My thoughts on controversy are that I would much rather have low traffic with a good brand than massive traffic and a poor brand. But that is just me, others believe the traffic is worth whatever backlash and all publicity is good publicity. Who is right? Well, we can see what happens as it happens as a story is just ending over at 1938media ...

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What are you known for? What do you want to be known for?

It's an important question. Especially if you want to be interviewed.

Consider the bloggers you follow. Can you name things they are known for? I can think of a few, who am I talking about here?:

• Ideavirus
• Six Figure Blogging
• Copywriting
• Tech startup news

I am sure you can think of better examples than my quick brainstorm. How can you be like the people who come to mind? How can you be known for something good and beneficial?

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Let me start off with, I was very surprised to learn that not everyone knows how to market their ebook or digital products.

Time and time again, I find a nicely decorated website going on and on about how great their ebook is. The website is nicely laid out, has nice pictures, a sample of the book, there are reviews, etc. I am ready to look at the actual book and even considering buying it, when all of a sudden...the book is not there.

Now why build a site around an ebook that you aren't including on your website? I'm thinking it's a lack of knowledge or something; otherwise you would have that nice link to the sale of your ebook. Most of the sites have a link to Amazon or something and tell you to find their book on the site. Not very handy...probably lose a lot of sales that way.

This got me to thinking, that perhaps not a lot of people know how to sell their own digital products. Well I do and I find it is way more effective than having your potential customers search for your product.

But I am not going to reveal to you how to sell your product online. Why should I? I did my homework and discovered after days of searching how it can be done, and you might as well do a little digging for yourself.

Enjoy! And good luck. But if you want to effectively sell digital products online, they need to be on your site, it needs to be easily accessible.

Or if you want someone to hold your hand and tell you step by step how to do it, buy my ebook at branding yourself online.

I found these interesting pictures on Neil Patel's blog. Neil Patel is a personal branding expert and personal branding is definitely something bloggers should be focusing on. Check out the pictures and see why branding and public relations (PR) is more effective than marketing and advertising.

As you can see, the message in marketing and advertising originates from you. However, the PR message comes from a third party. And PR leads to branding. In branding, the prospective customer/visitor is interested in you because of what someone else said.

Neil ties everything together by saying:

If you want to brand yourself you need to understand that it is much more effective when other people talk about you in a positive fashion compared to self-promotion.

So, how can you get other people to talk positively about you?

Network. Webmasters are much more likely to promote you if they know you. Get out there, knock on some doors, make some contacts, and build friendships especially with people in your niche.

Blog for the long haul. The longer you blog, the more people will notice you. As time goes by, you'll be considered a fixture in your niche. This leads to links and traffic.

Do something unique. Webmasters are much more likely to talk about you and link to you if you do something different from the rest. This means you need to know your niche well. Find out which topics in your niche are not getting enough coverage. Then, write quality content about those topics. For example, in my market research, I found that many of us bloggers were juggling too many blogs to our detriment. But not many people were writing about this phenomenon. So, I wrote this post, which attracted a couple links and went viral on StumbleUpon.

What other things can you do to get others to promote your blog?

If you are the owner of a company which does selling and take contracts online, it must be popular to get you more profits. The brand you build online matters a lot when it comes to success in your field and profiting from it. When you start a website you have to see to that you do the following things to become popular online:

Have an Easily Remembered Domain Name
When it comes to online marketing, there are just too many websites and a normal person cannot remember the name of your site unless it is really easy to remember. It will be better if you have the domain name on your company’s name without any additional words or numbers.

Unique Website Theme
In today’s world of marketing, one need’s to have a unique website theme to be known well. There are many free themes available but those themes won’t do any good to your website. You can get unique themes for a very low price at forums or you can get a professional theme for a little higher price.

Logo Matters
When you choose a unique theme, unique logo will also determine how popular your site will be. Your logo should be designed in such a way that it should describe at least half of what your site is meant for. Have a story in your Logo. Be creative and attract the minds of the visitors. While professional logo’s cost more, you can go for logos created in forums for a much lesser price.

Mind Capturing Tagline
Tagline is one of the most important factors which control your website’s profile. Your tagline should convey 100% of what your site is about. It should be funny, creative and at the same time it should deliver a message. Say, if you are having a Soccer News Site, you can have your tagline like this:
“We deliver the news before the ball hits the back of the net”
Daily Blog Tips had a big list of some of the best taglines in the internet.

Maintain a Blog for Your Site
If you want to attract large audience, then you need to have a blog. In the present day, most of the companies have a blog associated with their site. This gives the site, more exposure. You can keep in touch with your site visitors by maintaining a blog. If you think you will not be able to write for your blog, get a freelancer and setup a contract.

Send Gifts When Possible
If you want to be familiar with people, you need to make them talk about your website. People love free things. If you can give a free e-book or a gift coupon, they will surely talk about your site with their relatives and friends. By this way, you can easily build your website’s brand.

