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 Technocrappy Technorati, 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?

Sponsored Link: Sign up for my free Profitable Niche Discovery course… it's up to 10 lessons so far, with no end in sight yet.

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.

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