Personally branded blogs are now the most effective and probably also the most strategically sound tools for proper marketing and publicity of any commodity. When you want to market yourself or any professional service that you are passionately connected to, it’s very important that people know you; moreover, they must be able to co-associate you and the service you provide. That is exactly the endeavor that these blogs serve.
Firstly, when you have a blog which has an original style, be it the nature of content or style of presentation; you can be very much sure that you are getting a lot of attention, more site traffic and an accentuated awareness of your posts. So in this way you are actually in control of the marketing of the product or the image of the product through a direct interactive interface.
Secondly, having personally branded blogs serve the quintessential purpose of providing you with the status of a celebrity as it definitely appeals to the readers when they see their service provider’s versatility as a blogger. Apart from the aforementioned turnout of more site traffic, this “celeb” status lends you the added advantage of a more reliable source of publicity and awareness, because the reader is more inclined towards believing your claims as they have consciously chosen to listen to you. It molds the ‘trust’ factor.
Thirdly, you save a huge sum of money by maintaining personally branded blogs over the general convention of running a detailed website, where you pay for web-hosting, SEO, web-designers and content writers etc.
Coming to the fourth point, given that personally branded blogs have the option of guest blogging and opinion posts, it goes miles in establishing a very personal touch to the entire marketing of the brand, by giving the client and customer base a very informal platform of discussion as far as your services or products are concerned. You can also do better damage control for the brand by a direct interaction with them rather than the conventional formal publishing of public corrigendum. Guest blogging enables you to add testimonies of people (advisably credible and well-known public figures) thus giving your brand more authenticity.
The final and the most cutting edge advantage it serves you is that it helps you foster relationships with your clientele as it gives them a dynamic response system where they can openly complain and demand explanations for definite issues. Though there are customer care call centers and hospitality centers to serve these purposes, these blogs not only help you give a more prompt and transparent solution to their queries (thereby authenticating the value of the transparency and brand value upheaval); they also help small businesses to cut down the huge costs involved in the setup of call centers and customer care units.
If you still doubt the relevance of personally branded blogs, you may as well want to give it a second thought, given the fact that a person like Dan Schwabel earns a fortune simply by talking about and mentoring such initiatives, and also the fact that most celebrities find it better to maintain such blogs than spend millions per annum on PR personnel.
