First off, what is a brand? 

According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

Seth Godin in this article has his own definition, stating that brands are:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation]

Combining those two definitions, let us define a brand as something that differentiates a product from all others by virtue of what is expected of it, and the emotional power of that expectation.  Sounds good, right?

I guess the question to ask now is how it is relevant to blogging.

Let’s be honest for a moment.  We’re all blogging because we want to either be heard or to make money or to do both.  Whatever the case, we need an audience.  That would be our readers, or in marketing terms, our customers.

The current blog economy is extremely competitive.  Save for the blogging giants like John Chow and Shoemoney, we’re all desperately competing for customers to bump up traffic.  With enough marketing, we WILL get our share of visitors on our blogs.  But what can we do to make these customers stay (that is, be regular readers or repeat visitors)?  We BRAND ourselves, that’s what.

Customer Loyalty is the very foundation of successful blogging.  We create that loyalty by establishing a brand that customers can trust and identify among all the other brands out there.  You want your blog to be credible and reliable, but also to be YOU.  That’s because YOU ARE THE BRAND.  There is only so much content going around to blog about.  What makes your content different is in how you present it.

If you provide customers with content that is relevant and unique on a consistent basis, they will return.  You (and your blog) as a brand will have added value to whatever content it is you are blogging about.  The customers are returning not only for the content, but for YOUR content.

So the next time you post something, think about how it’s affecting your blog as a brand.  Lay the foundation for your brand as early as possible, and watch it grow.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under marketing, make money online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.