Even those blogs that do attain a substantial readership often take time to get there.  As a result, there are a lot of blogs in the blogosphere that have great content sitting in their archives that have barely been seen.  It seems like a waste to have taken the time and effort to produce great content and then not have it seen.  The solution to this problem is republishing.

The ability to make cheap/free copies of content thanks to computers and distribute it for cheap/free thanks to the internet has caused challenges for many industries such as music, publishing, news, and film. However, many people have found ways to make those exact same causes work in their favour as a cheap/free method of distribution for their own content.

In the case of blogs, the tactic here could not be simpler.  Look back through your archives for some quality content that didn’t get too many eyeballs.  Polish, edit, and maybe even add to it a little bit.  You can polish the content as much as you like, but the main idea here is to re-use what you’ve already created so it’s easy.  Once you have the pieces you want to republish, it’s a matter of finding the right places to put them.

I would recommend two resources: ezinearticles.com and hubpages.com.  Both sites have their own guidelines, and their formats are slightly different.  What they have in common is that both sites get a lot of traffic, and have high organic PageRank.  They do request original content, but if you edit an old piece and make a few modifications, then you should be okay.

Another alternative would be to turn an old blog post into a PDF, and re-publish it as a whitepaper, or a report.  There are a number of services that host and distribute these kinds of reports, but one example that I’ve heard good things about is Scribd.

There is a counter-argument for re-publishing content online, and that is that if you re-post duplicate content, your SEO rankings will suffer because Google and other search engines use duplicate content against you.  While this is a legitimate argument, it is not one I would put much stock in.  Anecdotally, I know no one who has been severely hurt by duplicate content issues for doing something like this.  Remember, you’re not re-posting your entire website, you’re posting one article amid an entire archive.  Also, if this is something that truly concerns you, put a little extra time in to revise and edit the piece.  As any writer will tell you, you can spend an infinite amount of time editing, and with each edit, your piece will change.  I don’t necessarily recommend spending hours editing a piece you’re going to republish (might as well just write another piece), but some editing is still advisable.

Besides not being too concerned about the duplicate content issue, I actually believe republishing articles on strongly ranked websites will help more than harm your own site’s SEO ranking.  By re-publishing, you’re seeding additional content that links back to your own site. The link from the re-pub’d article is already a bonus, but you will likely also be able to get additional links back from the readers that article will have attracted.

Of course, for any of this to happen, you have to link back to your own website from within the article that you have re-pub’d, with a clear description of what people will find when they visit, and a call to action to get them to check it out.  This also means that the piece that you re-pub should reflect what your blog is actually about.  If you write about practical motorcycle maintenance tips on your blog, and you happened to run one post early on that was a rant about why Harleys are so much better than Hondas, that’s not the right post to re-pub.  Not because it’s not valid, but because it doesn’t reflect the specific theme of your blog apart from being on the same broad topic.

In your journeys across the internet, always be on the lookout for additional syndication opportunities.  If you do video, check out TubeMogul.  If you’re a photographer, cross-post with Flickr.  The internet offers a ton of distribution opportunities, and it’s important to use them to get your content out there.

In any case, your posts aren’t doing anyone any good sitting  unread in the archives of your blog.

Have you tried re-publishing or syndicating your publishing?  Do you have any success stories or tips, you could share?  Drop a line in the comments.

Last week, I wrote about the story behind launching my new side project, iL-Logic the webcomic.  However, I thought of myself as a writer long before I launched iL-Logic with Paul.  I’ve been writing outside of work and school for pleasure or for money since the age of about fourteen. While I’m much more satisfied with my career now than I was upon graduating law school, it’s still a far cry from the artist’s lifestyle that I fantasized about as a teen, and yet, I wonder if I didn’t end up exactly where I needed to be.

As much as any artist will tell you that the work itself is the reward, there’s still a big part of himself (that he’s probably buried) that longs to have his work in front of hundreds of eyeballs.  That’s why many aspiring artists end up giving up their craft. They never get there.

