Personal Branding For Bloggers: 10 Strategies That Actually Work

When it comes to personal branding, not all bloggers can confidently say they know what it entails. And this clearly shows that they’re neglecting a very important aspect of their career.

Personal branding helps to establish you as a thought leader in your niche. And once people start identifying with you as a go-to person in your niche or industry, you’d be on your way to a successful blogging career.

If you’re looking for personal branding strategies that actually work, these ten strategies are worth considering right now.

Be unique

Having a unique identity definitely plays a huge role in improving your online personal brand. Ask yourself: what impression do you want to immediately create when a reader visits your blog? What do you want your readers to remember you for?

To put this into perspective, I’ll cite three examples:

Neil Patel is a content marketing genius; Brian Dean is your no bullshit link building guru, and Jon Morrow is a smart blogger who knows his onions.

As a blogger, you should always develop your own unique ideas. Although, there’s no such thing as an original idea; it’s just remixed and rehashed versions of stories we’re all familiar with. However, you must realize that there’s always a fresh perspective to every story.

With this in mind, you must begin to approach every blog post from a fresh angle and stop repeating what others are saying. Always offer fresh insights and be creative about it.

Be passionate about your brand

Being passionate about your brand typically propels you to work hard and continually provide value.

Here’s how to infuse passion into your brand: spend time on building your brand strategies and be an advocate for it. Be proud of your achievements and brag about it. Use these achievements as social proof, and show people how you were able to reach your milestones.

Once your blog readers see how passionate you are about your blog, they often become as enthusiastic about it as you are. This way, you’ll not only expand your fan base but also create a relationship with those who believe in your mission.

Be your brand ambassador

Nobody can represent your company better than you. Come to think of this: you birthed your business idea, and you crafted your own mission and vision statements. This is what qualifies you as your own biggest fan.

With this kind of psyche, it becomes easy to build your blog around your personality and promote it vigorously. If you’re familiar with Neil Patel’s blog, you’d notice how he has used his own pictures in all of his call-to-action buttons and sales pages. You can do that with your own blog too.

Alternatively, you could take your brand ambassadorship offline. You could create a branded T-shirt that’s telling the world why bloggers are special people. You could also customize your shirts with your website name or logo. Just do anything that’s creative.

Emulate successful brands

Every successful blogger has a unique brand. Bloggers like Pat Flynn, Jeff Goins, Darren Rowse, Set Godin and a host of other successful bloggers all have unique brands that are worthy of emulation.

Notice how they differ in everything like their website design and writing style. If you’re just beginning or you’ve been blogging for some time and you want to scale up, emulating these renowned bloggers is the way to go.

However, this does not mean that you should mimic their identities. Rather you should follow their pieces of advice on what works, and find motivation through their success stories. Also, seeking guidance through their mentorship will be cool if you have the opportunity.

Have a definitive name and logo

Logos are intended to be the face of a company. They are graphical displays of a company’s unique identity. Because a logo is the face of a company, those which do not have a well-developed logo for their blogging are far less apt to have a continuous business.

Take a moment to think about your favourite products and services. The odds are that all of the companies have a logo.

But it goes beyond just slapping on an icon or clip art. Your logo should incorporate the essence of your content.

For example: if a business writes movie reviews, the logo should have some cinematic element to it so that it can be identified as a blog or a business which writes about movies.

Publish quality content

As a blogger, you have to realize that your content receives more visibility online and is more effective when it comes to personal branding. So there’s no compromising quality in every blog post that you publish.

Quality content also plays a key role in your content marketing struggles. And it’s very important to state that content isn’t limited to text alone. It includes videos, images, infographics, memes, podcasts and every other thing that can create value.

The most interesting part of personal branding for bloggers is that readers can easily recognize a blog’s content than the blogger who produces them. I’ve not met any of the bloggers I talked about in this blog post, but I can easily tell who wrote what.

Create an exceptional web design

Blogging itself plays a great role in improving your brand identity. But your web design is equally as important. It’s what people see before they read your blog content. Some studies show that design elements are exponentially more powerful than content.

Your website is the most visible face of your brand. Your website is an integral part of your brand identity and is crucial for your online marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing efforts to succeed.

Not only does website design impact positively on your brand identity, it also affects SEO, traffic and conversion rates, which also help your web presence.

Therefore to create an enviable personal brand online, you must make a good first impression with your website, infuse character into it, and make it customer-centric.

Leverage SEO

As much as you’d love to have a solid personal brand, you might not get your desired results if you fail to optimize your blog contents for search engines. This is because SEO is what really does the work of putting your content in front of the right people.

In other words, if you’re looking to improve your brand identity, and you’re not leveraging SEO, then you’re not doing anything.

Essentially, SEO in its entirety, are classified into on-page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. This includes using your targeted keywords in meta-descriptions, headers, your post’s first paragraph and alt images. In addition, you should have a good keyword density by using your keywords several times in your content.

Off-page SEO is a set of activities that you and others do away from your site to raise the ranking of a page in search engine results. Link building appears to be the most effective off-page SEO strategy according to Google’s latest algorithm. To do this, you’ll need to publish guest posts on blogs related to your niche, comment on other blogs and use include a backlink in your bio.

The combination of both off-page and on-page will ensure that you will get organic search traffic to your blog content on a consistent basis.

Create an online presence

Having a strong and purpose-driven presence on social media is one of the best ways to build a personal brand. And this can be achieved through social media.

Social media is a great tool for spreading the word about yourself and garnering a huge fan base. It should be incorporated into your overall content marketing plans since it has the ability to take you closer to your target audience.

If big brands like Dell, IBM, Starbucks and Zappos can use social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, to their advantage, why shouldn’t you? Make sure to add the social sharing icons on your blog.

Build a network

Networking with the right kind of people will get you the necessary connections that you need to strengthen your brand. Remember, your brand is the perception people have about you.

Building a network will not only promote this brand, it will also enhance your professional growth, and open new doors for new opportunities.

You must also make your readers loyal to your brand. All you need to do is establish real relationships with your readers through blog posts, email newsletters, and social media channels.

Furthermore, you must leverage guest blogging by doing blogg

er outreach and participating in groups and forums.

Conclusion

We can say that personal branding strategies for bloggers can be divided into two categories.

Passive branding strategies: being unique, being passionate about your brand, being your own brand ambassador, and emulating successful bloggers.

Active branding strategies: having a definitive name and logo, publishing quality content, creating an exceptional web design, leveraging SEO, creating an effective online presence, and building a network.

A combination of these two broad strategies will ultimately improve your brand image, and consequently, drive huge demand for whatever services you provide on your blog.

Share your thoughts

Which personal branding strategy are you currently using? What effect does a brand image have on your blogging career?