On Branding, Blogging, and Link Ponds

To those of you who are still wary of allowing your dreams and tales to traverse the web, this one’s mainly for you.
Today I’ll let you in on a tale of a visionary-procrastinator who finally chose to breathe life to his dreams of getting his thoughts and dreams out on the web—welcome to my tale.
In this article I will run you through three aspects that both hindered and helped me start with writing and making my online identity, namely branding, blogging, and link ponds—all of which when unwritten and utilized properly can help you build and optimize your brand literally from the ground up.
Mind you that the primary goal of this article is to call on to those of you blogcrastinators out there to stand up and be creative beasts, to go out from the shadows and scare us with your splendid dreams!
On Branding: “Should it be about MEH!?”
Branding can be a problematic aspect as sometimes you can end up branding for the sake of branding, and honestly that can’t lead to anything but wasted time and effort. As a replacement for of just thinking outside of the box, why not deliberate making something people didn’t know was missing? In that manner, you can shift your mindset from making something that didn’t exist to making something that needs to exist, hence a matter-of-fact motivation to get you going.

This was my first stumbling block; I didn’t know exactly what to write about. Coming from the above mindset of making a need, I knew I had to dig deeper. Aside from listing down all of my interests such as SEO, social media, experience design, and way of life, I had to find a way to formulate an equation that can give me a proper brand—a thesis statement with a solid research domain that I was very much interested in. With a lot of introspection and research I came up with a brand that would talk about finding meaning and happiness amidst the intricacies of SEO, the chattering within social media, and the lack of common sense behind design and usability.
If you’re to dissect that statement, it’s really about my frustrations in Internet marketing and how we can find inspiration to get back up and accomplish the job. Here, my research domains would be my personal experience (sort of inexhaustible), the Internet industry (SEO, Social Media, etc.), and Taoism (a way of life that I got well acquainted with back in the days).
Tying in your personality with your brand in this manner not only provides you with a unique identity people must to remember but also gives you focused information streams you can straightforwardly tap into to guide you with content production.
Additional Notes:
Do a small bit of market/niche research as this will greatly help with your brand and content development. Potentially, business development?
Don’t forget keyword research, this will outline the course of your SEO groundwork for your brand and content.
Carefully study and design your visual brand identity—this should clearly represent your thesis (call a designer friend if you need help).
Make sure that your site’s visual interface elicits the right emotions and are in tune with your brand (consult an experience designer if possible).
Don’t forget site performance and usability—this greatly affects your image online.
Utilize your personal tone and character when expressing your brand—it pays to humanize your brand (well you’re human with all right?). Check out Dan Schawbel’s blog to learn more about personal branding.
On Blogging: “I’m too bone idle to write!”
By establishing your own personal brand and knowing your management, I’m assuming that moving on to writing would be a less daunting task, even if talking from experience, it can still be quite dreadful.
There are two common things that comprise the dread of writing, one would be “Would I be able to publish content evenly?” and “I don’t reckon my writing style is excellent enough!”—so much for the hassle of establishing your would be brand eh? A business that I learned along the way that you should take note of: “If not now, when!?”
First off, take baby steps, don’t promise anything you can’t deliver for yourself and to your would be readers. When I started, I explicitly mentioned (on my site) that I would be publishing content at least once a week, which was manageable. Don’t worry about publishing more than what you’ve promised, in fact you might just find yourself increasing your publishing rate as you go along.
Secondly, nothing will start happening if you wouldn’t even dare write that opening post of yours. Just get your foot inside that door and from there use your brand identity as a guide to help you arrange your content roadmap. Are you frightened of your writing style? Don’t be, as you write more and more you’ll find yourself producing better content.
Besides, take note that content production isn’t limited to writing articles, if you’re a excellent speaker utilize it by mixing in video posts, or if you’re excellent with visuals, go develop that killer info-graphic!
Additional Notes:
Aside from maximizing personal experience for your topics, make sure to utilize topic research in social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and forums)—talking about relevant content is vital.
Arrange a content plot. Sometimes it pays to write articles ahead of time to make a buffer and at the same time manage continuous publication of content.
Copyblogger, Problogger, and Men with Pens, are splendid copywriting resources.
Explore guest blogging not for self-promotion but for relationship and readership building.
Don’t tell me you’re not considering SEO when writing content? Deliberate SEO copywriting (as in writing-not-for-robots).
Allocate your content to travel. Optimize your site to make it simple for readers to share your hard work.
Share your experiences. Be a storyteller. People recall tales better than hard facts. Perhaps this is a excellent way to get readers well acquainted with your brand and writing style.

On Link Ponds: “Allocate link juice to flow to your brand.”
Never heard of Link Ponds? Well, you do now. Link ponds are basically content pages on a site that are often linked to internally and externally for the priceless information that they grant. In contrast to link bait or link hook content, link ponds are permanent sections on a site, David Mihm’s local search ranking factors and SEOmoz’s search ranking factors are excellent examples of link ponds.
Moving forwards, in light of brand building and content foundation, I needed to find a way to kick start my content optimization and at the same time find an effective way to let people in the science and way of life behind my insights and dreams—a branding and linking chance at the same time. This is when I came up with the concept of link ponds.
Making theoretical frameworks or manifestos that depict your brand and thinking process can greatly help you with your branding efforts and content development strategies, not to mention your SEO initiatives.
Additional Notes:
Craft a robust link pond that aligns with your brand and perspective towards your niche.
Make sure to update your link pond whenever necessary. Don’t forget to update your readers about it as well—a small update post might just do the trick.
Check out David Armano’s Manifesto. He’s done a splendid job utilizing this to shape the persona of his blog.
Check out Karim Rashid’s Karimanifesto.
Check out the SEO Taoist Way of life.
As always, I’m looking forwards to start discussion. Questions, observations, suggestions, and experiences are most welcome to further expand my article mainly on the topic of branding and blogging.

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