Comments on: Are You Branding Yourself?

By: Trisha

Trisha — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:32:17 +0000

Hi Danny – thanks for stopping by! That’s a good question – my impression was that her mom was not going to do it, but I’ll be sure to follow up with to find out!

I do agree that if you’re in business for yourself, whatever you do, you should be thinking about managing your brand all the time.
.-= Trisha´s last blog post: The Write Time =-.

By: Danny

Danny — Sat, 22 May 2010 02:57:16 +0000

I wonder if that little girl ever did buy that domain name? I think branding yourself is important even if you just sell products. You can still sell products while branding yourself as an affiliate marketer (ie John Chow)
.-= Danny´s last blog post: Indian Shores Vacation Rental 106 =-.

By: Maria Staal

Maria Staal — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:58:36 +0000

Very interesting blog post, Trisha. I think I am lucky that I have just started blogging and have made sure that my blog name, facebook fan page, and twitter name are the same one. I also have a personal FB page, but I keep that one strickly for friends.
What I need to do now is making sure that what my goal is, becomes more clear on my homepage.
.-= Maria Staal´s last blog post: The Mysterious little Book I found at the Library =-.

By: Trisha Miller

Trisha Miller — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:30:43 +0000

Hi Deb & Dave – yep, that is a challenge, since you can’t just “change” your YouTube name….

Ultimately it will be worth the time and effort to consolidate to a consistent identity – you just have to keep plugging away.

For example, I didn’t know that you had a Facebook Fan Page – it might help if you regularly suggest it to your Friends – the ones who have already “Liked” it (what used to be called “become a Fan”) will be greyed out – those that aren’t you should select and they’ll get an invitation via email. I also send a message to everyone who sends me a Friend request asking that they also check out my Fan Page….

Your YouTube strategy will be tougher, because even though you can upload all the same videos to a new account, your counter on views will start over. But you can modify the existing videos to point people to the new one, so that anyone who goes to the old account will be directed to your new one – something like “hey we’ve moved – come watch this and many more videos on our new YouTube account”.

Good luck! And I’ll go Like your Fan Page now…

By: Dave and Deb

Dave and Deb — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:02:21 +0000

Excellent article. Branding is so important.
It is interesting that you talk about diluting the brand. I had a facebook and youtube acount before our blog and we are having that same worry now. We have built up friends and followers on both facebook and youtube under different names and have not been sure on how to change the brand. On Youtube we have videos that have 30,000+ views, but they are under the name wegobyebye. On facebook we both have our personal accounts where we have connected with friends and those accounts actually generate quite a few views on our blog.
We are trying to move people over to our facebook fanpage and group, but it hasn’t worked. Our personal account seems to be our biggest connection.
Since we are ourselves on our blog, can we keep our personal facebook pages going as long as we keep it professional on the site? Just wondering.
Thanks for giving me so much information to think about.
.-= Dave and Deb´s last blog post: Wildlife of the World; A Photo Story =-.

By: Trisha Miller

Trisha Miller — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:00:18 +0000

Thanks Akila – glad you liked it!

I don’t think advertising will dilute a brand, but I do recommend that you put thought into choosing advertisers that would be relevant to your readers.

What can dilute a brand is an inconsistent identity when you’re promoting yourself – for example, let’s say a blogger has the (hypothetical) blog called “Travelingwithmydog.com”, tweets under the name “DogTravels”, has a Facebook page under his personal name John Doe, is on MySpace as John&Dog……well who could possibly connect all those and recognize a brand from it?

So once one has settled on a brand, that should be consistently used whenever one wants to communicate or promote the brand.

By: Akila

Akila — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:39:40 +0000

Great post Trisha. Branding is something we have been thinking about a lot because I think we have created a brand through our website and we worry about whether we will dilute or muddy that brand by adding advertisements — and what sorts of advertisements will be problematic. Right now, we carry more about the byline — that when people come to our site, we are producing rich, beautiful content rather than the paycheck.

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Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:18:56 +0000

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