I’m revisiting this topic. I wrote about Gravatar.com last year, but I think it’s a cool enough addition to your branding toolkit that it’s worth putting it out there again. Like so many of the most powerful tools available online these days, this is a free and effective service. Do yourself a favor and check it out! 🙂
Blogs are a wonderful source of information on just about any topic you’re looking for. Reading blogs by industry leaders can be very helpful in your education and learning more about what people are talking about in your industry, and they can help you learn about how you want to write your own blog posts.
Along with the value of reading other’s blogs is the value of commenting on them and contributing to the conversation yourself. It helps develop the conversation and it also lets people know who you are and a little about what you have to offer to the conversation.
Gravatars
If you’re new to reading blogs you may have noticed how some of the authors of blog comments have a small thumbnail image that accompanies their comment. It might be a photo of them or a company logo or something of that nature. Maybe you’ve left comments on blogs but your thumbnail is just a generic icon. You can have your own image accompany your blog posting and comments.
Now this is not a huge thing that’s necessarily going to dramatically increase your business or revenue. But it’s just another way to help develop your identity online. People are visual in nature. The more they see your image popping up here and there, it will help with you or your business’ recognition online. Why not take advantage of that?
Here’s how you do it.
Go to gravatar.com and sign up, then up load an image that you want associated with your email address. Now when ever you post a comment on a blog using that email address, your image will now accompany your comments. If you want to help your business’ branding you could use your company logo, however people generally like seeing people’s photos instead. Blogging and social media helps to put the human element into the web. A personal photo just helps that. I confess that I use Image Perceptions’ logo for my gravatar image. I have it on my todo list to replace that with my own image just for that reason, so bear with me.
