Writing and Blogging | Finch Sells

How To Brand Yourself And Your Blog

Apr 08 2011

This is NOT a step by step guide for how to become the next Make Money Online guru. I don’t want to be known as the guy who suggested our industry needs a hundred more self-proclaimed experts of the “make money by talking about making money” skillset.

Instead I want to talk about blog branding in general. And this applies to every blog owner, whether you’re a scumbag pick-up artist, a music journalist or just some crazed motherfucker with access to a WordPress.

You see, blogging as a means of making money is a lot more complicated than simply spunking random thoughts in to a journal and hoping your friends click the Facebook link. To make it a viable business, you have to brand yourself effectively.

Step 1: Understand what makes a trend setter in your niche.

Before you can brand your blog, you have to understand the very unique perception of what makes a trendsetter in your niche. For those of us in the “Make Money Online” market, that’s pretty straightforward. You want to portray yourself as a Made Man. A big trousered, fine dining, sunbed lounging, rich, son of a bitch. But in other markets, especially if you’re blogging about topics you’re not experienced with, it can be a little tougher to pinpoint the trendsetter gene.

For example, if you’re a music blogger, how can you create an illusion of importance? You could be exploiting the leaked albums market for a start. Getting to reviews before any of the mainstream sites and then claiming you were sent advance copies. Is it bullshit? Absolutely. But to your readers, you appear one step ahead.

If you can muster photos where you’re posing with the stars after a gig, get them featured in your header banner. To you, it’s a cheesy fan picture where you’re blushing bright red. To your readers, it’s the evidence you get invited to the hottest after-parties in town.

It doesn’t take long studying a Pick-Up Artist blog to establish where the trendsetter gene is at. You need to show as many drop dead gorgeous bombshells hanging off your arm as your page load time can handle. For most of us, this means creating a false blogger identity. Or, you know, going to a Playboy Mansion party.

The point remains the same. Whatever market you’re blogging to, a good brand is one that should be viewed with importance, jealousy or just plain admiration. You win nothing by sounding ordinary.

Step 2: Say what other people can’t put in to words.

Some of the best bloggers in the business, in my opinion, are those who find ways to phrase what their readers simply can’t put in to words. They convey general sentiment as if they’re voices of the people. This is an insanely effective technique that can propel your readership through the roof by viral power alone.

To do it well, you need to become the ear to the ground of public sentiment. It’s necessary to be exploring the very heart of your niche, in the trenches, so that you can write in such a way that appears genuine and honest.

The most successful posts I’ve ever written for my affiliate marketing blog, are those where I don’t give away a single tip that can be used to make money. But rather they’re the posts where I dig down and really get to the bottom of the stresses that come with being an affiliate. It’s effective because everybody can relate to them. If you can have somebody nodding their head while they read, you’re already halfway to branding your blog. Exploit unspoken public sentiment, and your blog will become relevant.

Step 3: Invite readers in to your world.

One of the easiest ways to build trust in a product is to whack your face on the Sales Letter. It’s bullshit logic, but it’s tried and tested. By the same virtue, including your face on a blog can give identity to your work. I personally can’t stand this craze of including cartoonized avatars as blog photos. Are you really that self-conscious?

You’re fighting for individuality in an ocean of rival bloggers. It might not change your fortunes, admittedly. But including a photo – whether it’s the real you or not – can help readers establish an image of your personality.

You’ve probably noticed how I love to flood my blogs with endless invitations to get in touch, to follow me on Twitter, to add me to Facebook. You’re probably thinking, Christ, it won’t be long ’til he’s asking me out for dinner and riding his hand up my leg. This isn’t some cybersleazey attempt of mine to find a BFF. It all boils down to being open with your readers and instilling a sense of trust.

How many of the acai berry floggers took the time to create fake Facebook profiles for their superhero “Before and After” characters? You should have tried it if you didn’t. Just one subtle illusion of openness that completely skyrocketed conversion rates, both for myself and the few other urchins I tipped off about it.

An open accessible brand is much more likely to leave a reader with positive thoughts, especially if you’re in the business of selling something.

Step 4: Remind your readers how important you are.

Listen, there are ways to show that you are a voice of authority without coming out and saying “Hey, you better listen to me, bitch. I’ve got a thousand subscribers.”

