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The importance of branding your book blog

When I started blogging I didn’t give branding a moments thought. I assumed that you only needed to worry about that sort of thing if you were a business, trying to sell a product. It is only in the past few weeks that I have realised how important it is to create a brand for your blog.

I subscribe to 200+ blogs and browse through many more over the course of a month, but if you asked me to name all the ones I subscribe to I think I’d get to about 30 before I started to struggle. The problem is that so many blogs have similar names and so I start to confuse them. This problem was highlighted recently when I wanted to thank a blogger for recommending a book. I went to Jackie’s Bookshelf  instead of Jackie’s Book Blog (blog names have been invented to protect the people concerned, but illustrate the point) and only realised my mistake when I couldn’t find the post I was looking for. I hadn’t even noticed there were two different blogs – I had combined them in my mind.

The importance was further illustrated when someone on Twitter wanted a recommendation for a blog about horror books. I immediately thought of It’s Dark in the Dark, despite the fact that I have only been to the blog once or twice. I think that the majority of book blogs take about 20+ visits for me to get a feel for them and remember their name, whereas this one did it instantly.

Another great example of branding in the book blogging world is Fizzy Thoughts. Her site is so well designed and I remembered it from the very first visit. She also uses the same images consistently across all platforms (twitter, blogger, gravatar etc) ensuring that anything she writes is instantly recognisable as her.

I have realised that I am not doing a very good job of branding my blog. Although I am lucky in that I chose a fairly different name to other book bloggers I need to work on using the same image everywhere, as I think every picture is different at the moment. If anyone knows a great, simple drawing of a farm lane – let me know!

I don’t think it matters that we aren’t trying to sell things. If you want people to remember they’ve visited your blog, and therefore come back, you need to think about branding.

There are lots of great posts on the Internet to help. Some of the best I’ve found are: 

10 Step Beginners Guide to Blogging Your Personal Brand

How to Shape Your Blogs Brand

A Blogger’s Guide to Branding with Social Media

10 Personal Branding Predictions for 2010

Have you thought about branding your blog?

Who do you think does a great job of branding their book blog?

Are there any other things that you should think about when branding?