3 Ways to Build a Brand For Your Personal Blog
What’s the difference between a personal blog and a business blog? It’s the branding. While a business blog will become an extension of the brand itself, a personal blog will have no such direction to follow, at least in the beginning.
However, what’s stopping you from taking an organized approach to building a long-lasting brand for your new personal blog? With below mentioned 3 simple techniques, you can give your new blog a head start when it comes to building a strong brand:
1) Choose a good name
The name of your blog will define what it stands for or what it is about. For instance, consider Shakira’s Space, a blog by London-bred wine blogger and entrepreneur behind Grappled; or Jeremy Jojola — Essays and Elements, a personal blog by journalist Jeremy Jojola. This a great way to brand your blog with your own name. In the long run, this strategy benefits in enhancing your personal brand.
On the other hand, you can style your name basis the purpose of the blog. For example, Hothouse, a blog by a team of artists has an abstract name and is actually a combination of two words. Another example is Polis — City + Citizens, a travelogue. You can choose to go this way if you wish to blog about something specific. In which case, the name of your blog could be contextual.
2) Give it an address
The web address of your blog is quite crucial for building a brand that stands out. Think of two brick-n-mortar stores — one at a premium location and the other in a not-so-popular area. Which one is likely to get more foot-falls? No points for guessing!
The same reasoning applies to your domain name too! Having a good (web) address is likely to get more hits. For instance, www.amymartin.space is more valuable than www.amymartin-space.com. The reason? The first one is shorter, memorable and sleek. It’s easy to brand and communicate too. Simply put, it looks premium! Let’s take a look at another example: gebski.tech. This tech blog is owned by Sebastian Gebski, hence the domain name makes for an excellent choice by the blogger.
When choosing a web address for your blog, think of a short name and club it with a meaningful domain extension that best defines your interest to make it a wholesome, premium looking name.
For example, .SPACE is a great choice for freelancers, artists, architects, etc. .TECH is suited for bloggers from the tech community. .PRESS goes well with all forms of writing (check www.thetropicalist.press).
If your blog is about humor, travel, entertainment, games, etc, a fantastic option would be to choose a .FUN domain name. The extension itself is short and widely understood! It’s a great was to build a brand for your fun blog right from the start.
Instead, if you are looking for a short web address and want to use a generic domain extension, consider .WEBSITE, .SITE or .ONLINE. These extensions will blend well with your blog’s name.
3) Build credibility
A blog by itself will not help unless the content that your put there is shared and read by your target audience. However, with so much noise on social media, it’s difficult to grab attention and gain new readers. What you can do, though, is use branded links when sharing your blog-posts online.
For example, when you share your blog-posts on various social media platforms, you tend to use URL shortners that make your post link look like this:
Such a link gives no idea to potential readers what this is about and where it is leading them to. As a result, they may not click on it at all.
However, you have a chance to brand these shortened links too with your blog’s brand name, something like this:
Such a branded link is easy to remember, is pronounceable and makes you seem professional. Most importantly, it builds trust since anyone can guess where this link is leading them to. Overtime, your readers will associate your branded links with your blog and know that it’s safe to click on them. In other words, you will be building a trusted brand name for yourself by sharing all your content through these links! Rebrandly is one such service that lets you create branded links through a simple process.
The quality of content that you post on your blog will greatly influence the success it sees. However, these 3 branding techniques will help you up your game in building a sustainable brand for your blog right from the start.
