Charles Lau dot Com

I was pondering about this topic recently while working on my blog. Probably it was Dan Schawbel who has triggered me to think about it more and more ever since his Personal Branding Magazine was launched. It sets me to think about my blog, how I can stand out from the many sites out there. And when I look at my blog again from a “First-time” visitor’s point of view, I am not sure what my blog is writing about. I am still struggling find out my niche again even though my blog is growing healthily. Probably it has to do with myself having to understand that my own blog is now striving to find a niche to stand out from the rest now. When I look at Dan’s blog, I am very clear what I am looking for. I can almost emerge myself into understanding what his blog is trying to relate. Probably I should engage an expert to help me review my blog.

How A Blog Stands Out In Its Own Branding
A blog stands out easily when he has a clear mission of what to write. And if he named his domain names after a certain keywords that he is trying to relate his blog, readers will have a certain prepared mindset of what they are going to expect in this blog. A blog like mine, where the keyword is my name, is pretty much harder to market. And what I am going to write in my blog, it is going to represent who I am to the world. Sounds scary?

I first attempted to blog about my learning curve in my online venture at the beginning of June 2007. I was almost lost in the world of blogging about “Make Money Online” where I get to see so many other websites doing the same thing in different variations:

1. Experts giving their reviews about different Internet money making models.
2. Beginners blogging about what they have learnt and blogged about it. (Like myself, but I decided to blog more towards my own specialty.)
3. Unknown people which seem to have so many articles to post which doesn’t seem to belong to them. (Probably copy and paste standard articles from somewhere.)
4. Bloggers themed their blogs as “Make Money Online”, keeping track of how much money they are making for starting a blog from day one.
5. Self-proclaimed “internet marketing experts” who simply blog to give themselves an Internet presence while their actual business is selling some ebooks teaching people how to make money online. (Well in actual fact, I found that the more they blog, the more I don’t find the reason why I should get their ebooks… haha)
6. and the list just goes on and on…

After blogging for a while, my lessons learnt about how a blog can stand out are:

• Domain Branding (Keyword, your name, or a brand name): keywords are pretty much easier to market since they speak for themselves. Your name or brand name is going to take a little while to feed the market to understand what you are representing, and sometimes you might just turn out to become another niche in the end (because of your market’s misunderstanding of who you are) which is easier to adapt.
• Your blog categories are very important as they represent the initial introduction of what you have been writing about. Failure to update your categories correctly might cause your site user-unfriendly.
• Blogging in your style is yet another niche! Having to blog in your own frequency, sets your readers to understand you better on a personal basis.
• Time maturity is yet another factor where many of us (including myself) tend to mislook. Any site needs some time to mature to become part of the whole Internet family where we will start to link one another.
• A unique marketing idea is also important to bring your readers near to you. People will be amazed by your creative idea to bring in the results you have desired…
• Lastly, keep doing it as a hobby… It can be a drag to do something which you don’t like… Hence, this has to be registered in your mind that it is going to be your hobby that you enjoy!

Blog Topics
There seems to have no actual blog topic to follow actually. And different people did things differently to make their money. Some people advised one way, while another advised another. It is not easy to write a blog which follows strictly against a certain niche. And it is not good to write a blog which posts topics out of its niche. There must have a balance in them, and it is all about expressing yourself. If you could write more about the topics surrounding a certain niche, while sidetracked a little about your life which adds to the spice, this might be good.

Blog Shouldn’t Be Treated Like A Normal Website Content.
It took me quite some time to understand this topic. While Sunny told me about getting myself loose in my blog, I am writing really serious topics again and again. I treated this blog like an article site in fact. Blog is something where we are going to work on it on a regular basis. Website content is usually more static, and it is going to stay there for long. It is not going to work for long before we are exhausted posting really good and serious contents…

It is easy to blog when you know your blog’s mission
In fact, it is easy to blog when we know exactly what our own blog is about. Yes, this sounds contradicting since we have total control. This is exactly what I am facing for writing a blog under my own name. My name can represent a lot of topics, and when I sit down, I will just blog about what I want to talk about and think about as I am experiencing through in my own life. This is how I blog… When I found something good to share, I will just blog about it. Isn’t this what Charles Lau is uniquely in his own way?

And if your blog is about sharing information with others, you will start to look for that specific information and put in your blog. That is what your subscribers are looking for in fact.

Sometimes It Is Not About Volume Of Traffic
Seth Godin posted on his blog in one simple message “So what if your company’s blog only reaches a few dozen people a day. If they’re the right people, the payoff is obvious.”

It voices down to quality traffic, and not about quantity. You may have swarms and swarms of traffic coming into your blog, and yet they might be just passing by… It is almost useless. (Of course you could be as innovative as John Chow to think of ways and means to turn that massive traffic into profitable business.)

As you slowly build up your quality traffic in volume, that’s when the rewards are coming…

Conclusion
Well, I must admit that my own blog needs more improvement as I learned further into doing internet business, but my content should be good enough (if not, it could be better…) to contain my visitors with lots of “Charles Juice”. haha… I might be looking into asking for some reviews to further improve myself as well as this site. As I was writing this blog, I came across this keyword “Business Analogy Blog” from google which comes into my site… Probably it’s a sign to tell me how I should fine-tune my niche into…

No matter what, unless you had great experience in blogging, you should be having problem finding a niche to write about. Because blogging is a marathon, you have to learn how to pace yourself in the right frequency of speed and language to attract the right crowd. Take your first blog as a “pacer”, and learn how to make up for your future mistakes as you move along. Well, I believe many of you who have been long with me have seen me fumbling in my blog as I faced different kinds of problems in my Charles Ramblings category.