To be a better blogger, your uniqueness and originality must be strongly evident in your blog. The outer effect of this is what we call personal branding or “brand you.” Many people, if they think of branding at all, tend to think of it as some kind of treatment after the “real” work has been done to make something look nice. I like to call it: “Just stick a logo on it” syndrome.

But branding is not just sticking a logo on something or just painting it in the company colors. Branding comes from within. We throw the word “brand” around pretty causally, anymore, but remember what it actually means: to burn a permanent mark into a surface. What is your mark, and are you burning it into the minds of your readers?

You can strengthen your personal blogging brand. You can identify certain aspects of your personality and emphasize them in your blog design and content production, thereby building your personal blogging brand. In the following three steps, we’re going to do just that. To really get the most out of this, you will need to do a little bit of thinking and writing. I will provide you with my answers for when I did these exercises myself (I walk the talk, y’know?).

Step 1: Identify What You Like

Do you know what you like? How do you know?

Write down a list of about five topics or subjects you like. Then, examine your blog’s topics and posts: do they reflect the topics you wrote down? If not, there’s a mismatch between who you are and what you’re blogging about. If you’re just starting a blog, compare the list of topics you really like to a list of what you’re considering for a blog niche.

You want the things you like to be the things you blog about because your personal passion is going to shine through the writing in a more natural way. It’s that naturalness that, if cultivated, helps to differentiate your blog’s brand from other blogs in your niche.

Here’s my list of the five things I like:

1. Meta-blogging (blogging about blogging)
2. Entrepreneurship
3. Web design
4. Mashup/remix culture
5. Electronic music

In one blog or another, I’m covering all five of these items, resulting in a good match between my personal likes and my blog topics. Not too long ago, these things were misaligned in my life and my blog suffered for it. Now that they’re back in alignment, I have rising traffic, good comments on my posts, and new friends in a short time. My personal blog brand is getting stronger because my blogs are in alignment with my own very personal likes. I am not doing something just for the money or because it’s the next cool thing.

Step 2: Identify What You’re Good At

This isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. For example, you might enjoy reading blogs about making money online, but if you’ve never made anything online but a few dollars, you’re not good at it (yet!), and unless you’re just blogging the process, you probably shouldn’t be blogging about it at all. You will not be presenting a powerful and unique personal brand if you are not knowledgeable about your topic. Enthusiasm is not expertise. People who have strong personal blog brands are experts in their subject.

Write down a list of your five greatest skills. On that list, what is the single strongest item? The second? Are either of those two items the skill that enables you to accomplish your blog’s mission? If not, there’s a mismatch that needs to be addressed.

Here’s my five greatest skills:

1. Explaining complex subjects in a way anyone can understand
2. Strong knowledge of WordPress
3. Understanding of how the internet is transforming all areas of life
4. Understanding of more traditional and newer marketing and advertising
5. Strong web design skills (XHTML, CSS, SEO, Photoshop, Illustrator, rapid prototyping, project management)

I’d say I’m good to go on these, as well. Between blogging here and my day job as a computer trainer, I get a lot of practice with point number one.

Step 3: Identify How You’re Unique

What sets you apart from others? Is it the way you tackle problems? Your natural ability to do something others find impossible? Your history of success and experience? The way you communicate? You have to isolate what it is about you that’s unique, name it, and then capitalize on it. This is vital, because this is the one quality about you that nobody else can copy or beat you at.

Write down a list of five things about yourself that are so unique, it’s highly unlikely that anyone else could encroach on your territory. Here’s my list:

1. I believe the means justify the end
2. I have a unique combination of breadth, depth, and experience that doesn’t match anyone else’s
3. I don’t just look at what’s happening in the present, I think a lot about the future
4. I’m comfortable living simultaneously in the seemingly separate worlds of business, internet culture, marketing, and writing
5. I see everything as entrepreneurial, and at the same time, I see everything as art–life as a work of art in progress

Write it Down: The Value Making the Implicit Explicit

It’s really important that you write these down, because that’s the best way to make them concrete and to remove any vagueness from your thinking. Do not just think about it, write it down. You want to make the implicit explicit, so that when somebody asks you, “What are you good at?” you have an immediate, strong, clear answer: “I’m great at explaining internet-related subjects in a way that anyone can understand” (see, that would be me). Writing these down makes them more real. Writing things down makes you think about it in an inescapably concrete fashion.

If you write them down and they don’t ring true, that’s a signal you haven’t really thought them through or that you don’t know yourself as well as you thought you did. To build a magnetic personal brand, you must know yourself and you must be able to quickly and clearly explain yourself to others. Keep rewording and rewriting your points until they feel true and natural to you. Could you read them out loud to another person without feeling silly or embarrassed? If not, continue to rework them until you have supreme confidence in their self-evident truthfulness.

What Are Your Results?

I’d like to encourage you to do this exercise for yourself and then leave a comment or, better yet, write your own post about it and link back to this post. In a couple weeks, I’ll take a look at the trackbacks, select what I feel are the best ones, and write a new post in which I will link to your blog and highlight your personal branding points. In order to make sure you don’t miss it, I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed.

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