One of the smartest moves that bloggers working in a network can make is to find ways to promote themselves. Your own personal brand can be moved from blog to blog, network to network, and if you are thinking about your own future in this business, you will want to focus on building your own personal brand in various ways to allow you to transfer it from site to site.
The most successful person that I know who was able to pull this off is Chris Garrett. At one point, he was writing on a number of great blogs and it was to the point where you couldn’t go to a popular blog without seeing one of his posts, but through all of that, he was able to promote himself, and in doing so, he now does very well in his online career.
What can you do to promote yourself?
Portfolio First, you should have a site where you keep a portfolio of your work. If you have had a post on the front page of a social media site, quoted by a larger blog, or even published in print, you’ll want to post that on your own site so prospective companies can see the work you have done.
This also makes for a great resume of examples for getting raises at your current job, so continue to mark down all of your successes.
Biography or Byline
Are the blogs you are writing on giving you a spot to promote yourself? They should be! Something as basic as a Byline that includes your name, and links to your personal site is a good start, but I would recommend having the network give you a small biography section at the bottom of each post, or an author page somewhere on the site.
Blog networks that are trying to do the best they can for their writers will give you this space because building up brands within their network is good for business as well.
Link To Yourself
If you have said something great elsewhere, be it on another blog, or on your own portfolio site, and it is relevant to something you are posting on a network owned blog, you should be allowed to link to it. This is a fine line to walk on though, as you shouldn’t be spamming the site you work on with links to your own sites, but if it fits the site, and is done tactfully, then there shouldn’t be a problem with doing so from time to time.
Conclusion
Promoting yourself becomes infinitely more difficult in a multi-author blog situation, but there are still opportunities to take advantage of. Remember, the long term effect of building your personal brand is that it is usually transferrable. When you are the celebrity rock star of your niche, you can write on any blog, and a certain percentage of people will come to read what you have to say, just because it is “you”.
For blog network owners, this can be to your advantage as you can then hire on these strongly branded bloggers to launch more blogs for your network, expanding their little empire within your network and hopefully driving more advertising revenue early on than a blog started by an unknown.
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