Key Strategies for Using Blogging to Build Personal Brand
Are you trying to build a personal brand? Of course you are. We all are. One of the crucial aspects of having an aspiring startup company or successful business is achieving elusive and ever so coveted online reputation. This is especially useful today when almost anyone can go online to look you up and almost all there is to know about you is only a few clicks away. This is why building a personal brand has never been more vital for the success of a modern entrepreneur.
One of the best ways of achieving just that is through blogging. Having an acknowledged and popular blog helps you display the best aspects of your brand, company or business, and it can help you build trust among your audience and make sure you build a great reputation online. It doesn’t matter what line of work you are in, personal branding is what separates the men from the boys as far as online entrepreneurship is concerned.
Even if you are (for some reason) not looking to build your own personal brand, people are still going to judge you by your content and base their opinion about you based on what you post online. This is why you better do something about your online image anyway and make sure you beat them to the punch.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can use blogging to create a successful brand for yourself.
Content, Content, Content
Ok, first things first. In order to have a fruitful blog that you can use as one of your online marketing strategies, you need a killer content. Your blog content should be able to do all of the following things at the same time:
- Be relevant to your niche
- Engage your audience
- Add value to your existing customers
- Attract new customers
- Showcase your skills at their best
However, in order to come up with blog content that covers all 5 of these bullet-points, you need to determine exactly who are the people reading your blog, and who are those potential readers that you want to attract. Which brings us to:
Defining Your Target Audience
Creating relevant content and defining your target audience go hand in hand. In order to begin building your personal brand through blogging, you need to figure out whether you are looking to reach new customers, gain insight into your current customer base, launch a new product or service, or simply all of the above. Once you have a clear picture of what your overall goals are, you are ready to start connecting the dots.
Engaging Content + Defined Target Audience = Starting Point for Building Personal Brand
One cannot go without the other, otherwise, you will only end up shooting in the dark. Susan Chritton said it best in her book Personal Branding For Dummies:
One of the biggest mistakes that budding personal branders make is trying to appeal to everyone. Think about the game of darts: You have to aim in order to hit the board. (If you let your darts go without aiming them, you probably won’t be very popular.) If you hit the board, you score. And if your aim is very good and you hit the bull’s eye, even better!
Once you figure out what your bull’s eye is, it is time to think about the design.
Visual Appeal
Us humans, we are visual beings. Always have been, always will be. It’s just the way we are wired, and there’s no use denying it. Exploiting it, on the other hand, is something you will want to do. Creating a cool visual identity of your blog is definitely something that needs your undivided attention, and it is definitely not something to overlook. The way your webpage looks can be key in creating your personal brand. Making a good first impression can be crucial and people tend to go back to sites that are colorful and pretty, just as much as to pages that gave them quality content. Having both is certainly a sure bet.
Social Media Impact
Social media visibility is currently one of the most important digital marketing strategies out there. Having many people following you online can be vital when it comes to building your personal brand, especially if you are using a blog to do it. Everybody’s doing it. The whole planet is online and people spend most of their free time hanging out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other popular social platforms, and this is exactly why you need to find a way to get your blog post into their news feeds.
If you are using WordPress, there are numerous plugins that allow you to add social buttons and sharing widgets to your blog. Once your reader gets all that he or she wants from your blog post, they will want to share that with their friends. This is where pushing the right buttons comes in handy and your page better have them up and running. Boosting your social presence will definitely help you create a recognizable and trustworthy personal brand. Once you manage to build that, it is only smooth sailing from there on out, and nothing beats smooth sailing.
