Creeva’s World 2.0

Jour­ney To Get Paid wants to bring you into the world of brand management.

Now the first thing to know as a blog­ger that you are your brand. What­ever you do pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive effects your brand in tremen­dous ways. It also effects your SEO in a way also, but I’ll get to that towards the end. You have to decide how you want your­self as a blog­ger to be per­ceived. If you want a spam blog that may or may not gen­er­ate your­self a ton of money please stop now because some of the things I’m going to explain is just going to out you quicker to the gen­eral population.

You as a blog­ger is the pri­mary asset for your brand, that being said if you have a col­lab­o­ra­tive blog, that blog in itself is a brand name and the authors are their own brand names. If you are insight­ful, engag­ing, humor­ous, or inter­est­ing you can gain an audi­ence. The audi­ence you wish to reach depends on your­self. The blog I’m going to use for exam­ple is my per­sonal blog at creeva.com. This blog is the core of my inter­net per­sona (iron­i­cally not really the core of my jour­ney to get­ting paid but my core nonethe­less). Where ever I post across the blog-o-verse I cross post the arti­cle to my home blog. This allows ease of backup and expo­sure to the few peo­ple that take inter­est in me.

For those that don’t care about the fluff or per­sonal lament­ing I have the on topic blogs I work on (journeytogetpaid.com) this imme­di­ately sep­a­rates read­ers from the two brands I wish to con­fer on to them, the brand of myself as a blog­ger com­pared to the brand of one of the blogs that I write. This allows for a more per­sonal dynamic of engage­ment between your­self and your read­ers. You should always be per­sonal — but I’ll never get asked if my cat is feel­ing bet­ter at journeytogetpaid.com.

Hon­ing into the fact that you are your own brand man­age­ment (Sco­bel is king of self-brand man­age­ment) you have to tar­get your own peer group. This includes allow­ing other meth­ods for read­ers and friends to con­tact you. This gives mul­ti­ple lev­els of engage­ment where you still have some con­trol over the bound­aries. I went from google telling me “did you mean cirev?” when I did a search for creeva — to the fact now that I have over 6k hits on that name. Is that good? Well my friends can find me through all the var­i­ous ser­vices I use — or the can engage me at my home blog with aggre­gates the data from far and wide.

Let’s take this story I’m writ­ing right now. When this is pub­lished it will be pub­lished on journeytogetpaid.com and cross­posted to journeytogetpaid.blogspot.com (google crawls itself first hence the blogspot mir­ror) and creeva.com. You may think that is the end of i, but far from it. At creeva.com I allow my friends to read me from what­ever social net­work they use and wish to fol­low me on. Here is a run down to what hap­pens when this story is cross­posted and pub­lished over at creeva.com.

Creeva.com cross­posts to the fol­low­ing sites

My live­jour­nal which in turn syncs with my dan­delife account

My Vox

My MSN Spaces

My Old Blogspot Site

My Xanga Site

It also through RSS feeds goes to these sites:

Sends an alert to my twit­ter readers

Sends a noti­fi­ca­tion as a blog entry into my myspace blog

Cross posts into my face­book profile

Archives as a line in my old tum­blr account that I don’t know what I’m going to do with

Archives to my old suprglu account that I used to use as my lifestream.

The­o­ret­i­cally before any­one reads this arti­cle it will be pub­lished 13 places. This is also before the spam­mers get to it and repur­pose it for their own means. My wife says she is going to blame me when the inter­net crashes. Behind the scenes there is even a bit more that goes on, but that really isn’t pub­licly acces­si­ble since it has noth­ing to do with branding.

Why do I do this?

Dif­fer­ent peo­ple know me at dif­fer­ent places, but my writ­ing is all me and I wish to share that with all of them. I’m not as bad as some. I actu­ally at one point cross­posted every song I lis­ten to, thank­fully I’m more selec­tive at what I cross­post at this time. It’s more rel­e­vant to what is going on and fam­ily and friends can have dif­fer­ent lev­els of engage­ment with m.

I also use many activ­ity spe­cific type sites like flickr and digg which I don’t cross post to but have a level of engage­ment with other users there. But of course my pro­file links back to my main site. When­ever I cross­post I also include links back to where he arti­cle was orig­i­nally pub­lished at. This allows read­ers to trace­back and find the infor­ma­tion at teh cor­rect source. I use no sub­terfuge or magic mir­rors to hide what I’m doing. It’s all plain as day.

See­ing this is my jour­ney to get paid I’m sure your won­der­ing how I can mon­e­tize all these sources?

In short — I can’t, but pass­ing the mes­sage and adver­tis­ing myself to those that show inter­est hope­fully have them trace back to the orig­i­nal arti­cle. If not I have meth­ods of import­ing com­ments from these diverse loca­tions into creeva.com. So if you leave a com­ment on my face­book account or my flickr account it get pulled back into creeva.com. This allows full engage­ment with my read­ers and what they have to say.

So all I have to do to be pop­u­lar is push myself out every­where at once?

No, if your not inter­est­ing and don’t have any friends now, prop­a­gat­ing your infor­ma­tion will not help you get any­more. If your not clear on your inten­tions or your read­ers think your being shady it can back fire on you. It can get you on the dreaded spam­mer list in people’s minds. Yes I could the­o­ret­i­cally start 2000 blogspot domains and cross­post to all of them, but I don’t. I just main­tain the links I already have in the com­mu­ni­ties that I already exist. I’ll migrate the method in which I inter­act with a ser­vice by sourc­ing mate­r­ial from the one I pri­mar­ily use, but I don’t aban­don the com­mu­nity I left behind.

This of course in some ways hurts me from a mon­e­tary per­spec­tive — but my brand­ing gets bet­ter and recog­ni­tion improves. You will always have to write some­thing peo­ple wish to read if you want to gain a steady and grow­ing fol­low­ing instead of sin­gle SEO tricks to get peo­ple to click links with­out giv­ing them any sub­stance (that’s cheat­ing). Work on your own writ­ing and enhanc­ing the com­mu­ni­ties around you, this is what gives you a fol­low­ing and brand loyalty.