10 Step Expert Guide to Blogging Your Personal Brand

January 5, 2009 at 12:15 pm | In Career Development, Personal Branding, Success Strategies, eBrand, marketing, social media | 15 Comments

This is the final post in a series about blogging your personal brand. I’ve written a post for beginners, as well as intermediate and advanced users. Please review those posts before reviewing this one.

1) Podcast your brand on your blog

Whenever I talk about podcasts, I typically think of video, but many bloggers choose to record their voice or an interview through the telephone or a voice recorder and then publish it. You can do the same and there are services that will aid in the publishing process, such as PodBean.com. Audio podcasts are great for people who are scared to show their face or are in situations where they don’t have the necessary equipment to shoot video.

Video is the best way to interact with your audience, especially if you’re charismatic and personable. People can get a sense of you from reading your posts, tweets and social network messages, but when it comes to real interaction and emotional connection, video is king. Purchase a webcam or a video camera and hook it up directly to your computer using a USB connection. If you want to be a professional, and possibly interview other people for an internet type show, then you may want to buy a microphone, a sound amplifier and possibly an HD video camera (they cost less than $1,000 now).

Then you’ll want to get the video on the top video sharing websites in the world. To do this, all you need to do is upload it on TubeMogul, using the name, description and keywords that you feel will be optimize the video for search engines (as well as the video sharing search engines). TubeMogul will put your video on YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and more.

Finally, you’ll want to use the embed code from the video on either sharing site to use on your blog. You can either post the video as a blog post or decide the transcribe it, in addition to placing the video on the post.

2) Lifecasting

The two best “lifecasting” sharing sites are Qik and UStream.tv. I recommend getting comfortable doing audio or video podcasting before you decide to do live video. When it comes to live video, you have to be authentic, and be cautious as to what you say and do. When you sign-up for one of these services, you are given your own branded web page, where you can use your phone or your webcam to film yourself or other people. While you are lifecasting, people can view this page and see you live, while having the ability to type messages to you. It’s your ability to get to know your audience more and visa versa.

The end result of your time spent lifecasting is a video recording that you can embed on your blog as a post. If you choose to do this, you should give a summary of how your session went!

3) Start your own mailing list

If you want to start a mailing list, then make it different than your blog. A lot of the best bloggers use mailing lists to give their most loyal subscribers additional tips and strategies for signing up. Typically, your readers or viewers that care enough about you and your material will signup for your mailing list to receive more content. Before starting a mailing list, you should think about how busy you are and if you’re able to spend time on such a project. Also, you’ll want to decide how many emails you want to send in a specific period of time and the value that list will receive.

Your mailing list and blog should market each other, which means you’ll want to add links to cross-promote both and any other products or services you want to sell. I recommend the following three email marketing services for your mailing list: iContact, Get Response and Contact Contact. For an example of how a newsletter is attached to a blog, please review Shoemoney’s blog.

4) Place advertisements

There are many different kinds of advertisements you can place on your blog to drive revenue (passive income). Before you start calling, emailing and Facebook’ing possible blog sponsors, you’ll want to create an advertising page on your blog, so people can see the sizes of the ads, what they’ll be receiving in terms of traffic/subscribers and the different options and packages you have.

To find advertisers, you should Google terms relating to your blog and click on company’s that are paying for AdWords. You can also find good sponsors by emailing people who comment on your blog and through natural (organic) search. Email them your pitch and then a link to your advertising page, so they can make a quick decision.

I’ve seen a few different kinds of advertisements on blogs:

  • Text links
  • 125/125 graphic (possibly animated)
  • 468×80 header banner
  • 180×180 single post banner
  • Product / website review posts
  • Sponsored blog posts

You should charge based on your monthly visitor stats, feed subscribers and overall blog credibility and reputation. If you want to see how much traffic you’re bringing in, I recommend Quantcast. Alex Shalman has a great advertising page on his blog if you want an example.

5) Setup an affiliate program

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. You only get paid for when you people click on advertisements on your site and pay for a company’s products or services.

There are many affiliate programs out there, such as Amazon Associates and Yahoo! Affiliate Programs. Don’t expect huge returns unless you already have a lot of inbound traffic to your website. The money you make from affiliate programs (possibly with other bloggers) will help fund your ongoing blog initiatives and upkeep. If you have deeper interest in affiliate marketing, then you should visit Zach Johnson’s blog.

