Blogging To Build Your Personal Brand

As sales and marketing professionals, we’re always looking for tried and tested ways to extend our reach and influence more prospects. Blogging can be a great way to do just that.

What Exactly is a Blog?

A blog is a place online where you can easily share your content and allow others to view, comment on it and share it with others via social networks. A blog can be textual or visual (video or photo) or both and it can a strong tool to build your brand, share your knowledge and establish your expertise, if you do it right. You can choose to set up your own blog or you can contribute to an established industry blog.

Here are some notable blog facts to inspire you:

• B2B Marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not. – Hubspot
• Companies that blog get 97% links to their website. – Hubspot
• There are over 250 million blogs on practically every topic you can imagine.

Blogging As a Thought Leadership Tool

I started the Out-Smarts blog back in 2007 as a way to establish my expertise in a new marketing field, I’d recently decided that my fledgling marketing company was only going to focus on online marketing (social media and blogging), a risky move at a time when most hadn’t heard of blogging let alone Facebook. I wanted to find a medium to share my online marketing knowledge to help other businesses grow and to showcase the fact that I knew a lot about digital marketing so I set up a WordPress blog as a component of my company website.

I recently posted my 600th blog post and I can attest to the fact that blogging can be a great vehicle thought leadership tool. Over the years I’ve contributed and been quoted in industry blogs too.

The Out-Smarts blog grew from having no followers to having hundreds in the first few years. Traffic to the blog brought thousands of visits to the website every month and subscribers grew too. My blogging style has evolved over the years but to this day I regularly meet people in my business community who know and respect the work I do, people who have never met me in person but have read the blog. I know for a fact that the blog has been instrumental in helping convert leads into sales.

How To Write a Blog

Writing a blog can be a lot of fun and it’s a great way to share your knowledge and showcase your experience but it can also be time consuming so it’s a good idea to get to know what blogging is all about and to learn how to do it effectively before you jump in with both feet. After all, a blog that has been neglected or abandoned can be as damaging to your reputation as one that is updated regularly with great content can build your brand.

On August 5th at 11am Pacific Time (2pm Central). I will be sharing my blog knowledge with the SMEI community so that you can hit the ground running and build your own brand using blogging. Join me then.