Building a "Coffee Brand" in Today's Crazy Online World

Hi All!

Since this is my first post ever, I thought I would start with what I have been working on over the last year. How in the world do you build and promote a new brand in today's digital world? As I was putting my youngest child to sleep, an idea around a referral program just popped in my mind. I quickly wrote down the idea and thought "now how do I use it?" To not bore you, I went over hundreds of ideas and ended up settling on coffee. I mean ... Who doesn't love coffee right?

Over the course of the year, I have learned a ton about coffee plantations, coffee beans, the roasting process, and so on. I ended up finding incredible roasters and I now have a legitimate "Organic Coffee" company that is currently only selling online. We have been growing steadily through online marketing, but it has been a grind to find the right channels. My model is simple, which is most likely why it has been working, I have an affiliate program that awards commissions to users just for referring buyers to our site. We track everything and pay up to 3 levels of referrers in perpetuity (Think Affiliate marketing meets an MLM - but does not require the affiliate to buy into anything!) I started promoting it through bloggers and several local online business who I knew to have over 15,000 members in their community. I contacted large twitter users and gave them unique referral codes. Crazy enough ... these have been our biggest affiliates to date and all they did was tweet out our link! Easy monthly commission check for them and a great way to spread the word on our brand. Now I must emphasize, you need to have a GREAT product, if your brand is to succeed. I spent countless hours and thousands of dollars to get this right. If you do though ... You can easily build out a solid brand through good old organic growth!

If you want to check out our company, it is called FightingTheGrind. Good luck to you and we certainly welcome questions or any feedback you would like to provide.