During my early blogging career, I recall comparing my blog, brand, and business to world-renowned, billion-dollar empires in the online and offline world.
Sometimes I even figured on doing certain things based on the success of these iconic brands.
Perhaps you can imitate lesser aspects of a world-famous, established brand. Look to top brands for a bit of inspiration to give your blog and brand a tiny boost. But beware: basing your blogging brand as a solo blogger on some fundamental embodied by a billion-dollar brand or a business around for 20, 50, 100, or 200 years often leads to massive problems. Why? A 200-year-old business built up their name, business, and brand over centuries, in front of billions of human beings, in some cases. Perhaps you have 6 months or 1 year under your blogging belt. No way can you do all the things big brands do and get away with it.
Big businesses started small and evolved into something special over decades and a massive amount of work-hours, first via 1 person, then through a steadily growing workforce, went into the brand. But you are one person running your blog and brand solo. Until you decide to scale – or if you ever scale in the first place – you will be doing things quite differently than big businesses.
For example, a world famous business or iconic brand has massive exposure already. Does Apple need to have writers publish 1, 2 or 5 pieces of content daily to the company blog? Nope. Possessing perhaps the most loyal group of rabid fanatics in all things tech means no one needs to publish a high volume of content to spread the word. You however do not have millions of rabidly loyal, fanatic, mad customers begging you to release your next product. You better publish content like a machine to begin expanding brand awareness to critical levels in order to pop up on the radar screen of customers and clients.
Since you do not possess the budget, staff, or brand awareness to blitz a marketing campaign, simply be as generous as humanly possible in publishing content and building bonds with bloggers in your niche, focusing heavily on influential bloggers specifically.
Big brands appear to break certain rules. For example, Merriam-Webster ranks incredibly well for an online dictionary despite the hyphenated name; usually, a big no-no for a domain name as hyphenated names appear spammy or less than credible, compared to non-hyphenated names. But Merriam-Webster has been THE name in dictionaries for 189 years. If you took over a brand established for 189 years as THE standard for your niche, you can break many online and offline rules because billions of human beings have been familiar with your business, brand, and what you do over nearly 200 years.
But if you have 6-12 months or even 2 years under your belt, you do not have blog, business, and brand exposure in front of millions so unless you feel a terribly strong intuitive nudge to break some rule, stop comparing yourself to iconic brands, stick to the rules and build your blogging brand on rock-solid, sound fundamentals.
Nab a little bit of inspiration from iconic brands but trust your gut to know which rules to follow and which rules to break on your blogging journey.
Goodness knows I broke more than a few but also stuck to a hefty amount of sound fundamentals on my 10 year blogging journey to be the blogger I am today.
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