6) Poll your readers

As a blogger, you should be interested in what your readers think of your blog, the types of posts you’re doing and any topics they would like to learn more about. Also, you may just want to poll them to gather quick feedback, to measure your success or out of curiosity. The best poll service for blogging is Polldaddy, which is actually integrated into WordPress.com now.

7) Build a team blog

A team blog is a blog that has multiple authors. The are a lot of benefits of having multiple contributors to your blog, such as having a variety of voices, more content and saving your time for other purposes, such as marketing the blog. If you’re an expert blogger, you should have a strong network of fellow bloggers to select for your team blog. Using WordPress, you give bloggers permission to write entires and then submit them for your review. You should give them the right to use their avatar, name and a link to their own blog.

I’ve seen team blogs with over 10 authors and they are highly successful. Blogs like Mashable, TechCrunch and The Huffington Post have a lot of bloggers, which allows them to become more of a business media site. You can do the same!

8 ) Use your blog at a platform

A blog can lead to bigger and better things. The most notable are speaking engagements and consulting gigs. By showcasing your interest in receiving those opportunities, you are more likely to garner them. So setup pages with those titles on your blog and if you’ve spoke or consulted in the past, use endorsements, video and a topic outline to show people what you’re made of.

You can also use your blog to sell more of your products, services and introduce people to other sites you own. Your blog will allow you to promote anything you want!

9) Write an eBook / book

After writing hundreds of blog posts, you will naturally want to tie your writings into a book of some sort. Some of you will try and get a literary agent and a publishing deal in order to get your ideas out there, while others will draft an eBook that captures many of your posts. You can sell the eBook and market it on your blog. If you’re interested in having a physical book, you’ll want to have more original content for that, but the eBook doesn’t have to always be original.

10) Start more blogs

When a single blog (or team blog) isn’t enough, you can always start multiple blogs. Obviously, it’s going to take up even more of your time, so think through your current situation before you make the jump. There aren’t too many bloggers who are willing to have yet another blog to build content for. The one’s that do, usually do it on a completely different topic to satisfy their other passion.

The Same Laws Apply For Personal Brands as Any Brand

January 1, 2009 at 11:00 pm | In Book Reviews, Interview, People, Personal Branding, eBrand, marketing | 5 Comments

Today, I spoke with John Gerzema, who is the Chief Insights Officer for Young & Rubicam Group and an author.  We discuss the three main challenges marketers face in today’s marketplace, what the brand bubble is and how to measure it, as well as his five-stage model for brand creativity and change.  John, then gives us his perspective on personal branding.

What challenges do marketers have these days? How are they different than years ago?

Marketing is facing a convergence of forces:

  • First the Fragmentation of everything — of channels, choice, modes and mediums means it’s no longer possible to build a brand on the back of mass media, the way we did in previous decades.
  • Second, because of Social media (collaboration, communication and sharing… social networks, applications and consumer generated media), consumers rely on each other more than brands.
  • And Personalization (products, experiences, mass customization and micro-addressability) means there are no USP’s anymore. A brand has a myriad of potential appeals to be personally relevant.

All of these new phenomena accelerate the decay in brand equity. Consumers are quicker to punish uninteresting brands. Marketing must adapt because brands have nowhere to hide.

What is the Y&R’s Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) and what key research have you found on brands?

BrandAsset Valuator is the world’s largest continuously updated study of brands. We’ve invested over $ 115 million dollars and each year we interview over 500,000 consumers in 44 countries. We’ve tracked consumer perceptions of over 40,000 brands since1993. In fact, we’ve opened up the database for anyone to research hundreds of brands in our study.

What is the brand bubble and why do you think it will burst soon? What can we do today to prepare for it?

“We believe another crisis is brewing on Wall Street: The financial markets think brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them.”

Main Street offers a different view of brands than Wall Street: While brand value increased 80% in three decades, brand awareness declined 20% — brand quality eroded by 24% — trust in brands declined by a staggering 50%. And 85% of brands were either stagnant or declining in brand differentiation.

