I'm telling you that the only way to find success long term is to focus on building a brand.
I was browsing through Performancing's archives and I came upon the above quote mixed into and lost among a bunch of comments. Not only do I stand by this comment, but I think it applies even more now than when I wrote it.
Though this has been my working principle now for about nine months, I was surprised to find that I hadn't really written an article on what I see as the number one strategy for blogging success: building out a brand.
That's going to change. Because I believe that developing a brand is critical to success, I'm going to write several articles on the idea, with the hope of giving some concrete tips for doing so.
Text content just doesn't cut it anymore
Yes, your base of content needs to be text. And yes, if you are bootstrapping, you should probably start out with a text-only approach. But if you're serious about building out your brand, and capturing an audience, then text should not be your final goal.
The fact of the matter is that you face your fiercest competition in textual content. Text is the easiest form of content to produce and in most niches, the supply far exceeds the demand. This fact is even more pronounced with Google's recent emphasis on authority sites in the SERPS. Exact key-phrase matching is no longer the holy grail of the long tail. Goog has given the long-tail back to the rich and trustworthy. Read the rest of this entry