I’ll use the launch of iL-Logic as an example.  On March 1st, the day the webcomic was launched, it went quasi-viral.  Before I could announce it on Facebook or Twitter, or even tell friends about it, someone had come across it and submitted it to social bookmarking site Stumbleupon.  On that first day, Stumbleupon accounted for 80% of the site’s traffic, and that first day saw twice as much traffic than my best day on any of my other sites.  If you don’t think Paul and I were elated by that day because we were just doing it for the art, you have too high an opinion of us, and probably of all artists. The bottom line is that all artists get off on seeing their work in front of others.

And what’s the best way to get content in front of eyeballs?  That’s right, marketing.

With the highly competitive nature of just about every industry, the main differentiator between two options will always be the quality of the content, product, service, etc. The best people to create great content and products are the artists and craftsmen (and the best craftsmen are artists). But even a great product needs attention, and for that, artists must once again rely on marketers.

Marketing is becoming a numbers-based science, and that’s a great step for advertisers. Advertisers are sure to get their money’s worth when they’re paying for performance, rather than conjecture. However, it’s not very appealing to artists, who generally speaking don’t love numbers. Talk to a lot of old school ad men, and I bet that a fair bit of them are nostalgic for the times when clients like John Wanamaker knew that, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That’s because old school ad men were artists at heart, trapped in the bodies of marketers.

Still, “true” artists have always had a certain disdain for marketing.  Whether this stems from a mistaken belief that commercial marketing cheapens the work, or that it equates to “selling out,” or simply because marketing was associated with business, and business was not art.  And so, artists have traditionally stuck to making art, and letting someone else sell it for them.

Agents, publishers, galleries, and other entities whose goal is to take the work of artists and sell it have left most artists poor and desolate. Unless an artist becomes a part of the top 1% in his field, he is unlikely to make a middle-class living off his art using the traditional models.  This is simply because the entities that have existed to sell artists’ works on their behalf have become so bloated that they absorb all of the revenues of the work.

As an example, a writer who spends a year of his life writing a novel can expect to get a paltry advance of perhaps $5,000 to $10,000 on the book, and then will receive royalties, that if he’s lucky may go as high as 10%.  This means the publisher, who is taking the expense of marketing the book keeps 90% of the revenues.  The writer’s agent will then keep 10-15% of whatever the writer makes.  Despite this model, publishers are going out of business, and writers can’t find anyone to publish their work. The model is broken.

The good news is there are alternatives.  There are so many examples of artists doing well for themselves by embracing online marketing techniques:  Hazel Dooney, Hugh Macleod, and John T. Unger, JC Hutchins. To name only a few whose stories I’m familiar with.  These artists have stepped away from the traditional model and market their own work.  They are both artist and marketer.  In so doing, they turn the traditional model on its head, and make it so that the person producing the work is actually receiving the majority of the revenues from its sale.

They are not doing anything magical.  They are simply taking advantage of the cheap publishing platform that the internet has given them and used marketing techniques, many of which are the same ones I write about on a weekly basis, and have enjoyed the fruits of their own labours.

Doesn’t it only make sense that artists should be the marketers?  Who knows the target audience better than the author of a work?  Who is best suited to sell it, if not the person creating it?  If artists want to thrive, they need to become marketers. Not only will it benefit their work, but their previous work as artists will make them better marketers than the rest – their imagination and craft will set them apart.

If you’re a writer, painter, sculptor, photographer, designer, or any other kind of artist, drop me a line.  I’d love to discuss what you’re doing to market your work.

Branding is not a new concept.  In fact, it’s probably one of the oldest concepts in marketing.  The internet, however, has created a branding revolution. It used to be that if you told me to think of a brand, I’d think of Coca-Cola or Marlboro (two of the most highly valued brands in the world), and a handful of others.  Now, when I think of brands I think not only of the big boys, but I think of everything as a brand.  Where branding used to only be for major corporations, now it’s become just as important for the individual.  That’s right, your name is a brand, hence this site.

