Blogging Tips

So I get up early this morning, hell bent to write this post based on another idea entirely.  And there waiting on my morning email is the latest Bloggingtips.com masterpiece by Kristen Nicole, and everything changed.  Because she’s so right: don’t be a scaredy cat blogger.  Today I’m here to take that one step further. 

What I’d planned can wait.  This can’t.

Because what Kristen shared is the tip of a critical iceberg when it comes to growing your blog.  The secret to doing so is to brand yourself out here in the blogosphere.  The better the branding, the faster your blog will grow. 

But what does that even mean?

Blogging beyond the obvious

We’ve heard all the blogging tips before, respun, reinvented and rekindled in the name of yet another post you hope will stand out in a weary crowd.  It’s all about content.  It’s about the reader, not you.  Grab ‘em with a killer headline.  Hook ‘em with an irresistable lead.  Wow ‘em with your insight and expertise. 

Dead on.  But it’s Blogging 1o1.  If you want to grow your blog, you not only need to do all that and more on a consistent basis, you need to do it with a distinct voice.  With an edge.  With a specific point of view that is uniquely yours, yet in context to all of the above.

It’s the only way to separate yourself from a very ambitious crowd. 

You can’t miss an effective brand. Even if you want to

Like it or not (and I don’t), Rush Limbaugh has a brand.  Jessie Jackson has a brand.  That guy with the fu manchu on on ESPN has a brand (which I do like).  So does Ritz Carlton, Nordstom and Morton’s Steak House.  You know what they stand for, you know what you’re getting.  And you keep coming back to get it.  Or at least, someone does.

Chances are you’re not blogging as a general commentary, you’re on a soap box looking out over a sea of hopeful neophyte faces that occupy a defined niche.  You and a thousand other self-proclaimed experts.  Nobody looking for cooking insight is reading this blog right now, unless they blog about it themselves. 

Are you a generalist or a lobbyist?  Are you rehashing or reinventing?  Are you fresh or are you recycling conventional wisdom?  Are you vanilla or are you triple chocolate cherries jubilee?

Killing your inner scardy cat

Have you pissed anyone off lately?  Have you bucked the system, rejected the accepted, proposed a fringe strategy that suddenly makes all the sense in the world?  What is your voice?  Your platform?  Your passion?

The key to successful branding is twofold: consistency and credibility.  But with an edge.

You’ll get knocked right off that soap box unless you can back your bluster with war stories and scars.  Have you been there or are you reflecting what others are saying?  Do you know, or do you parrot what others know? 

Be sure you know before you write what you know

As for me, I write in the fiction niche, presuming to tell authors how to write better stories and stay sane in the process of trying to publish them.  I’m new to blogging, and yet my blog has taken off like an Octo-Mom reality show.  Why?  Because I’m bucking the system.  I’m delivering a new and better way to approach writing, something writers haven’t heard before and are thristy for.  Because the established way is crap.  I’m offering something that pisses off roughly half of the people who think they already know.

It’s fun, pissing people off.  Especially when you know what you’re talking about and can back your position in a smackdown.  Which I absolutely can.

When you understand the equity behind your brand, you need to be strategic about how you put it out there.  It’s truly a show-don’t-tell proposition (remember that one, from your freshman creative writing class?).  It’s the veiled, even self-deprecating reference to your own life experience (like I just did in the previous paragraph) that uses the power of your message to take the deprication out of the delivery. 

Readers recognize the real deal when they see it.  So the first rule of branding is to be that blogger, the real deal, and then put a spin and an edge on it with every post.

Bold branding is a strategy

Successful branding strategies are never random or accidental.  They are the product of a carefully conceived and proactively honed marketplace identity, backed with the establishment of content and tone that embodies it.  When delivered consistently, the brand emerges from between the lines of the content itself.

Every columnist who keeps their gig more than a year knows this.  And a blog is nothing if not a column in the truest sense of the word. 

Do you know the nature of your brand?  Do you even have a brand?  Do you understand who you are as a blogger, or more importantly, as a player in your niche?  Once you do, the secret to growing your blog isn’t so much the content of it as it is the essence of it.

The essence of it is your brand.  And if you live it in every post, your blog will begin to grow.

Image credit: Marsdencartoons