Guest posting can be an awesome way to build up your own blog, and getting your posts on high powered, top tier blogs can be amazing for growth, but I haven’t heard much from those getting a guest post on Darren’s site about the effects on their own brands, sites, and goals.

Taking a look at the last month, from November 9th, 2009 to December 9th, 2009, I looked at the posts, and found twenty-two of them to be by Darren, and eleven to have been by guest posters. Out of the twenty-two posts by Darren, one was a video shot by someone else that he added a small commentary to, and a few were focused on Problogger.com updates, his re-launched newsletter and his e-book. Two were in depth reviews of blogs, leaving around fifteen posts written by Darren to help teach.

Fifteen posts in a given month of unique, original content organized to reflect on things he’s learned and help you blog better. I’d hazard a guess that most of us would still be deeply interested in his writings even if his blog only featured these fifteen posts, but with the addition of the posts done by guest bloggers, I begin to wonder what effects they have on the overall brand.

Darren gets more content, thus providing a stronger attachment to his own brand, and bigger net of keywords for grabbing search visitors. Guest bloggers get their content posted on an upper tier blog with a loyal audience.

Even if you wrote the best blog post on Problogger.net, I wonder how long it would grab people’s attention before Darren either adds another guest post, or puts up something of his own?

Also, as a reader, I wonder how these posts are being edited, filtered and controlled? Are we really receiving the best content available? Don’t we visit Problogger.net to read Darren’s insights?

Still to this day, despite Darren’s hard work to change this issue, people assume all posts that appear on the site were written by Darren. When this happens, it is probably a testament of how well written the guest author’s post was, but if people make such assumptions, where is the brand benefit to the contributor?

If more blogs were run in the same way, what would be the net effect for guest blogging as a whole? Would you give up one third of your blog to guest bloggers? Would you give up one third of your blogging time to write guest posts?

For me, I think it would be more valuable to my audience and brand building to have Darren guest blog on one of my sites rather than spend my time to guest blog on his.

Building a Basic Blog

Building a Basic Blog – From Nothing to Profitable, is a twenty-one page e-book focusing on giving the broad strokes of what to consider when creating a blog. From hosting and domains to advertising and new sources. This book is aimed at those that are considering adding a blog to their business or marketing plan. If you have an idea, and don’t know how to proceed, Building a Basic Blog should help.

Social Media Promotion

Dedicated to promoting content, Social Media Promotion covers the various popular sites that people submit their content to, what type of users interact there, and what kind of traffic you can expect. It also makes sure to point out monetization strategies related to traffic coming from social media sites. This book comes in at nineteen pages and will help those that don’t understand Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other great sites.

Sacred Secrets of Blog Monetization

My favourite of the three e-books, Sacred Secrets of Blog Monetization – The Often Missing Information is a twenty-four page e-book that covers everything I’ve learned about monetization on the web.

If you want to make money from your blog, this is the e-book to read. It covers information that I have never seen other people push out publicly, as well as my own inspirational stories of selling advertising. I feel like this e-book alone is worth joining Branding David Members.

What is Branding David Members?

I wanted to be able to work with people, consult for them on various things, but my hourly rates were just too high for the type of clients that needed help, and so rather than lower my rates to work furiously for a number of great clients, and still be without a home, I decided to create a forum where I could consult with people in a public manner, and share tips, tricks and information with a close knit group of people.

There is also information that would be quickly diluted by the masses if thousands or tens of thousands of bloggers took advantage of it, and so limiting the community was a way to keep every tip and idea created within the community as powerful and useful as possible.

Branding David Members is a private forum of no more than 50 active participants that costs only $25 per month or $250 per year. For those registering for a year in advance, you also get an hour of my consulting time, where I will help you with your blogs, websites, or online marketing strategies. You will want to register soon though as on July 2nd, 2009, the price will go up, and only those that get in before then will be able to continue at their grandfathered rate.

This also means that by signing up, you’ll be one of the few that will have access to these great e-books.

Free E-Book

As I said in the start of this post, one of these three e-books will be made available free from a variety of different blogs, and is free for you to give away to your own readers, and that is my second e-book, Social Media Promotion (right click and select save as…).

While I, personally, consider this the weakest of the three books, I also know that it will be the most useful to newer bloggers that are looking to improve their traffic and monetization strategies.

Notes: For those on Mac’s, please install Adobe Acrobat Reader or download the lower-quality version as Preview had issues with the original version compiled. The Social Media Promotion e-book is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

Kudos: A big thanks goes to Tom Leroux, Blue Rain Creative, and my friends and family.

It can be really difficult to define them sometimes, but holding your dreams, goals and aspirations close to your chest will allow you to chase after them, and hopefully reach them. I was recently asked what my goals are with regards to my career. People were assuming that I wanted to become a full time consultant like other Internet personalities try to present themselves as.

But for me, I just want to continue to learn, teach others, and give myself a variety of tasks, roles and things to do in my daily rotation, so that I keep happy, all the while keeping my family afloat by bringing in enough money that my wife can continue her University studies.

My goals are fairly simplistic on the surface, but really complex in practice. Trying to find ways to enjoy everything I do, and make enough money to keep my household afloat is difficult to do, especially during these trying times, but that is my goal, and I am going to stick with it.

I hope everyone reading this has been or will take some time to consider their goals, and work towards them. Also, make your goals known, so people don’t make assumptions that may change their perspective of you and your actions.

Using The Apprentice as a great example of branded entertainment, she really drove the point home that branded entertainment is everywhere and growing.

She also brought up Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, which was sponsored by Burger King and an interesting way to brand content in a compelling way for audiences today.

