10 Reasons To Use a Blog To Drive Your Personal Branding Campaign

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On the internet, content is king. And building a personal brand is all about creating and giving away lots of quality content in order to create an audience.

And that, of course, is the rub. When I talk to people who want to become recognized authorities in their fields, ie "micro celebrities," a good number of them HATE writing. The idea of writing a book, even though they may be incredibly knowledgeable about their topic, is just too daunting to consider.

Yet having written a book is the very best credential anyone can have in any field. The value of being titled "author" cannot be exaggerated.

But there are other types of content that can be just as valuable. Writing ebooks, producing videos, conducting seminars and training, writing articles for print magazines, or producing audio materials can all go a long way toward establishing a professional as an expert in his or her field.

So how does a very busy person, who may or may not like to write, create this kind of content?

My answer is blogging.

A blog should be the engine that drives any personal branding campaign.

And if done properly, writing a blog can be done with minimal effort, PLUS blogging can be done within even the busiest of work schedules (I'll prove this shortly).

Here are 10 reasons to use a blog as the engine to drive your own personal branding campaign:

1. With just a minimal time commitment, regularly writing a blog can help you organize your knowledge and material into a book or other project. In fact, you will find that blogging will almost write your book for you.
   
   
2. Blogging builds an audience and establishes you as an expert BEFORE your book is published. In the publishing industry, this is called having a “platform.” Readers can discover you through your blog and you can have a built-in list of people ready to buy your book (or other project) as soon as it comes out.
   
   
3. Readers may also post comments on your blog articles, which give you instant feedback and may also give you anecdotes or additional information you may wish to include in your book.
   
   
4. A surprising number of excellent blog posts contain very little original writing. Many bloggers find relevant material on the internet or print books and quote or link to them, adding their own comments to another author’s articles. Of course you want to always give proper credit to your sources and provide links to them as well.
   
   
5. You can monetize your blog and earn money while you are writing your book. You can place Adsense ads, link to books and other materials on Amazon.com, and earn affiliate commissions long before your book is published. If you have written other books, ebooks or your own digital materials, you can also link to these products and earn money selling them as well. Additionally if you conduct paid speaking engagements or offer consulting services, your blog can also create more revenue for this work.
   
   
6. You can find material to write about quickly and easily by setting up Google Alerts that will send relevant information directly to you by email. Google Alerts is a little like doing a one-time Google search on a topic and getting all new updates on that topic sent to you as soon as new content appears on the internet. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts for more information.
   
   
7. You can also find information to write about quickly and easily at social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, delicious.com, reddit.com, YouTube.com, Fark.com, and stumbleupon.com. These sites are bookmarking tools used by thousands (maybe millions) of other people to bookmark websites and news items related to whatever topic they choose. Searching a social bookmarking site rather than a search engine allows you to know that the sites you find were ranked by people as being relevant to a certain topic. Whereas the search engines simply rely on algorithms to categorize various sites.
   
   
8. If you don’t feel like writing, you might simply post a YouTube video related to your blog’s topic. While a video cannot be incorporated into your book, it still may attract new readers or get your blog noticed by search engines. You may also simply post an audio recording on your blog as a podcast. Podcasting is easier than writing and still attracts visitors to your site.
   
   
9. Your blog gives you something to talk about on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networking tools. Many people misuse social networking sites as mere platforms to be carnival barkers shouting about their wares. The better social networkers use them to point to valuable content that solves problems and addresses the needs of their market. If the theme of your blog is offering solutions to certain problems, you can mention each new article, and even refer back to your old articles, every time you Tweat on Twitter or post on LinkedIn or Facebook.
   
   
10. Finally, and to my mind one of the most innovative way to use your blog, you can use it as a means to network with others in your field. You can contact experts and ask if you can interview them. Then you can post either a written transcript or a podcast of the interview (or both). In the process you have made a valuable contact, given that person free publicity and, if that person is also blogger, you may attract some of that person’s readers to your own blog.

Have I challenged you to get busy writing a blog? If your goal is to establish a personal brand, then a blog is the core of your online marketing efforts. No other online marketing tool even comes close to the effectiveness of a blog.

And as you’ve seen, writing a blog does not need to be a major time commitment to be effective.

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COPYRIGHT © 2009, Charles Brown
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