Branding David

About a week ago, I started developing a membership area for this site. The premise is simple: give people access to my knowledge at what I consider to be a very reasonable price.

I currently bill myself out at around $120 per hour, depending on the needs of the client, and so I have priced the members area aggressively at only $10 per month, or $120 per year. Those purchasing a full year in advance will also get an hour of consulting. That means, if you buy a minimum of one hour of consulting time, you also gain entry into the member area.

What do members get that normal readers of this blog do not?

• Premium content similar to other things I’ve written here
• Actionable information that can’t be found elsewhere
• Tips, tricks and advice from me and other members
• Information on tools that I use
• Guides and techniques I won’t post anywhere else
• Members only podcasts, videocasts, live Ustream video sessions and screencasts

I will be doing everything in my power to make membership worthwhile, and I will be limiting the membership to only 50 members. This limit might sound like a marketing gimmick, but instead is a number I chose based on a few different factors.

I wanted to make sure the community was small and tight knit. There aren’t going to be hundreds of people all competing in the same niches, allowing us to help each other, and to make each tip I give out more useful for each member as there might only be a small handful of people in the same niche for you to compete against.

Also, there is advice that I’ve long wanted to give out, but I didn’t want to do like Darren Rowse did a long time ago by giving out tips publicly that could ruin my business growth and opportunities. He told the world about how high the advertising rates were in blogging about digital cameras, and in doing so, created his own competition, effectively diminishing what anyone could get in that space through advertising revenue.

I gave out the information regarding this new offering in my e-mail newsletter last week and already have five members on the forums, so you will want to get in quickly before I close the doors. I will never raise the member limit beyond fifty active partners.

Lastly, the current rate isn’t set in stone. You need to join before February 1st, 2009 to be grandfathered at the $10 per month rate. As of February 2nd, 2009, the rate will go to $15 per month, or $175 per year.

How can you sign up for the Branding David Premium Partners section? Head on over to the sign-up page and enter your details now.

Think you made a smart move by letting some hosted blog service deal with running your company blog? Well, I would say you’ve probably made one of the biggest mistakes in your businesses endeavors to understand and integrate blogging into your branding efforts.

Bad for Branding

Who are you trying to brand, yourself or Blogger? If you host with any of the numerous services currently offered today, you are no doubt giving away some of your branding efforts to whomever is hosting you, and while that might seem like a fair trade, in the long term it truly isn’t, as people will come to expect you to be on that service later on, even if you decide to switch.

Bad for Control

Which brings me to my next point. If you can’t control everything on your site, it isn’t your site. WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to use advertising, though if you are an open source foundation, advertising might be your only revenue source. Google Blogger is difficult for most companies to easily skin and integrate into the normal look and feel of the rest of their site.

There are so many issues depending on a service to provide your blog, a voice for your company, and one of the biggest is that they can delete your site at any time if they don’t feel it adds value or if it crosses a line for them.

While this might seem trivial, since most businesses won’t post anything that would fall outside of the Terms of Service, accidents can and do happen.

Bad for User Experience

Many businesses don’t go the extra mile and find someone to properly integrate the hosted blog with the rest of their design, creating a jarring shift in the user experience, and making users question if they are still on your company site. Most of this is due to the difficulty of finding someone that knows the hosted systems well enough to shoehorn your design into their theming language.

Bad for Search Engine Optimization

People won’t be linking to your website. They will be linking to your blog on some hosted service. Part of the allure of blogging is that it will bring traffic to your business, but if people go to the blog, and then leave, they aren’t giving you any direct traffic.

If you then decide to move your blog, you can’t set up any type of redirect, and you’ll end up with people going to your old blog instead of your new one. If you always host your own blog on whatever software you enjoy, then you’ll be able to switch out software without truly losing any links or traffic.

Conclusion

Please don’t host your professional, business or corporate blog on some service as you are only doing a disservice to yourself.

It really doesn’t take much time, money, or energy to install one of the many pieces of blogging software on your web hosting server, and publish articles to it, and you’ll be glad you did.

I recently finished writing up and posting a resource post on College Crunch about Fifty-Two Starting Salaries for Careers, and it took me nearly a week to research, write, organize and promote. The actual article itself wasn’t too bad, but we wanted to make sure to have many of the interconnecting pages complete, and we hadn’t built them out yet.

It is quite a process writing up a list that goes beyond the normal ten or twenty items, and I give big kudos to those that put in the extra effort. It goes back to something I said in my speech at WordCamp Toronto, if your post isn’t easily replicate-able or beatable by your competitors, it will do better, and that, so far, has definitely held true for this post.

While it was very time consuming, we are already seeing huge dividends which make the time spent worth while. Will I be writing more longer resource related posts over the coming weeks and months? You can definitely count on it, though I will need to recuperate for a while before doing another one as they are much more draining than normal day to day work.

I recommend that everyone working on a blog, take some time, and put together a resource post of more than fifty items or three thousand words and see what it does for your blog.