How To Trash Your Blog’s Brand In 5 Easy Steps
If you owned a brick and mortar store, would you report your sales stats to everyone that walked in the door? If you owned an electronics store, would you tell someone that wanted to buy a television that you knew nothing about televisions? Would you waste that customer’s afternoon by trying to talk to them about a bunch of unrelated jibber jabber? Would you close your store unexpectedly for weeks at a time?
These concepts are Business 101, and I think basic instincts cover this material for most people. What blows my mind is how people think that these principles don’t apply to online businesses.
Whether you like it or not, your blog is a business and a brand. From the first time a person lands on one of your posts or pages, they will start to make assumptions about your site, and also about you as a person (or group). Blogging purists will tell you that blogging is about freedom of expression. It’s your site, right? You can write anything and do anything, right? Unfortunately for many bloggers, freedom of speech should be called freedom of self-destruction.
The Cold, Hard Truth
The honest truth is that you can do anything you want on your blog, and long as you’re willing to accept the consequences. For many, this may include the cultivation of a trashed brand that no one respects. Good job, you created a place to speak your mind. Have fun talking to yourself.
Here are the hard facts. If you are trying to make money with a personal blog, you’re wasting your time. If you’re trying to make money with a hybrid personal/business blog, you’re wasting your time. The sooner you drop the personal, the sooner you can get to business and it’s the business that’s going to make you the money.
There’s nothing wrong with a personal blog. I like personal blogs and actually read a few. Show me one that makes big money and I’ll show you a thousand business blogs that make more. If you just like blogging and want to have a personal blog, I’m fine with that. You still actually have a brand to manage if you want to grow your audience.
How To Trash Your Blog’s Brand In 5 Easy Steps
1. Stray off topic. This is a hard one for most people to stomach because they want to say what they want to say. If I want to learn how to cook from a blog, I want a hard-core cooking blog that knows what they’re doing. I don’t want a blog that talks about cooking 50% of the time and talks about miscellaneous stuff the rest of the time. If you want people to take you seriously, you don’t have any choice – you have to stay on topic. Would you sell fruit loops in a video game store?
2. Let everyone know that you don’t have much experience. Does anyone know of even one person that made it to the elite level of their industry that didn’t believe in his/herself as an expert? Confessing that you don’t know anything about your topic will turn off almost all casual internet users.
3. Report meager stats and earnings. Vic created a great post about this on BloggerUnleashed – I would read it: Stop Publishing Your Stats. The only niche I would even consider publishing stats in is the ‘make money online – internet marketing‘ niche. Unless you are seriously producing amazing numbers in that niche I would keep your stats to yourself. If you have a site in any other industry, don’t publish your stats – it just makes you look unprofessional.
4. Forget about spelling and grammar. People are pretty forgiving when your mistakes are occasional. If spelling mistakes are common on your site, you’re definitely leaking brand power. People know that if you’re legit, you will write with proper grammar and spelling. If this isn’t your strong point, work on it and consider hiring an editor.
5. Post erratically. I’m not saying that you have to post every single day, in fact I only post about 4 times per week. If you let a few weeks go by without a post… people are going to start wondering what the heck is going on with you. Your blog will lose some of its professional feel. You will probably come back and apologize, making a bunch of excuses – this makes you look even more unprofessional. It also makes you look unsuccessful.
Take a look at how professional your blog is. Do you treat your prospects the same way you would if you were seeing them face-to-face? If you’re not, it’s time to rethink your business.
source: www.courtneytuttle.com
