206: Personal Brands vs Business Brands for Blogs

Is There a Right Way to Brand Your Blog? I’m just back from our Aussie Problogger training events where we ran masterminds with around 40 bloggers per city. In those days speakers spent time with small groups of attendees in round table discussions where attendees could ask us any question they liked. One of the questions that I got asked repeatedly through both masterminds was around whether it is better to give a blog a personal brand or more of a business brand? In one case the questioner was about to start a new blog and was wondering if they should set it up on a domain that was their own name or if they should choose a name that was nothing to do with them. Another blogger asked what to do when they felt trapped on a blog with a personal domain - but they wanted to introduce other writers onto the blog. Yet another blogger had the opposite issue - they had set up their blog on a domain and with a brand that was very niche specific but now felt trapped because they wanted to change their focus and evolve the blog beyond what the brand might allow. I’ve been pondering these questions a lot since our event so wanted to explore it today in this episode. There is right way to brand your blog - there are extremes where you can go one way or the other and also there are ways of doing both a personal brand and a business brand - and that’s what we’re going to explore today.   Examples Mentioned for Personal Brands vs Business Brands for Blogs Personal Brands Amy Porterfield Michael Hyatt Seth Godin Business Brands Digital Photography School Nerd Fitness Mashable Gawker TechCrunch Engadget LifeHacker Gizmodo Moz Smashing Magazine Personal Business Brands Smart Passive Income Styling You Doing Both Personal and Business Chris Ducker Gary Vaynerchuk Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hello there. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger, a blog, a podcast, event, job boards, series of ebooks and other resources all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, to produce great content and to make money from your blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. I’m just back from our Australian ProBlogger event where we ran a couple of masterminds this time around for the first time ever. We did two masterminds, one in Brisbane and one in Melbourne and we have 40 bloggers who have come to each of those sessions. As part of the day, we had some teaching from our speakers like Pat Flynn and James Schramko and Laney Galligan and then Kelly Exeter. We also spent time, as speakers, circulating through the tables, around tables, around the room. We, each, got to spend about 30 minutes being peppered with questions by these small tables. Something made me a little bit nervous because I’m not the fastest thinker but I love that. What I found really interesting over the day was that I was asked some questions on almost every table that I went to. That may have been partly because people thought I could answer those questions but also, some of the questions were quite random. One of the questions that I got asked a lot over both cities, multiple times in each day, was around how to brand a blog in terms of whether it should be a personal brand or whether it should be more of a business brand. I’ll get into some examples of both of those types of options later on today. It was a question that I got asked repeatedly in different ways. One person asked, they were thinking about setting up a new blog, whether they should set it up on a domain that was their own name or whether they should choose a name or domain name that was nothing to do with them personally at all. That was a question I got asked a couple of times.