How To Build A Brand As A Blogger (10 Tips)

Who are you? What makes you stand out?

Such questions can challenge bloggers to define their identity. But with a well-established brand, answers become self-evident. Crafting a unique brand for your blog may be a journey, but it’s invaluable. A robust brand elevates your authority within your domain, potentially making your brand synonymous with the niche itself. Wondering how to carve out a distinctive brand as a blogger? While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, I can share proven strategies that could guide you toward becoming a blogging sensation.

How To Build A Brand As A Blogger:

1. Niche Down

As a beginner at blogging, you want to explore a variety of topics. That’s normal and beautiful. But once the time comes to create your brand, you’ll need to niche down. That’s true for one simple reason – your blog needs to be memorable to become a brand. Think about it from the perspective of your audience. If a person wants to read a bit about marketing, they’ll think of marketing brands they know of – and likely end up on Neil Patel’s or Hubspot’s blog.

People love brands that are focused on addressing a particular problem or topic.

If you write about music, programming, baby stuff, and industrial carpet cleaners on your page, your versatile posts may attract visitors, but it’s unlikely they will return to see what else you have to say about the topic. To build a brand, your audience needs to know what they can expect from your page, and they’ll continuously return for more. However, choosing your niche is easier said than done. If you’re in the business for the money, I recommend going through my list of the most profitable writing niches. If profit isn’t your primary concern – focus on that thing that makes you feel excited and all warm inside!

2. Get to Know Your Target Audience

Now that you have your niche, you can focus on figuring out your audience and what they want. Always focus on providing value through your blog – but remember that one’s man’s trash is another man’s treasure – so it’s important to figure out who you’re writing for. There’s an interesting and helpful exercise that makes you explore the details about a fictional reader of your blog. It’s called creating a blog reader avatar, and your job is to figure out what kind of person would enjoy your blog the most.

You’re supposed to answer a set of questions and make a ‘profile’ of a typical visitor to your blog:

• How old are they?
• What’s their gender?
• Where do they live? In a house or an apartment? In a city or the countryside? In the US or somewhere in Asia?
• What do they do for money? What’s their economic situation?
• Are they married, in a relationship, or single? Do they have any children? Who do they live with? What about pets?
• What are their hobbies and interests?
• Where do they spend their time online? Do they use a phone, a tablet, or a PC to browse?
• What problem can this person solve by visiting your blog?

This may seem like a lot of guesswork, but it’s very valuable. Creating a fictional reader for your blog will help you make many decisions on your path to branding. Write for that person. It’ll help you pinpoint the best tone of voice, and choose your format and style, but also give you a hint to choosing the perfect marketing channels and creating a call to action that resonates with your readers.

3. Find Your Voice

There are about 70 million new posts each month on WordPress alone. That’s A LOT of content published every single day. Of course, standing out from this sea of content is hard but extremely important if you want to brand your writing. The style you use when you write can make or break your blog. Decide how you want your audience to perceive you, dive into the details, and make a definitive style guide for your blog. Then stick to it! To make this step easier, start with finding a few adjectives that describe the way you want your blog to be. Authoritative, kind, helpful, sassy, sarcastic, honest, bold, friendly, intellectual, witty? What works best with your niche and your style?

4. Be Consistent

Consistency is one of the most important factors in a blog or social media popularity. It influences the ways both your audience and the algorithm perceive you. Once you start posting, continue posting. Set yourself a posting schedule and stick to it. Once your followers know that you make a new post, say, every Thursday, they’ll be there waiting – don’t let them down. If you use multiple channels (for example, email or social networks), you can repurpose your content by adapting your blog posts to fit the structure.

5. Don’t Forget Your SEO

It’s hard to brand your blog as it is, let alone if you only get a few visitors a month – so don’t forget to make your content more ‘findable’. People are Googling whatever they’re interested in, and your best bet at grabbing their attention is showing up in the results. In fact, the higher the better, since 75% of people never click on the second page of Google results. Short for Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a priceless toolset for anybody who wants to be noticed online SEO is a priceless toolset for anybody who wants to be noticed online. The way you present your blog and tailor your content determines which page of Google search your business appears on. So do your keyword research, limit your word count per sentence and heading, and make sure your site loads correctly (and quickly) on both PC and mobile.

6. Find Your Colors

We’re visual creatures, and remembering simple shapes and color schemes happens faster than anything else. Colors are quite powerful since people associate them with emotions. Colors can also help people recall a brand quickly, even if they never remembered the brand name. I’d recognize the Coca-Cola red and the Heineken green any time. Pair a good color scheme with a nice, readable font, and a shape dynamic that reflects your tone of voice. So go get yourself a professional designer to make your blog more memorable and impactful.

7. Create Valuable Content

It’s indeed possible to build a brand around a useless idea – but why waste time and effort? Providing value that people want to pay for is the core of every successful business. It doesn’t matter if you provide a physical product, knowledge like actionable advice and informed recommendations, or you simply entertain your audience with a good story. What matters is that your reader feels they got something valuable from your blog – if they do, you know they’ll come back.

8. Persevere

Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither will your brand. It takes an average of 12 to 18 months for your branding efforts to show the first results. That’s a lot of time, I know, but it’s worth it. There will be moments when you feel everything you did was in vain. Watching the seasons change and not reaping the results of your hard work can be downright frustrating. In those hard times, remind yourself to stay patient and persistent. Just focus on the next small task you can complete, and step by step, results will show.

9. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome

It’s almost impossible to find a big brand that hasn’t changed or tweaked its original idea from the beginning of its journey. It simply doesn’t work that way – to make a great brand, you need to adapt to many factors, including market trends and technological limitations. Using your analytics the right way can be the key to building a great brand. It’ll let you make informed decisions through your blogging adventure. Through analytics, you can see what works and what doesn’t, what attracts visitors and what they don’t care about, and you can draw many other conclusions that will help you build a brand that your audience needs.

10. Scale to Other Channels

Writing a blog is a lot of work – trust me, I know. Growing pains can be terrible. But once you’re done with building the infrastructure and you publish some content, it’s smooth sailing from there. When you realize your blog is not taking too much of your time anymore, you can think about growing and scaling your business to other channels as well. It doesn’t matter if you’d love to build your email list, make videos and podcasts, write a book, or simply create a successful social media presence. Using other channels in harmony with your blog will make your brand so much stronger, as you can reach a much wider audience. Next up, you may want to explore a guide on how to earn passive income from your blog.