The first thing we must acknowledge: This is not a brand problem; it’s a business problem.  When consumers fall out of love with brands, shareholder value is at risk. CEO’s are leveraging their brands to make promises of future earnings to shareholders. Today, brands are 30% of the market cap of S&P 500, or almost $ 4 trillion dollars. The 250 most valuable brands are worth $ 2.197 trillion dollars, which exceeds the GDP of France. Even the world’s top 10 most valuable brands are larger than the market capitalization of 70% of U.S. public companies. So we’re advising clients to completely re-think marketing from a cost of doing business, to a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

The 21st century CEO must be the ‘Brand Manager in Chief’. The best CEO’s think like CMO’s. And the best CMO’s must think like CEO’s. Together, they must bring marketing to the forefront of business strategy in order to access and integrate other functions of the business.

“Marketing isn’t a department, but a way of thinking across the company. Marketing is now everyone’s concern and a business imperative, as important as any strategic function in the enterprise.”

What is your five-stage model for brand creativity and change?

In the book we walk the reader through a five-stage model to drive the brand through their organization and to collaborate from the standpoint of what the consumer wants and what the brand needs. This process involves the entire enterprise recognizing that the brand imperatives are one and the same as the organizational imperatives. Every department and division, including outside vendors, suppliers, partners – everyone in the brand’s value chain – plays a role in fueling the energy of the brand, by contributing creativity and ideas that lead the brand forward. The company has to become what we call an Energy-driven Enterprise, and this especially means that the entire company has to become marketing-led, not just a company with a marketing department.

Most importantly, in developing the process to ignite energy into their brands, we identified what we call the Five Laws of Energy. These five laws now govern the new ConsumerLand, where consumers have new demands and unparalleled power. These five laws help enterprises re-examine how they approach and implement their creativity, their messaging, their flexibility and ability to evolve their brand, their approach to marketing, and their use of strategies and tactics.

Do you have any tips for people wanting to create personal brands? You can use some of the research you’ve already discovered to answer this question.

The same laws apply for personal brands as any brand — Have a unique point of difference (your differentiation) and continuously innovate around it (energy).  Today’s social media and fragmentation described above offer any individual extraordinary opportunity to brand themselves and gain a following quickly. The key as with any brand is to also have integrity and ‘walk your talk’. So the brand promise —the person’s content, delivery and dialogue are all critical factors to providing a brand experience that consumers believe is unique and enduring.

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John Gerzema is Chief Insights Officer for Young & Rubicam Group. He is the author of The Brand Bubble.  One of the early founders of account planning in American advertising, John has guided brand strategies to global business and creative acclaim. Previously, John ran Fallon’s international network and founded offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo. He holds a master’s degree in integrated marketing from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a B.S. in marketing from The Ohio State University.

Road to Me 2.0: My First Video Interview For the Book

December 30, 2008 at 4:20 pm | In Career Development, Interview, Me 2.0, People, Personal Branding, eBrand, marketing, social media | 4 Comments

Recently, I was interviewed by Rick Burnes of Hubspot about my upcoming book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success. As of today, my book is doing very well on pre-orders, ranking #26 on Amazon for job hunting bestsellers, #54 for web marketing and #70 e-commerce.  I want to thank everyone for helping promote the book so far and for your ongoing support throughout the past few years.  The coolest thing is that the book doesn’t even come out in stores until April 7th of 2009, which means there seems to be a big need for it already!

Part 1 of the interview:

Part 2 of the interview:

David Armano Reveals His Personal Branding Secrets

December 30, 2008 at 1:50 am | In Career Development, Interview, People, Personal Branding, Success Strategies, eBrand, marketing, social media | 1 Comment

Today, I spoke with David Armano, who is a well-known blogger and visual expert.  He’s best known for his marketing diagrams and speaks at a lot of industry events.  I spoke to David about how he’s grown his personal brand, what it takes to become known in a cluttered world and tips he has for bloggers who are just starting out.  One of the main themes in our talk was how he separates his personal brand from his employers brand and how he’s able to make both brands mutually benefit over time.  I’m in a similar situation to David, so it was helpful to see how he’s handled it.

David, in terms of the way you branded yourself online, do you feel you owe much of your success to your visual drawing? Was there some sort of viral effect with them that got you noticed?

The visuals absolutely had a great deal to do with the visibility I am fortunate enough to have. My first few blog posts were mostly about user experience and brands. There’s a lot of people talking about these topics. Then one day, I did a visual and I noticed that other blogs started using it on their sites and they would link back to me. And as I did more, I noticed the same pattern. Over time, I started building a reputation for doing this—and I enjoyed dong them. People saw value in the visuals—many use them in their presentations. One visual in particular that I created is called “influence ripples” and it pops up all over the place.