In order to underscore the renewed importance of branding across the spectrum, I’m going to split branding into two artificial categories: business and personal.  I call these categories artificial, because as you’ll see, the internet is causing the two areas to spill over into each other in a big way.

Business Branding

If you’re a business owner, you need to know what is going to make customers pick you.  What good or service can you provide that your competitor can’t?  If you’re lucky enough to have a completely unique product, congratulations, you don’t have any competition…  yet.  If you’re like most business owners, and you’re competing with other business for customers, then you know you need to have an edge.

It used to be that you could compete on price, speed and quality.  I have bad news, though.  Price and speed?  You can’t compete on those anymore.  Even if you can make something cheaper and faster than someone else, in two months, China will do it even cheaper, and even faster, and ship it to Wal-Mart to add a convenient distribution method.  Two months after that, China will be outsourcing to Vietnam, to cut its own costs and production time.  Competing on price and speed is a race to the bottom that small and medium-sized business owners should avoid altogether.

What’s left then?  Quality.  Quality of your product and quality of your service.  Quality is what keeps customers coming back.  Quality is what generates word of mouth.  Customers will pay more for quality. Here’s the catch, though, customers associate quality with a brand.  No one walks into a shop picked at random and assumes quality.  If, however, people recognize your brand, they assume there’s quality tied to it.

Most people who buy an iPod over any other MP3 player are buying it for the brand.  They buy that brand because they assume it’s of a higher quality.  Is it?  That’s debatable.  I’ve tried multiple portable music players.  I’ve liked some of them just as much, if not more than Apple’s iPod, and yet, I own an iPod.  I don’t know for a fact that the product is better, and yet I still bought it for the brand.  The great thing about building a brand is that if you can convince people that your product is better, it doesn’t actually have to be better (but it does need to be at least comparable).

Having a recognizable brand and a quality product also creates brand loyalty.  That’s the customer who keeps coming back.  Customers who keep coming back are the best kind, because instead of doing all the work of attracting new customers every time, you attract them once, and then they keep coming back on their own.  But if you want repeat customers, and brand loyalty, you need to make sure you build the reputation of your brand, and then that you protect that reputation.

Personal Branding

Personal branding is either a relatively new concept, or an old one that simply exploded with the help of the social web.  Either way, it’s become a reality, and it’s one everyone needs to begin to embrace as soon as possible.

The concept behind personal branding is no different than that behind business branding.  Job markets are increasingly competitive, not just with the higher number of people completing higher education domestically, but also with the huge influx of talent coming from overseas.  In a hyper-competitive market, you need a way to stand out, and the way to do this is to build your personal brand.  You can equate your personal brand to your reputation, and in today’s world, reputation is currency.

Dan Schawbel is the self-proclaimed Personal Branding expert for Generation Y, and also a great example of what personal branding can do.  As a personal branding expert, you can imagine that Dan has done quite a bit to build his personal brand, and as such, has created a ubiquitous presence on the web.  A couple of weeks ago, Dan followed me on Twitter (if he weren’t following tens of thousands of people, I would be honoured).  I’m still relatively new on Twitter, and have a small network, so I actually check the profiles of anyone that follows me before I decide whether or not I follow back.  Annoying twitter-talk aside, my point is that if I hadn’t recognized Dan’s name from some other source that I’d read about him, I’m not sure I would have followed him back.  But, because I did recognize his name – his personal brand – I followed him, started receiving his tweets, took a look at his blog, and now I’m writing about him on mine.  All that because I recognized the guy’s name from something I’d read a while ago.  Maybe he is an expert on personal branding after all!

So How Do You Start Building Your Brand?

The hardest part in any process like this one is getting started, and so I’ll tell you how to get it off the ground and then you can run with it in any direction you like.  After all, it’s your brand.

