What is a brand? And, how do you develop a brand for your business? There are a lot of elements that make up a strong brand, but first let’s define what a brand is.

Your brand is how your customers perceive you – what they think about your products, how they feel about them, and you. Your brand is a promise to your customers. It’s not something you can touch or see, but instead is more like your customer’s feeling about your business.

Whether you created your website yourself or had someone else do it for you. There are certain elements that will attract your customers and keep them coming back. The last part is important especially if you sell products because if someone land on your website once that doesn't mean they’ll return. So here are the elements for how to design a website that attracts customers (and keeps them coming back).

If you want to grow your blog or business than you should have a plan for your marketing, and strategies for your content, Pinterest, social media, product creation, sponsorships and more. Is it important to have a strategy specifically for Pinterest? With 300 million monthly users, it sure is! Take a look at these stats: “93% of active pinners said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases and 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest”. Here are the steps for creating a Pinterest strategy that will help grow your blog and business.

There are many ways to make your blog more appealing - stock photos, infographics, distinctive fonts, icons, textures, illustrations... Here are my suggestions for some great sites that offer graphics, fonts and more for your blog.

If you're a blogger with graphic design ideas you will want to use the right graphic design programs. Adding  visually appealing graphics to your blog is one way to make it stand out and reinforce your brand. In addition to blog graphics you will need to create pins for Pinterest, social media graphics and more. If you're just starting out, you may not have the budget or want to spend the money for professional graphic design software. The industry standard is Adobe, with products like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. These are the programs I use and prefer because they offer quite a bit of options.  The company developed Adobe Creative Cloud, a monthly paid subscription alternative instead of spending hundreds of dollars to own the software.

Whether you’re just starting out or have been blogging for a while, creating blog graphics can be a struggle. If you’re new, you may not even know how to start the process. If you’ve been blogging for awhile you probably have days when you feel uncreative.. It’s easy to become overwhelmed or fall into a rut in a profession like blogging. Taking some time to check out visual sources and doing some research may be just the key to providing you with a boost of creativity and optimism. Keep reading to learn just where to find design inspiration for your blog.