Blogging Tips Book: Blog Branding and Identity

The following excerpt is from Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging by Lorelle on WordPress.

Your blog’s identity is represented online by how you blog, what you blog consistently about, and other visible elements. Blog branding is the development of your blog’s online identity into a brand, a consistent online identity.

Your blog’s visual identity or “brand” is represented in your blog’s:

• Header Art
• Web Page Graphics
• Gravatar or Avatar
• Favicon
• Link Button/Badge
• Graphic Badges

The image can be a logo, photograph, part of a photograph, graphic, cartoon, text, or any visual image that represents your blog’s identity and can suit all the different size and shape formats.

When your blog’s identity is you

If your blog’s visual identity is “you”, promoting yourself as an expert, using your blog as a resume, or a personal blog about yourself, “you” become the logo for your blog.

A portrait featured in the header, sidebar, gravatars and avatars, and even in your email reinforces the image that you represent your blog and your blog is you.

When you are your blog, everything you say publicly on the web becomes identified with you and your blog. You are creating a visible online persona and how you behave across the web reflects upon you and your blog. You becomes your blog’s representative.

Name recognition and your blog

You have to call your blog something, as does everyone else. Is your blog’s name yours or it is something different?

If you want your blog to be your resume and establish an online visible reputation, name your blog after yourself or your business? Anonymous bloggers can achieve fame, but named bloggers tend to do better.

If finding the right domain name is a challenge, reinforce the visibility of your name through the blog title, tagline, and in the byline of the blog post.

Your blog is your resume

Every word you write in your blog is an example to a potential customer or employer on your writing skills. The structure of your blog, the arrangement and presentation of the content tells a lot about your organizational abilities.

What you put on your blog says a lot about who you are, how you work, and what you are capable of. Is your blog your resume? If not, consider making it one.

You may be writing for your future boss

Human Resources and employers admit that they are using search engines to learn more about their future employees. What they find may influence their decision.

Whenever you post anything to the web – from your blog, in a comment, on a forum, via email, video, podcast, or otherwise – consider what a future employer will think if they read or see it. What will it say about you now? What will it say ten years from now?

Once you have released information to the web, it’s hard to delete. There is a growing industry in removing personal, private, and unwanted information from the web, but they are costly. Think before you publish. If you do not want your future boss to find it, then don’t publish it.

Separate your personal life from your blog

Whether or not you take on a different persona when you blog, separate your personal life from your blog. This is no different from not bringing your work home with you and not bringing home to work.

If you are blogging as a representative of a company or organization, you may find that you have no personal life on the web. When you speak, people may believe you are speaking on behalf of that company or organization. How will others know if it is you speaking or you, the representative?

When you comment on a blog, how will the reader really know if you are speaking for yourself, your business, or your company? If you put embarrassing pictures on Flickr, what happens when the world sees them and snickers.

Just like movie and television stars need a personal life away from the limelight, the blogosphere is now your stage. Keep your personal life separate from your blogging life to avoid confusion and a tarnished reputation.

This is an excerpt from Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging by Lorelle on WordPress. For more information on the book and ordering, see Blogging Tips.

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