I’ve taken my Family to Sun City for a week of fun and relaxation. Sun City is a really great resort, and well worth a visit if you haven’t been.

Sun City has given me a lot of great ideas, and taught me a lesson or two. The biggest lesson, (or reminder, cause we should already know this stuff) is in how they do their branding. Which is brilliant.

EVERYTHING has the Sun City logo on it. There is a phone in the room, and it carries the Sun City logo. In the bathroom the bath mat has a Sun City logo on it. There are a bunch of Sun City magazines and they are littered with logos. Every single piece of paper that has been handed to me has the logo on it. There is a fridge magnet with a picture of some baboons on it, and a Sun City logo.

I noticed that there is an ambulance service down the road, and even the ambulances have the Sun City logo, and are branded as ‘Sun City Emergency Services’. If you go to a restaurant, you can order Sun City house wine, although I can’t see a vineyard within 100 miles.

This got me thinking about how important branding is. The Sun City brand is so prominent all over that I will never ever be able to forget it. So how do you go about applying some of these branding principals to your everyday blog?

The first area I would look at is where and how often your logo appears on your blog.  Making sure the logo appears above the fold is critical. When people visit your blog, they need to see your logo right away. But your logo needs to stand separated from any other logos, or banners or ads. So you need to create a special place for your logo, where it can stand boldly promoting your brand.

And the logo doesn’t have to be anything wonderful, it could just be your blogs name in a certain font. As long as it stays the same, and doesn’t change every week then you’ll do fine.

Secondly, I would add a logo to the sidebar and the footer. Think about the logic here for a second. If you add a smallish logo to the very bottom of your side bar, and one in your footer, chances are that 80 -90% of the time you are going have your logo visible on the screen. That’s worth its weight in gold.

Then I would look at each and every interaction with your visitor. Every email, every comment notification, how can your brand and your logo be worked in there, so that the visitor / subscriber knows that he is dealing with your brand?

Another way to add your branding is to watermark images you use on your site with your logo. Obviously you’ll need to assess whether your logo will work in this situation, but if your images are scraped on the Internet and posted on other sites, at least you get a bit of brand exposure while you’re at it.

The other area of branding that I think is often forgotten about is off site branding. When other bloggers talk about you, have a careful look and see if there is not a more efficient way to work your brand in there. So for instance, if a blogger links to you from their site, is there any way you can turn the link into an image of your logo? You’ll have to weigh up what’s more important, link quality vs brand exposure, and you also wont get your logo on each blog that links to you.

Then you need to look at your offline interaction with people. Do you have business cards? Is your logo on it?

How often do you go to meet ups, and dinners and blog lunches? When you go, do you have a t-shirt with your logo? Do you wear it? Do you have a few you can give away?

Recently at a 27Dinner I met a guy dishing our cool t-shirts, and when I asked him for one, he said sure, but I had to post a picture of the t-shirt and a link back to his site. That’s a really great way to build brand exposure. Other bloggers putting your logo on their site, and then also giving you a text link. By the time someone visits your site, they have seen your logo, and you carry some credibility. That’s a brilliant viral strategy.