Three principles of Google Branded Entertainment:
1. Destination: Develop the Concept
2. Distribution: Make it Discoverable
3. Accountability: Measure the Results

Alexandra went through each point with more details, talking about how to develop the content, distribute it, and measure the results. She, of course, promoted Google products like YouTube, saying that it would be the best place to put video content, as it is the biggest.

“You need people to be caring about your content.” – Alexandra Levy

The whole speech continued to progress as a pro-Google session, with very little actual content other than “use Google for everything” sales pitch talk. It was frustrating, but also fairly understandable. Google is the largest, but did we need around one half of the session being used to re-enforce that? Probably not.

The content outside of “Google is god”, was really decent though, and was a great reminder of what can be done with branded video entertainment. Reminding people that it isn’t just about display advertisements, logo overlays or other such basic ways to brand content to make money.

My hope from this session is that media businesses here at nextMEDIA realize that sponsoring branded content could be both profitable and fun as I would love to work on, develop and promote sponsored content that worked well both for me and the advertiser’s business.

Considering your personal brand, or your personal mission statement can have little to do with fame or money, but instead it is the hook that defines you and your goals online.

I have met many people that are very successful online that wanted to be known as “the guy that isn’t known by many people online, but still makes a lot thanks to Google search result traffic.”

Everyone has a hook though. Usually, you’ll see it at the top of their site or in their sidebar. For me, I want to be known as the person people can trust to learn about blogging, branding, and new media.

While there might be many people that want to be known in the same way that I do, that is no reason to change myself and my brand. If ten people stated doing what Gary Vaynerchuk does in his video podcast, would that change Gary? Probably not!

Your brand is your own, even if there are dozens of other people want to be known for the same thing. Learning how you want to be known can help focus your pursuits, and keep you on track for the future.

I have worked for people that are focused on making money online, and they are good at it, but far more people get to the point where they receive a return on their time and energy investment if they aren’t overly focused on the money aspect of running their site.

In fact, most of the successful people that I know gained more fame, money, links and other benefits because of their strong desire to gain attention to themselves.

While gaining attention is getting more difficult online due to people quickly hitting their saturation point with regards to new people, products, services, and companies, there are still ways to stand out from all of the noise and get the attention you are looking for.

One of the hottest trends for gaining attention right now is to run a contest, but many people would probably say that we have passed the apex of attention grabbing through contests, and so it might be time to focus on new and interesting ways to drive attention to yourself.

A mix of techniques is probably the most effective way, but if you come up with something new that works really well, then let me know in the comments below.

They assume that if they just throw money at people that they will grow their brand or that buzz words will spellbind us all into buying their products, but if you are talking about branding a product, person, or company, what really works? What would be the online branding tip that you think everyone should know?

Leave a comment with your answer or write a post on your blog and let me know about it, and the best tip by November 1st will win a 6 Month Access Pass to Performancing Hive, a great private forum for web developers, designers, bloggers, internet marketers, and real experts in the field of online branding. This is a $60 value, but definitely worth more than that with the amazing people trading secrets, advice and tips on there.

While not a requirement of the contest, I would also love for everyone to sign up for my RSS feed and my newsletter. The newsletter will start early in the new year, and will include tips, thoughts and other advantages over top of what you will see here on the blog.

The reality is that planning as much and as often as possible will shave off gigantic chunks of time, condensing your timeline towards the success that you want.

So many people tell me that they want more traffic going to their site or blog, but when I ask them how they can do that, they don’t have any ideas. They tell me that they want to build their business, be well known in their market and make money, but they don’t have any ideas on how to sell themselves or their product.

They have lacked a strong focus on the planning aspect of their business and brand, and are struggling to get to that “next level”.

Start With What You Want and Quantify Everything

It is fairly simple to get closer to your goals, as long as you know what they are. Most people say they want more traffic, but they don’t quantify it. How much traffic is “more” to you? Is one more visitor enough to make you happy, or will it take thousands? Having numbers will give you a yardstick to measure things by.

What Do You Need to Do?

Create a list of everything that you think will get you to the next step towards your goals. If you want more sales, then figure out why people aren’t buying and make adjustments. Make sure you can track every detail and change, so that you can revert back to things that were working well, and move away from things that reduce your performance or push you further from what your goals.

How Much Time?

The key to good planning is a time line. If you don’t know how long something should take, how will you ever know if you have arrived at the point where your previous quantifiable metrics should have been met?

Sort and Prioritize

There will always be more than one thing that you need to focus on, and while it might be difficult to figure out which one is more important, I highly recommend that you spend time seriously considering the priority of your tasks, as time is finite and we can’t do everything.

Conclusion: A Great Example

Why do we see Gary Vaynerchuk and Matt Mullenweg everywhere? These people are both strong corporate leaders, with great personalities, and instead of leading their companies every day, they are attending events, conferences and speaking to the public, building up their own brands and by association, the brands of their companies.

In this respect they have prioritized brand building over sales, conferences over other types of marketing and have quickly built up nice little business empires for themselves.

What is stopping you from doing the same?

I have never understood this reluctance, having spent half of my career entirely online. I am of the opposite mindset where I don’t understand how most businesses plan to survive in this new age of technology, connectivity, and interaction.

If you can’t talk to your customers, how will you ever convince them to spend their hard earned money on your products or services? Marketing and branding alone won’t give a sense of how your business really works, and as such keeps your business disconnected from a huge pool of potential customers.

Companies like Dell have done a good job at changing how people online see their business by creating two streams of interaction, Dell’s Ideastorm, a website that allows customers and potential customers to share their ideas and Direct2Dell, a blog written by Dell employees about what the company is doing.

These ideas were revolutionary one and two years ago when they were started, and if a big company like Dell is willing to invest the time, money and energy into maintaining such customer focused services and communication, how can your business afford not to?