It’s always good to refer to emails you’ve received, tweets you’ve been sent and questions you’ve been asked. Instead of writing a huge “How To” post for no apparent reason, explain in the introduction how a highly valuable client recently asked you to offer your thoughts, and now you’re ready to share them for any other listeners. Same content, but conveying a completely different image of your importance.

Through this technique alone, you wouldn’t believe how many actual high value clients have subsequently contacted me. Portray yourself as Mr. Big enough times and shit, people actually start treating you like one. Such is the power of the Internet where people can’t see you scratching your nuts, eating cheesy wotsits, and pretending to be a big deal on your Acer laptop.

Branding yourself and your blog is about more than finding the right Blogger colour scheme. It has to be something you consider with every sentence, every opinion and every post you publish. People are going to judge you by whatever you give them, so give them something good.

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Is A Blog Worth More Than A Degree?

Mar 28 2011

It’s easy to dismiss blogs as a colossal waste of time. They can be wild ego trips, or pointless attempts to feel more understood by your peers. Guilty as charged, that’s probably how it started for me. But when I say that blogging is the smartest career move I ever made, I’m not exaggerating.

I honestly believe that regardless of whether you’re trying to write for a living, make a few industry friends or simply spew your early morning drivel, blogging is one of the most powerful ways of adding value to your name. The value may not be immediately evident, but neither is a résumé until it’s delivered to the right mailbox.

I’ve been convinced for a long time that the blog is the new résumé. I don’t have a degree, or an academic background. I can’t rely on Masters honours to justify my ability to get a job done. To put it simply, there isn’t a single slip of paper in my filing cabinet that could pass as a certificate for my work. Christ, the only certificate I have at all is a swimming award from my primary school. And even that I somehow managed to fake.

One of the great appeals of working on the web has always been the level playing field. I love that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, or what your story is. You can be as relevant as you want to be in almost any field or industry, just by having the knowledge and putting it out there in the right way.

As we see on a daily basis in the “make money online” niche, it rarely even matters if you have the knowledge. Blogging is all about perception. It doesn’t matter how smart or dumb you are, just that your readers are buying in to the right image. But forget about the readers and the meaningless subscriber stats. Have you heard the saying, If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room?

How true is that for bloggers?

If you’re the smartest marketer in affiliate marketing, why the hell would you be blogging about it? Exactly, you wouldn’t. But by blogging about a topic you’re involved with, you instantly make yourself relevant to the field. And when you become relevant, you get leverage with people that simply wouldn’t be approachable to Average Joe with no web presence. I’ve never seen blogging as talking down to a crowd. It’s a two way relationship, and a great way to establish a reputation.

Since launching an affiliate marketing blog over at FinchSells.com, I’ve pretty much guaranteed that if my business were to fold overnight, I’d only have to open my inbox to find work opportunities. That’s not to say I’ve done it well or achieved any more than the next blogger. It just comes with the territory of being relevant in my industry and establishing credibility through a web presence. In effect, my blog has become my résumé. Except I don’t have to read job listings or go combing for contacts on LinkedIn, because opportunity tends to present itself.

A couple of years ago, I saw friends leaving university with degrees and qualification to their names. But for many of them, it wasn’t enough to secure a job in the area they studied. How ridiculous is that? 16 years in education only to join the same rat race as the rest of us. Does that mean a successful blog has become more valuable than a degree?

Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to use a blog as a platform to a career in marketing than it is for, say, structural engineering. But if you have expertise, you should make every attempt to show it!

Blogs and portfolios are the way forward in 2011. The résumé deserves to die an ugly death for turning all of our individual qualities in to one uniformed template in Microsoft Word. If you have a special talent, or simply a career to fight for, you can often make it happen just by talking about it and becoming relevant.

A blog doesn’t have to be a profitable moneymaking machine. It can simply be a professional stamp of what you have to offer in your line of work. We all like to make fun of the stay-at-home-mum bloggers who write piles of sweet nothing to a circle of fans that eat it up anyway. But if you’re sitting on your degree and expecting qualifications to carry you up the ladder, I think it’s time for a reality check.

It’s not about the talent you have, but what you do with it that counts. Perception is everything to so many careers. And a successful blog can make you relevant in whatever industry you’re trying to crack.