When launching a website takes a lot effort, building the profile of the website is harder. You need to do something unique and be creative to accomplish goals in the field. You can be 99% sure that if you do the above things, you will build your website’s brand online.

2007 has been the year of consolidation and building brands - and with that we're seeing more and more people understanding that to build a successful business you need to move away from 'push' marketing and work more on positioning your product / service and attracting attention by building a powerful brand.

In this article on building brands, Ryan talks about first setting big goals for your blogs and then working hard on building the brands to match those goals. It's easy to say this (dream big, then work your ass off to achieve those dreams), but how do you go about doing it?

Pick Goals Worthy Of You

95% of the people in this world think the other way around - they look at their own circumstances and then allow them to shape their goals. If you follow this route, your goals will be limited to where you are at present and will in fact trap you into the same place, not allowing you to grow and prosper beyond a certain point.

Shed the mental shackles, silence that dissenting voice in your head and go as high as you can go. At worst you'll fail, but let me tell you one thing - working hard for something impossible and failing will get you much farther than working within your means for something that is within your reach.

Marketing = Branding

If you are promoting yourself, then remember that everything you do in a public setting is marketing - the way you talk to clients / prospects / press / employees / competitors / colleagues, the way you interact online through your blog / comments / forums, the quality of your work, your attention (or lack thereof) to detail, your ability to keep your word - everything you do is marketing.

If you are promoting your blog / your business, then everything - from your customer service to your blog design to the error message your readers get if they enter the wrong URL - is marketing.

Branding is often defined as an organisation's representation of what it stands for - I'd like to flip this around. Branding is what your customers - your target audience - think you stand for. A strong brand is one that is consistent, focused and easily identified. Your brand is how your readers, your clients identify you. Your brand is what prospective clients will base their buying decisions on. Your brand determines how people talk about you in your niche (or if you're big enough, outside it).

Marketing = Branding. When you're promoting your blog (or your company), you're essentially building an identity in the minds of your target audience. That process is branding.

3 Simple Steps to Strengthen Your Brand Right Now

Brand-building is often thought of as a difficult exercise that somehow involves lots of brainstorming and boardroom meetings. It can be as easy as following three simple steps:

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Each year a few clear patterns emerge among content producers and marketers. As the net changes, so do its dynamics, and so do the best ways to make money.

In the past we've had the year of the blog (when blogs made their first big splash), the year of article submissions (before article submission succumbed to over saturation), the year of the linkbait (when the search engines got smart, and organic links became a necessity), and so on.

2007 is turning out to be the year of branding and consolidation. Not that branding and consolidation haven't been important in the past. But I'm seeing clear signs this year from several independent corners of the web that the dynamics of the web (probably thanks to a combination of information saturation and Google's push to measure quality indicators) have put pressure on web publishers to consolidate content and build brands. This is a real world observation.

The days of easily squeezing dollars out of AdSense by putting up an article on thirty different blogs, every 2 days, is on its way out. Why? Because with thirty different blogs, the economics of time and money are no longer in place to do proper SEO on each one, and because of information saturation, you can no longer rely on the Search Engines to send you enough free traffic to get the clickety-clicks that you need. The skinny is this: the time and effort required to make this model work is going up, while the monetary returns are going down.

Ok. So how should you respond

If you're a single individual (not a company) and you own lots of blogs, don't despair. Take your five most successful blogs and ask yourself "which of these three do I enjoy the most." Keep them and focus all your energy on them. Maybe focus all your energy on just one to begin. Whatever feels right.

Then consider all of your other blogs. Would they consolidate smoothly into any of the three that you've chosen to focus on? If so, consolidate. If not, then muster up your will-power to sell them off. By selling off your worst performing blogs, you will feel a huge burden lifted from your shoulders, will gain capital to leverage and focus in the direction of your focus blogs, and will gain the freedom to finally create some great works of monetizable art.

The key is to stop thinking of blogging as a chore, with content to crank out, and start working on only a few projects that you're passionate about. You know, the one's that make you proud. The one's that excite you. By doing this, you'll naturally create great, brandable sites.

I say all this perfectly aware that there are some brands that aren't worth creating from a monetization standpoint, so if you're in this for at least partially for the money like most of us, then you should definitely stick with monetizable niches.

Why this is a good thing

In my view, the movement towards consolidation and branding is a great trend for the overall health of the web. The dynamics are now in place so that bloggers have more incentive to create a few great blogs rather than lots of tiny, borderline spammy blogs. When humans are able to focus their energies on one or a few creative projects, the end result is almost always a better work of art.

And that's what you should be doing. Put your energy into making great, brandable works of art. By standing out in a vast sea of mediocrity, you stand a much better chance of surviving as a problogger earning a full-time wage.