By: Susan Brinson Photo by: House Of Brinson
For a moment, let’s take a step back and say: what is branding? For those of us in the advertising industry, it’s a word that is used a lot. Dare I say, it might even be over used.
Back in the day the term ‘identity’ was used, and that referred to the visual assets of a company. Logos, fonts and color would be the visual identity or assets. But what about the rest? What about the core values, voice and tone of a company? Where do we define that? That’s part of the brand. If we compare a company to a person, the brand is the personality: how they speak, their values. Their identity supports their personality with items like how they dress. Luckily, for us as bloggers we have a great brand to start because we’re people and our brand is so deeply engrained in ourselves, we already know what it is. I can say from personal experience that I know my blogging brand well, but I always stumble when someone says: what’s your blog about? Or how about the panic inducing project: writing your about page. Now it’s time to make a change and redesign your blog. Where do you start?
Here’s a quick exercise you can do before
looking at your own brand:
First, find three blogs that you love!
I’d say these are the blogs you fan-girl out when you read them. Write down
everything you like about these blogs, about 3-5 things. Later, when it’s time
to review your own blog, you can see how much of those shared items you have in
common, and what you can work on creating for your blog.
Here’s an example: I have a blog I
really like the typography on (ok, I LOVE it). When I started looking at my
favorite blogs, they all had great typography. So when I redesigned our blog,
typography was a focus. I knew, deep down this was important to me.
