For my domainers out there, replace the product example with a domain name for sale.

Test it out for yourself, complete the form below and send out the message. Make sure to come back on Monday 12pm est to get this application. I’m not allowed to say how much it is but, I can say it will be very reasonably priced.

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Sorry I haven’t blogged in a couple days, I have been on Twitter a lot. I may need an intervention because I am addicted. Having said that I will be putting up an article in the next few days about Twitter and why you should be on it too.

Just two things and I’ll let you get on with your Friday.

What do you want?
What would you like for me to talk about? Are there any topics you need or want me to cover? Let me know either by leaving a comment, sending me an email or message me on Twitter.

Prizes
Secondly make sure to sign up for my newsletter. We are giving away our first newsletter prize in two days, a $25 gift card to either Amazon or GoDaddy. Like they say with the lotto, you have to play to win.

Sorry, one more surprise. I am working on a contest with a ton of prizes, my goal is around $5,000 worth. This contest will be in March, just in time for March Madness. If you are interested in sponsoring my next contest please send me an email through the contact page.

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