As Blogs Mature, Focus Shifts on Business

Today at The Blog Herald, we're talking about how you can transfer equity from your current brand to the next. As blogs mature, the conversation is shifting from merely developing a voice and getting traffic, to leveraging that traffic to build a business. If you're building a brand that you plan to sell one day, it becomes more important to separate yourself from the online asset over time.

The point of my post there is that brand equity can be transferred. It would be nice to know exactly what kind of business you're going to be in and plan to grow your brand in that direction. Things don't always go as planned. Especially when you find the opportunity resides perhaps in a slice of your original offering, or maybe just the opposite, you find that what you do appeals to a much broader base.

Many bloggers in my network have adjusted the course over time. In some cases, a blog redesign brought about the recalibration. In others, a book, or a special project that evolved into a specialty offering. How many hours do you spend writing (and researching, marketing) for your blog per week? Even if you are using this tool as a medium to get the word out about your business, chances are that in the next year or so, you will look to develop a way to make this a business as well.

What I'm seeing is a shift in focus from the conversation to a business outcome for many blogs. For the sake of definitions, to me marketing conversation is a need/want based exchange where your customer and his problem is at the center. In a business context, your brand embodies the biggest verifiable benefit you can put to the results your customers need.

I see a lot of opportunity for bloggers to conduct this conversation right - because they grew up in an environment where people can opt in vs. having to opt out. Now it's a matter of learning how to build equity in those online brands so that they may become business ventures themselves in addition to leading to business.

[image extrapolated from PowerBranding, by Brandt & Johnson.]

Comments

[Carlos de Paula]

The problem is that there are so many people doing Seinfeld blogging, blogging about nothing, with no obvious authority on any matter, that the activity itself seems to lose relevance by the hour.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Carlos:

My take on blogging is that it is indeed mature - some people in my network have been doing it for 5, 7 years already. I started publishing online only a mere 18 months ago and I enjoy learning so perhaps it will take me a few months yet to be affected by what you so aptly describe as the Seinfeld syndrome.

We are also seeing readers' fatigue. With tools like Twitter that give you the illusion you are having a conversation so there is no need to have it in the comments of blogs anymore.

[Geoff Livingston]

I get so much out of blogging its not even funny. Consider the following:

Experimental vehicle for best practices
Brand building
Speaking opps
Deal flow
Recruitment bennies
Book deal
Forum to air out concepts and theories
Friends
Training mechanism for junior staff

To name a few ;)

[Valeria Maltoni]

I would add:

Boot camp for fleshing out ideas
Open invitation for conversations with others
Learning about yourself lab
Community building vehicle
Inspirational tool (give+get)

Anyone else would like to add anything?

[Chan]

Equity means that you built a reservoir of characteristics and experiences that are identified with thier brand. When the brand they owned one and the same with their name or person, they are need to work towards disassociating yourself from the brand before they can sell it. It must be awesome topic.