Building Your Brand

Your brand is the foundation of your blog’s identity and purpose. In his article “7 rules of successful bloggers,” Robert Pagliarini defines your brand as “the emotional reaction someone feels when he or she hear your name.” You have a brand right now, even if you don’t realize it—in fact, you probably have several. 

You have a certain brand when you’re at work, another with your family, perhaps even different ones with various groups of friends. For many new bloggers, that’s part of the problem. Your real-life brands are too diverse and scattered to make for a compelling blog; you need to narrow and craft your brand into a salable package.

A brand is a combination of your persona and your reputation. Your persona is the way you try to present yourself to others; your reputation is formed by the way you interact with them. When you’re first starting out as a blog and haven’t yet built a reputation, you’re going to be working off of the strength of your persona alone. It’s necessary, then, to decide what your brand will be before you start writing your posts, and then to reinforce that brand consistently through your content.

Play to your audience

Imagine your ideal reader. Think about how they spend their time. Are they single, or do they have a family? Where do they live? What are their values? Tailoring your brand to your audience can help give you a better focus for your first few posts and help you to establish your identity more quickly. 

Of course, you shouldn’t take this too far, either. Don’t pretend to be a new person just to attract more readers. You’re not changing your personality, just identifying which aspects of it will be the most appealing to your target reader. Consider it this way: when you’re at work, you probably dress differently, have a different bearing, and use a different vocabulary than when you’re hanging out with your buddies at the bar or watching TV with the kids at home. 

All these versions of yourself are “you,” you’re just tailoring them to the situation. Most people do this subconsciously in response to the non-verbal cues and clues of their surroundings. With blogging, you can’t see the people you’re interacting with; without those context clues, it’s necessary to construct the persona you want to use rather than letting your subconscious do it for you.

Think about your ideal image. Do you want to be a friendly confidant? A knowledgeable expert? Think back to the “why me?” question you answered in chapter 1. If the reason you chose your niche is because you’ve studied that topic and have a lot of knowledge to share, your brand might be aimed at educating your readers. 

That branding won’t work if you’re a relative novice in your topic area; maybe instead your brand would be learning how to become a better chef, or finding the best attractions in your city, and bringing the reader along for your discoveries. 

If you’re having trouble thinking of what you want your brand to be, some old fashioned brainstorming may just do the trick. Get out a blank piece of paper and a pen. Write “I want my blog to be…” large at the top of the paper, then write down whatever words come to mind. Link these words together into concepts and sentences, rearranging and connecting them until you feel like you’ve gotten to the heart of what you’re trying to represent.

You’ve probably heard the term “elevator pitch,” a description of your product or idea that could be conveyed in the time it takes to ride in an elevator—about thirty seconds, if you want to put a number on it. Before you start blogging, you should be able to give an elevator pitch of your brand and topic. Once you can do that, you should have a clear enough concept of your brand to stay consistent through your early posts.

The importance of design

The layout and design of your blog will give your reader their first impression of you. On the practical side of things, you want to make sure it’s both easy to navigate and easy to read. Important posts should have a prominent place on the page, and the color scheme shouldn’t interfere with the legibility of your writing.

A pre-made template like those available on WordPress can be a good place to start when you’re designing your blog, but you should customize at least a few elements of it to help it stand out from the thousands of others that use that same layout. The design you choose for your blog should in some way reflect your brand or niche. Ideally, a reader should be able to glance at your page without reading a word and get a basic idea of your blog topic. 

Layout and color choices have some role in this; if you run a photography blog, you should choose a format that emphasizes images, for example. Consider specialized features. A financial blog might find it helpful to install a live tracker of the stock exchange on their front page; a sports blogger might have a ticker of scores and match results. 

A great way to clarify your brand is to design a logo that reflects both your niche and your personality. You can do this yourself if you’re artistic, but for many people, it’s worth the financial investment to hire a freelancer to design the logo for you. The logo will come to represent your brand in most readers’ minds, and the initial investment you make hiring a designer will be repaid many times over by the boost to your brand recognition. 

Though this is most important with your logo, it can also be true of other aspects of your blog design. If you want customized images or a unique layout format but don’t have the design or coding background to make them competently yourself, don’t be afraid to look for a freelancer to complete the work for you. A well-designed site will be more likely to attract visitors and will ultimately be worth the initial financial investment.

Blogging success story: Nicola Lees

Nicola Lees had already built a successful career in television before she started TVMole.com. She developed a strong brand based on her expertise, helping people with ideas for TV shows to pitch those shows to TV executives and producers. 

The content on TVMole all reinforces this strong brand, giving helpful advice that readers can’t get anywhere else, allowing her blog to grow and expand into multiple income streams. She does consult and contract work, speaks on panels and sells books and courses that help her readers. 

Having worked with major industry leaders like the BBC and Discovery Chanel meant Lees’ obvious choice was to base her brand around her expertise. Her insider perspective makes her a trusted voice in the niche of television production. 

But even though she had the credentials, it was still Lees’ high-quality and trustworthy content that reinforced her brand on her blog and helped her generate traffic and opportunities.