The visuals themselves have helped me to build my personal brand as they are often times immediately recognizable, but what’s more important is that I try to provide value with them. There’s a lot of change going on in the spaces between social media, marketing and even the user experience and what I try to do with my visuals is take something potentially complex and boil it down. Those who find value in this, use what I put out there and in return reward me with their attention and eventually trust. But like any brand it has to happen over time. I’ve done hundreds of visuals and posts over the past 3 years which I hope contribute something to the larger conversation.

How are you able to separate your personal brand from that of Critical Mass, your company? What parts intertwine and has your company benefited from your exposure/visibility/credibility?

On my blog it’s fairly separate as is my personal Twitter account. I make it clear when writing on my blog that it’s my personal opinions. But there is a good deal of intertwining. When I write for Ad Age, it’s predominantly for Critical Mass, but obviously I bring my personality to it. That’s one way the agency benefits from it. I also have relationships with journalists at BusinessWeek and Adweek that were originally initiated from blogging. I see the relationship as mutually beneficial. Whenever I speak at an event, I represent Critical Mass (the name of the agency is on my slides) though I often times get invited to speak because of my personal profile. But in reality, it’s co-branding.

People know me from before I worked with my current employer and that’s just a reality. I get a good deal of leeway in my job and really enjoy the people I work with, so the bottom line is that I try to treat the “co-branding” very respectfully and not take it for granted. If you are going to be in a position like mine, you have to always be looking for opportunities to have your company benefit from your profile. If they are comfortable with it, it can be beneficial to both parties.

What are your top 3 tips for bloggers who want to market their content to the right people?

  • A. Focus on the content
  • B. Play to your strengths
  • C. Get out there in person

First thing for bloggers to realize is that their content has to be solid. They can find an undeserved niche or chime in with the masses, but there has to be something there that gets people coming back. The best marketing for a blogger is the blog itself and what others say about it vs. what they do. People will recommend good bloggers, it’s that simple.

Secondly you have to play to your strengths. Some bloggers are amazingly extroverted and social, they respond to every comment they get and engage people all day long. Others are organized and create useful lists. Still others are great on video. Find out what your strengths are and develop those vs. trying to be like others. And lastly making connections—meeting people in real life is incredibly important.

“Just like with all networking, once you’ve met someone in person it makes a more lasting impression and goes a long way.”

You use “//” and Brogan uses “[ ]” as part of your brand. Why?

I’ve been doing that since long before blogging. Partially it represents the // in Http:// which I think pays homage to my passion for the interactive medium. But also, I just think it looks cool. :-)

What are some personal branding lessons you’ve learned over your career?

Great question. When I first started blogging, I did not feature my photo on my blog, or even on Twitter at first. I wanted to rely on the visual manifestation of my brand (logo, visuals etc.). I was wrong on this. I’ve since changed both and understand the power of a “face”. For a personal brand to be truly effective, people have to feel like there is a “person” behind it. A simple photo helps move you in this direction and it was something I learned on the fly. I’ve also learned that a personal brand can begin by accident, but it takes some work and strategy to have something that really represents something you feel comfortable with. It’s different for everyone and at some point you have to ask yourself “what do I want to be known for”?

So I make fairly calculated efforts in what I talk about and how I talk about them. While I often times talk about social media, user experience and marketing—I also try to communicate visually as much as I can, because my true passion is in the communication. I really enjoy solving problems visually. So I am learning that in order for this to be my “personal brand” I need to be careful not to over indulge on all of the “Web 2.0” talk.

“Lastly I’ve learned that having a personal brand that is sufficiently visible requires working in an environment where your employer not only comfortable with it but want to tap it somehow. This is the best case scenario and can work for everyone if both parties reciprocate.”

———
David Armano has over 14 years experience in the communications industry with the majority of his time spent in digital marketing and experience design. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 25 of the “Power 150” as listed by Advertising Age. David’s writing and visual thinking has been cited by respected sources such as by Forrester, Crain’s and landed him in BusinessWeek on several occasions including their “Best of 2006”. David leads an interdisciplinary group of designers, writers and content strategists for the Chicago office of Critical Mass, a marketing agency focused on creating extraordinary experiences.

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