Your Brand ‘R You In Your Blog

“Branding” – we hear a lot of this popular marketing term, don’t we?  Business owners put a whole lot of their time and money into creating a brand name, complete with a logo and other graphics, sometimes adding a motto or slogan.  As a professional ghost blogger, I’m considered part of a company’s marketing team, and so I’m always looking for ways to help reinforce each business client’s brand.

The other day, though, in Speaker magazine, I read an article about branding that put things into a whole new perspective.  The writer was telling professional speakers that a brand is really much more than a name and graphics.  The brand, she was saying, is the business owner (the professional speaker, in this case).  A brand, she added, is not something you create; it’s something you discover! You live your brand by discovering your core values and skills, was the main idea of the article.

The thought occurred to me that, if building a brand for a speaker is done through the process of thinking through the message in each speech, the same process is true for a business owner who’s blogging.  It’s the old idea of not really knowing a subject well until you’ve gone through the process of teaching it to someone else. In Use Blogs To Capture Concepts, I explained how I work with business owners to arrive at the right tone and the right emphasis for the blogs I’m going to ghostwrite.  I start by challenging the owner of the business or professional practice with the following question: “If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what you sell, what you know, and what you do, what would those words be?”

In other words, whether the business owner him or herself is doing the writing, or whether they’re collaborating with a professional ghost blogger partner like me, the very process of deciding what to put in the blog is one of self-discovery.  A business blog, then, doesn’t just keep repeating and emphasizing a brand; the creating of each blog post is part of the process of inventing and reinventing the business brand.  The Speaker Magazine article was “spot on” – your brand ‘R You in your blog.