Brand Your Blog From Day 1
This posting is in response to Darren Rowse's group writing project about what you'd do differently if you had to start your blog all over again. I have a list of things I'd do differently, and I'll list them later in this post, but first a short discussion of what I did correctly from the beginning, and that's brand my blog.
Branding Your Blog
In marketing terminology, a brand is something distinctive (usually a name, but it can also refer to colors, designs, etc.) that identifies a particular product, service, or business. Branding refers to the things you do to develop a brand. If you need to know more, the Wikipedia entry for brand has a good discussion about the subject.
Blogs can be branded just like any other product or service. A number of factors play a part in establishing your blog brand:
- site design (it's hard to be distinctive if you use a default theme, like Kubrick for WordPress 2.x)
- name and description (does they express what the blog's about?)
- URL (similar issues to the name, but less flexibility in what you can choose)
- topic selection (if the blog's about you, you better be quirky and interesting)
- writing style (literate or informal? conversational or descriptive? long or short?)
- uniqueness of content (reposting content from elsewhere does not make a branded blog, it makes an anthology or directory)
- readership (if only geeks read it, your blog will be geeky by association)
Brands don't happen overnight, but you need to start working on your brand from day one of your blog.
Now, everyone won't agree with some of the choices you make to establish your brand. I've had a few people say they dislike my choice of colors for this blog — but of course, I chose them deliberately to match those of my book. Same for the name of the blog — it's almost identical to the title of the book (which wasn't my original title, by the way, but one the publisher came up with). I've been very careful to tie things to the book and develop a brand around quality AdSense advice from day one. But there have been mistakes.
My Blogging Mistakes
Forget the name and colors. My biggest regrets with this blog are:
- Changing the domain name. That was a biggie, and it was unfortunate that I had to do it. Although I referred to the site as memwg.com in any URLs in the book, that was done mostly to keep the URL length as short as possible so that the URLs didn't get too mangled in the text of the printed book. At that time, memwg.com was just a redirect to MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com. What I didn't count on, though, was that Google would object to the domain name and stop serving AdSense ads to the site. Truly, I figured that since I had written a book that was very complimentary (and complementary) to AdSense that they'd be fine with it… but no, the ads stopped displaying and because of the nature of the blog I felt I had to have AdSense ads on it (even though this particular site doesn't earn a lot — my audience is less likely to click ads that regular folks) and so I bit the bullet and reversed the domain redirection so that MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com now redirected to memwg.com. Even though I was careful to do the redirections carefully — using 302 redirects — it still caused me grief, especially with
TechnocrappyTechnorati, which somehow manages to list both domains in its list of AdSense blogs. Oh, and I lost PageRank, too, though it's slowly building up again. - Not placing the blog at the root of the domain. Initially I thought the blog would be just one component of the site, which was intended to be a companion site for my book. But the blog's taken over the site for all intents and purposes, and if I'd had the foresight I would have set it up as memwg.com and not memwg.com/blog/adsense.
- Not using WordPress. Because I'm a Java programmer, I had a natural attraction to the blojsom blogging platform. But in the end it's cost me time and effort because I can't just go and install all those wonderful WordPress plugins that everyone's developing for their blogs. Plus the number of hosting services that support Java is much, much more limited than those that support PHP, which is what WordPress is written in. And for some reason, Technorati has a lot of troubles figuring out when my blog changes and it often gets confused and things individual posts within my blog are new blogs… don't know why, but it's annoying, and I don't see WordPress users having that problem.
Other things are more minor. One is not developing a mailing list from day one, instead I waited a good six months before putting together my newsletter and offering the ability to read this blog by mail (see instructions below). Another is spending too much of my time with this particular blog, to the detriment of my other money-generating projects. But you don't necessarily blog for money, so I think that's a common “regret”. Sometimes, though, I feel I should just take most of my postings and convert them into a PDF called “The Best of Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense” and sell them as an e-book for $97.
Any takers? 
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Drought-Order.com: New reader-built site
Haven't done this in a while, but today I'm pleased to announce another new site from a reader of Make Easy Money with Google. Drought-order.com is a resource for UK homeowners looking to find out more about drought orders. A drought order is the British term for what we North Americans would call a watering ban. It's a very simple site, but there's lots of useful information about saving water, how to keep your garden alive during a drought, and so on.
One thing that's interesting for me about this site is being exposed to new British terminology. Terms like hosepipe instead of garden hose, water butt for water tank, and so on.
The owner of the site had this to say about my book: “Thanks for writing such an informative book on the subject. It greatly helped in constructing my fledgling site.” I love to hear from happy readers. I'm no Joel Comm, but it's good to know that what I write is helping others succeed in their own online ventures.
One piece of advice for the site owner: you need to settle on which form of the domain you want to use as your website address. Is it “drought-order.com” or “www.drought-order.com”? They both provide the same content, but one should redirect the visitor to the other. You can follow the advice in The AdSense-ready WordPress Blog (Part 1) in the section Prefixed With “www” Or Not? to fix this, assuming of course that the site is using an Apache web server.
Beyond that, you might consider branching out and building a more generic site about water conservation that would appeal to North Americans. But one step at a time!
P.S.: Part 4 of my blog series is coming shortly. It just takes time to write those posts because they're full of screenshots.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
MEMWG helps with 50% AdSense CTR!
After my post yesterday reviewing HyperVRE, longtime reader Ed pointed me to some site generation software he's been using called SEO smArticle Composer. Now, before we go any further with this, go to the sales page and watch Video #2. Does any part of it look familiar? See those red boxes he's using to highlight the ads? Looks like the creator of SEO smArticle Composer found a good use for my Highlight Google AdSense ads Greasemonkey script! Kinda funny to be indirectly promoting someone's product like that.
I must admit, the sites generated by this software have the cleverest placement of AdSense link and ad units that I've seen in a while. There are links to some sample sites on the page that demonstrate what the software generates from articles or text you provide it. Go take a look for yourself and see if you can figure out what it's doing. Hint: look at where the link units are and then look closely at the text ads — they're not all what they may seem to be.
The sales page claims that these sites have a high clickthrough rate (CTR), some of them getting up to 50% CTR. That's very high, but I can see how it might happen… get a few pages into the site and you'll soon discover that the only way to get out is to hit the back button several times…. or click an ad. Clever indeed. It's like taking the single-page AdSense site to the next extreme.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.