Brand Your Blog and All Your Platforms
Updating your Blog Design, so that you can Create Your Personal Brand for your Blog, is something all bloggers should do, once they have settled into their blogging habit and blog routine. When you first start Blogging on Blogger, or a blog with WordPress hosting, there is so much to learn, and get done. Not only are you setting up a brand new platform for yourself to write on, your also having to choose headers, backgrounds, categories, arrange sidebars, all of which are brand new, to you at the time. Learning to operate a WordPress blog is enough work in itself. You don’t have to create your personal brand for your blog, all at once. You can bring in little design changes one at a time. Keep in mind that you want to create a brand that can be used across all your social media platforms as well. This will be the easiest way, for your brand to become quickly recognisable.
Update my blogs personal brand
Once you’ve been blogging six to twelve months, when everything is starting to become habit, that’s when it’s time to think about, Updating your Blog Design and create a personal brand for your blog.
It’s likely that by this time, your already sick and tired of your blogs design looks anyway! This is when I began to update my blog design. Around nine months into blogging, I got tired of my blogs theme and decided to switch to the theme you see now. This is Alyeska, a paid for theme from themeforest.com. I was able to make my own customisations, and it was the exact type of theme I was looking for.
So what type of things can you do, to make your blogs brand, a perfect fit for you? A Blog Design that is a mirror image of yourself, mixed with features of the blogs you marvel at.
I’m not suggesting copying other blogs, I’m suggesting incorporating different design features that you admire in other blogs, but adding them to your blog, using your own colors, sizes and styles. What kind of header, side bar, left, or right. Where are they placing their ads, do they have a slider for pictures. How is their footer set up?
What are your favorite design elements for your personal brand?
Creating your personal brand for your blog means incorporating all of your favorite blogging features, mixed with your favorite symbols, colors, textures, typefaces, and having them in the end, be a reflection of you and what your passionately writing about. You also want to be able to replicate these design features into your social media pages. Your twitter theme, your facebook page and any of your other applications.
Here are five steps for you to use to create your personal brand for your blog
Which are your favorite blogs, from a design view?
- Choose a handful of blogs that you love. 5-8 should be plenty. Make a list of the things that you really love about those blogs. The bits that you are drawn to, and would love to see in your own blog.
- How is your blog different from the rest? (We are all different in so many ways. These ways can be reflected through our blogs design features. )
- Make a list of all the ways that you are special, and the things that you see in your blog, which make it different from everyone else. (If you don’t really think your blog is too different, now is time to come up with some ideas that you will be able to use, to make your blog stand aside from the rest.)
- In one sentence explain, how your blog is different from everyone else.
- Do you have any preference in themes. Some blogs name the theme they use, at the bottom of the page.
How would you like your blog to be thought of and remembered?
What is it that you would like your blog to be remembered as, or spoken about as, if say you were no longer around to write it, but say it’s twenty years down the track from now. (Not to be morbid, I’m just saying thinking about this step is really important, and thinking about it in those terms, helps you to remove yourself in order to see, better) You might have a blog on gardening and a vision of your blog, after twenty years of writing it, to be:
- The oldest and most comprehensive gardening resource on the web”.
- Through your teachings, large area’s of USA have eradicated, some introduced noxious plant species,
- People have saved money and been more successful in gardening, through learning which plants like to grow in what area’s.
Summed up: Through working together with our community, and educating the public, we are winning the fight against some invasive species of plants. Our readers save money, because they are more aware of what plant it is, where it’s from, and where they are planting it, with the focus on, the plants survival through proper care.
Which Colors For your Blogs Brand
So much study has now been done on color theory and which colors people are drawn to and opposed to. Somewhere in the middle is a place that includes a color pallet that you love, along with colors that your readers will also love. Here is a link to a color specialist site, for help choosing your colors for creating your personal brand for your blog.It’s quite amazing at how much they actually know about colors and feelings associated with them in general. Here’s what color wheel pro has to say about orange:
Orange has very high visibility, so you can use it to catch attention and highlight the most important elements of your design. Orange is very effective for promoting food products and toys.
Dark orange can mean deceit and distrust.
Red-orange corresponds to desire, sexual passion, pleasure, domination, aggression, and thirst for action.
Gold evokes the feeling of prestige. The meaning of gold is illumination, wisdom, and wealth. Gold often symbolizes high quality.
Brand and your Self Brand
As we spoke about in the article 11 blog fixes for a tremendous personal branding strategy, the main point to focus on when creating your self brand is to keep everything consistent.
Other sources for your Blog Update for your personal blog brand
The itgirls.com : a really great resource of idea’s including pictures of other really special and sassy blog designs.
They also have a great article called 7 tips for working with PR, which is the next area that we are moving onto after all the blog re-design stuff.
For blog themes try Themeforest.com
Blog Challenge Day 30
If your new to RHB welcome. We are currently doing a blogging challenge, 90 posts in 90 days, called “Blogging While Angels Sleep”. The idea is to make 90 blog posts in 90 days, and or, follow the blogging advice contained in the post for the day. The advice from the challenge posts are either to-do with blogging business, blogging promotion, blog writing or blog design.
Today for our blogging challenge, I want you to have a look at your blog theme, and see if it gives you the freedom to brand your blog in the way that you want to. Make notes about the types of things you would love to be able to do with your blog framework, but currently aren’t able to because of your theme.
Next take a look at your twitter home page and your Facebook page and see if the three platforms relate to one another. Make some notes about the ways in which you’d like to change these three platforms to create a brand for yourself and your blog. Don’t just jump straight into it and start doing. Make some notes first to set the stage for what your going to be looking for further down the track.
If you have any questions, or need any help with this exercise, feel free to let me know in the comments below, or send me an email, through the contact button in the navigation bar.
Comment
So what do you think. At six-twelve months were you tired of your blog and ready to update the design to work on a personal brand for your blog. Please tell us in the comments below.
Please Help Me Spread The Word
As my regular readers know, I work very hard at updating my blog. Mainly research for stories, and of course learning from others, the things that I want to know about and pass on to my readers. What helps me most is if my readers, pass it forward and share my work on their social media platforms.
So please share on Twitter (I’ll follow you back) or like my page on Facebook. Please Subscribe to our newsletter, and if your a blogger, leave me a comment below, with your blogs URL and I’ll be sure to visit your blog and say hi.
As always, thanks for reading
Sharon