1. Start by creating an online presence
If you don’t already have an online presence, create one.  It can be as elaborate as an interactive website, or a blog, or as simple as a bio page.  Whatever you choose to do, create a space for yourself on the web, because that’s where the attention is turning to.

2. Own your domain
You’ll notice that this site is www.adamdistefano.com.  I could have named it any number of things more creative, but that would defeat the purpose.  When someone looks for me, I want to make sure they find me, and not someone else.  In that respect, owning your domain is as much defense as it is offense.  There is nothing more damaging to a brand than having someone else using it and ruining its reputation.

3. Monitor Google results for your brand
Googling your brand might seem like an exercise in vanity, but it’ll give you an idea of what people are seeing when they look for you.

Uisng myself as an example, a search for my name on Google shows that on average five of the top 10 results are actually me (searching on google.com and google.ca with quotes and without).

More important than just the quantity of results, however, is the quality of the results.  Most of the results that aren’t me on Google are fine because they are obviously other people with the same name, but they’re not damaging to my personal brand.  However, some could be.  I used to write regularly for askmen.com and those articles are now indexed on Google.  I have no issue with that.  Since then, various international websites have scraped the content from askmen.com and repurposed it for their own use.  Normally, I would have no issue with that, either.  Additional exposure is a good thing.  In this instance, they even kept my name attached to the articles (something that is not always done when websites scrape content for their own use).  The issue arises when you look at the context of the article.  For whatever reason, many of these sites chose not to copy the articles, but instead to summarize them.  Unfortunately, the summaries were poorly done, using bad grammar and simply badly written.  To make matters worse, nothing in the summary indicates that this is a summary of an altogether different piece, and instead, it simply looks like something I wrote.  As a freelance writer, you can imagine that this is not good for my brand.

The lesson here is to make sure you keep an eye out for your brand to make sure it’s not being misrepresented.  Apart from just Googling your brand repeatedly, you can also set-up Google Alerts, which are a handy way to be notified anytime something you’re trying to watch is mentioned on the web.

4. Make sure you appear in major eyeball areas
Aside from having a site, and ensuring that you’re well represented on Google, make sure that you appear in other major eyeball areas.  If you’re a restaurant, make sure you’re listed on Yelp.  If you’re a local business, make sure you’re listed in the major business directories (such as YellowPages.ca).  If you’re a Doctor, make sure you’re in medical directories.  Go to where people are looking for you, and make sure your brand is there. After all, what’s the point of building a brand, if no one ever sees it?

5. Social Networks
Social media and social media marketing have turned into a gargantuan topic.  Tons of books have been written on the topic (Trust Agents is my personal favourite).  Love them or hate them, they are making a splash.  The topic’s too big to cover in a bullet point in a blog post.  Instead, I recommend that you sign up to a few social networks and fill out the basic profile. Even if you choose not to participate, stake a piece of real estate.  More often than not, the top six results on a personal name search on Google are from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  That’s something to keep in mind if you still refuse to sign up for those services.

If you follow the above five steps, you’ll have created a footprint for your brand online.  From there you can grow it any number of ways, but the best way to do it, is to provide quality products and quality service.  If you do that, the foundation you’ve laid will grow nicely.

Additional resources:

• Seth Godin: Seth is a guru on just about all topics marketing and business, but he has some particularly good stuff to say about the importance of a business’ reputation and brand.
• Dan Schawbel:  Even if you’re not a Gen-Yer, you might still be able to learn something from Dan.  You might feel turned off at first by the self-promotional nature of a lot his stuff, but after you get used to it, you’ll start to see a lot of value.
• Susan Lewis: Susan took personal branding to a new level when she decided to use social media and her personal brand to hire a boss.  That’s right, when she finished her MBA, she didn’t apply to jobs.  She had THEM apply to HER.

What do you think about branding?  Is it overrated?  Should we stop paying attention to brands?  If you just conduct good business, will your brand build itself?