Recommended This Week:

On the subject of putting value in yourself, I highly recommend Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. That man has a way with words that can light a candle up even the pluckiest of arseholes.
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Reverse Engineering Your Article Writing Career

Mar 22 2011

Like many Internet Marketers, the very first money I made online came as a hired writer. It seems painful to even contemplate the idea of sitting at my desk and writing ten 500 word articles in 2011, but that’s how I discovered the possibilities of making money in my bedroom.

As a sixteen year old who’d just dropped out from school, I saw every moneymaking opportunity – online or offline – as a chance to justify my decisions and say a big fuck you to further education. When you cremate your ticket to university, you kinda have to develop a killer instinct when it comes to making money.

But I guess writing articles was never the most glamorous way to earn a living. It would start off with enthusiasm. The words would flow from my keyboard and in my head I’d be counting the pesos with every saved text file. After a couple of hours, I’d find myself twisting phrases and sentences in to whatever upped my word count. But it was easy money.

You can often gauge how serious somebody is about making money online by how willing they are to get their hands dirty with cheap labour.

If you’re serious about producing some extra income, writing articles for other people is about as legitimate as it gets. The money won’t put you on a jet plane anytime soon, but what are you expecting? The miracles you were promised?

After several months of writing the same shit for different people, I began to ask myself just who was using this gibberish further up the food chain. Why would anybody need 100 different articles explaining the merits of marketing on MySpace?

If you’re one of those article writers, you’ve probably asked yourself the same questions. Just who is using this crap? Are they making any money from it?

Well if articles keep getting outsourced, somebody keeps profiting from them. It would make sense to learn how to profit from your own work, wouldn’t it? I know many article writers are just looking to make a quick buck to pay the next bill, but if you look at the economics of it all, you could be doing so much better.

I remember Googling one of the articles I’d written to see how it was being used. Sure enough, there it was, propping up a Rocket Spanish course with the entire website consisting of no more than my own hard work and a bunch of affiliate links. Being an eagle eyed little bastard, I decided to take it upon myself to start writing articles for my own personal use. That’s right. I became a Clickbank whore.

And, of course, I didn’t make much money.

Just as most people don’t when they’re getting started. It’s part of the learning curve. A successful entrepreneur fails, fails, and fails again. If you want to believe any differently, by all means be my guest. There’s plenty of experts who will take your money to fuel that short term belief.

So eventually I got the right idea. Instead of writing articles for other people, I saw the potential in building my own assets. And if you’re writing articles for a living – or just to make ends meet – I hope you can see the potential in having your own assets too.

The problem is, you need a vision… and patience. Endless reserves of patience.

Articles are no good on their own. Christ, I’ve already spilled my guts how I think they’re barely relevant at all moving in to the new decade.

But the economics of cheap article labour are a very good introduction to the world of Internet Marketing, SEO and whatever the current flavour of the month happens to be for successful entrepreneurs who already make money on the web. Who better to learn from, right? Better than Digital “I’ve got a method that would make you money in 2006” Point.

You don’t even have to be writing articles to get a good grasp of where money is being made. Just by browsing through regular Elance listings, you should notice familiar trends.

I often give this advice to writers looking to transition in to more lucrative work, and it never gets old. If you want to see where there’s money to be made, look at where there’s money being spent. You’ll find either successful entrepreneurs, or blind ass investors with not many repeat buys to their names.

Some people prefer to be team players. There’s nothing wrong with that. And for many online writers in third world countries, the money made through article creation alone is enough to live a life of relative luxury. I remember how exciting it was to take the leap from being a cheap labourer to somebody who defined his own project milestones.

But the way I see it, if you’re going to be a writer, you should be aiming for the top. There’s not much money in the middle grounds. And where there is, you’ll find fierce competition. If lazy 500 word articles are how you make your money, maybe you should consider moving up the food chain and adding some longevity to your work.

It’s not hard to reverse engineer your way to the top. To be in a position where you’re the boss rather than the bitch. If you need a little help along the way, drop me an email. For the first half of my Internet Marketing career, Bitch was my middle name. I know how it feels, and I sympathize with other writers in the same boat!

Recommended This Week:

Subscribe to my new FinchSells RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
If you’re feeling generous, you can also do me a favour by simply retweeting this post or recommending it on whatever hellhole of a social networking joint you use. Every little help is appreciated!