Naming is a subset of branding. Any combination of sounds, or phonemes, can compose a name, and perhaps be unique enough as to identify a product or service without ambiguity. But that is not enough to make it a brand.

For internal purposes, engineers or designers often use code names to identify their projects, such as PN96. To become a brand, however, a name has to be able to fit in its audience’s memory in a way that will make the brand’s attributes recalled. Thus, “PN96″ turns out to be the best selling vehicle in the US, the F150 truck, “Built Ford Tough.”

Nevertheless, naming is a critical step of branding, and it would be a missed opportunity to leave it to Tarzan or the CEO’s spouse. Deprived of access to the Brandchannel, Tarzan sought common nouns from his limited vocabulary to name his adopted son and quickly ended up with “Boy.” Little he knew! If new parents cringe at the idea of getting the new name past their mothers-in-law, brand managers have to deal with a long battery of naming tests (and eventually the CEO’s mother-in-law). On the bright side, a well-chosen name can be so powerful as to become a one-word commercial. It is especially critical for small businesses, which often lack of the necessary marketing budgets to promote their brand effectively.

I originally wrote this article for Digital Journal.

We’ve all heard of Google Adsense and the revenue it has generated for marketers and Google. The thing is that Adsense is no longer considered the strong earner it once was for internet marketers as generating income online continues to slow down.

Adsense revenue has normally been generated at its peak by high traffic website owners who continually have fresh content for their users daily. As more users enter the online world with websites and blogs, it makes new bloggers and website owners wonder how they can generate any type of income with all the competition on the web.

Research has shown that Adsense revenue has been difficult to come by for the basic blogger. In a study conducted by Technorati, of 174 blogs:

85% allowed comments on their blogs
33% used Google Adsense
45% generated no revenue
40% generated less than $5,000 per year
4% generated over $100,000per year

The study shows the discrepancies of using Adsense or not. Though there are other methods of generating revenue through your blog, Adsense has become the household name for blogging revenue. Services such as PayPerPost and Smorty offer bloggers a way to generate some revenue by advertising an ad on their blog, but these services can only do so much for your blog.

Is blogging becoming more difficult to generate any sort of income? Yes, but it’s not impossible. There are no easy methods or schemes to reach high amounts on revenue in your blogs, but can a basic blogger ever get a piece of the action in the blogosphere?

Branding is the foundation of marketing and is inseparable from business strategy. It is therefore more than putting a label on a fancy product. Nowadays, a corporation, law firm, country, university, museum, hospital, celebrity, and even you in your career can be considered as a brand.

As such, a brand is a combination of attributes, communicated through a name, or a symbol, that influences a thought-process in the mind of an audience and creates value. As branding is deeply anchored in psycho-sociology, it takes into account both functional and emotional benefits. Therefore, those attributes compose the beliefs that the brand’s audience recalls when they think about the brand in its context.

The value of a brand resides, for the audience, in the promise that the product or service will deliver. Clearly, a brand can recall memories of a bad experience. The value for the audience then would be to avoid purchasing that brand.

In conclusion, branding is the blend of art and science that manages associations between a brand and memories in the mind of the brand’s audience. It involves focusing resources on selected tangible and intangible attributes to differentiate the brand in an attractive, meaningful and compelling way for the targeted audience. Brand management then becomes the organizational framework that systematically manages those customer-centric processes. It aims at gathering intelligence, allocating resources, and consistently delivering the brand promise over time at each contact-point with the customer.

Gaining traffic to your site using Adwords doesn’t always work. When you get your own web hosting services, they’ll probably throw in a couple of advertising coupons to help out the deal. Lots of blogs have Adsense installed and this gives you a huge potential of redirecting traffic from specific sites to yours. However, Adwords is not for everyone. Most of the keywords on "make money online" or similar ones require you to put at least $0.20 per click to activate it.

If you are tight on budget or rather just started to learn how to make money online, then you can forget about using Adwords. If you are an A-list blogger then you can go on and spend hundreds or even thousands on Adwords campaign.

In my opinion, most of the clicks that are coming to your site are just one time visits. You’ll have to spend a lump sum to gain "quality traffic."

There’s always Social Media Marketing – DoshDosh has a perfect article on it. Happy Blogging!

I read this article from Ades Blog about Matt Cutts’ white hat SEO tips, video, and text summary . Here are some points made on Ades Blog:

1. Use variation of the same keyword in the url, title and content separately
2. Use dashes and underscores in the URLs to separate the words
3. Name categories after the keywords that you are chasing
4. Merge your www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com
5. Make a buzz on the net and Google will notice you
6. Avoid .biz and .info type of domains

It’s very important to note that these tips could improve your blog depending on how you perform them. With the proper research and execution, your blog will receive traffic left and right.