The Marketing Factor for Blog Branding
Posted on November 3, 2007 - Filed Under Branding
Since its the weekend, and I would like to maintain some sort of life outside of sitting in front of my computer, this will be a light post but do keep tuning in as I have some great topics planned for the week ahead. Today’s post is about marketing your brand, I have attached a picture of Bruce Lee who is a great representative of an Asian brand with international reach.
Ivy Online was started almost two months back, and it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I decided to start marketing my blog which forced me to be more focused in my content. Being a person of varied interests, it was a hard thing to do as my blog previously served to inform friends of all the wonderful and interesting things I found on the World Wide Web. Having varied content for your site is great for attracting a higher hit rate (more keywords for search engines), but consistent traffic takes a much longer time to build and you will struggle with convincing readers to subscribe to your blog. It has the same concept as magazine subscriptions - a playboy reader won’t be too thrilled to find articles about parenting, or gardening. This metaphor may seem a little overdone, but it highlights the point that marketing is all about positioning.
You need to constantly enforce your positioning by posting relevant articles and removing elements that weaken it. Define the arena of content that is relevant to the theme of your blog, and stay within it. This requires discipline and conscious effort. There are still days that I badly want to blog about all the many interesting things I encounter and ideas that pop into my head that have completely nothing to do with providing marketing tips for building a successful blog. So I put them aside, and list them down for someday when I am ready to start another blog. Manage your blogroll to link to related sites that are additional resources for your readers, and change your site design if needed to reflect the theme of your blog. Moderate your comments to maintain threads that are relevant to the key ideas you want to promote on your blog.
A good positioning and reinforcement of that positioning will lead you to the desired state of forming your own brand. That is when you become an authority in the field that your blog is targetting. Remember that the formula for brand success is awareness, recognition, recall and response.
When your blog is new, you need to tell your target audience by establishing relationships with influencers in social networks, getting authority blogs to link to you, planning your strategy for online advertising, and working on your SEO stats. If you want readers to recognise you, there must be something about you that impacts them, that is unique and of value to them. Be it a great web design, a clever tagline (think Nike), a distinct personality (YOU), or content that is controversial or sparse in your niche. Once they recognise your brand, it is easier for them to recall you when certain key words or phrases come to mind. It takes hard work to reach this position so you need to be careful that you are consistently sending out the right key messages in various ways.
For example, if your blog is about making money online, always shout out how making money online is a very viable opportunity. Look at John Chow’s blog. His blog title is “I make money online by telling people how much money I make online”. It is full of advertising and referral ads, he has a free ebook to teach people on his favourite topic. He reports his substantial financial income earned from his blog every month to readers. This is a great marketing strategy because by selling people that they can make money online, he is actually reinforcing his own branding as an Internet Mogul who has had great success at making money online. So now, if anyone mentions the phrase “making money online”, immediately John Chow comes to mind (recall), along with a few other Internet moguls out there. That is a powerful position to be in, and usually requires a response from readers.
Not convinced? To share a personal story with you - I used to run a blog simply because I loved to write and the fact that I could get my friends discussing what they read on my blog. For some reason, I get a kick out of eliciting a reaction from my friends from what I write. So I had a lot of offbeat news, posts on uploaded on all the funny junk mail I received, ramblings about my day and office, etc. No marketing was done - while I went to Digg for my news stories, I failed to join the community and use it to my advantage, and I did not engage authority bloggers on the content of my site or ask for a back link.
80% of traffic for my old blog was from indirect traffic, 13% from referring sites, and 7% from direct source. It had a bounce rate of over 90% and exit rate of 73%. While you may say, “Great! That means you are attracting more new readers to your site!”, it also means that 80% of my readers are not coming back. This is bad news for blogs that want to earn money online as advertising rates are based on RSS feed counts (i.e. subscribers) and not number of page views. And loyal readers are more likely to click on the ads displayed on your site as you have built a trust relationship with you (brand is based on trust that you will deliver on your promise). I have since held the funeral procession for my old blog and bid it dead and buried.
My stats for this site, though I only started focusing my posts and marketing it since two weeks back, has 1000% more page views than my old site, of which 60% are from direct sources, 31% from referring sites, and 9% from indirect traffic. While I need to put more work into SEO, the number of feed subscriptions are on the rise as I am getting more people from referring sites, and they are coming back for more. So want more traffic to your site? Start marketing!
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[…] brand that you have to protect. It doesn’t matter if your blog is 3 months old or 1 week old. Branding requires consistent quality and reinforcement of particular traits associated with your […]
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