For today’s Blogging 101 I wanted to talk about something called Brand Reputation. I’ve seen a lot of blogger drama recently (are people bored during lockdown?) and I’ve seen how the reputation of some bloggers is negatively impacting (or positively in some cases…) the success and following of the blogger. So let’s chat about how you can build, protect and improve your own blog brand reputation.
What is Brand Reputation?
Put simply, your brand reputation is how your audience views your blog as a brand or person. To be more complicated, your blog reputation depends on so many different factors which you have to work on, however some factors are completely out of your control.
Why You Should Care About Your Brand Reputation?
Your brand reputation and brand image is what people think about you and your blog, which means it can help or hinder your success. If you brand reputation is build on gossip, being rude, and not respecting others (for example, Perez Hilton…) how would this affect the goals you have for your blog? Probably badly… unless you’re a celeb gossip blog.
Your brand reputation could be about being friendly, being credible, being well informed on the newest things in your industry, having good reviews, and many more. Each of these would be a bonus to new and returning viewers about your content, and can be a reason why they trust you. So you should care about your brand reputation as often people care what others think. Plus, once you gain a bad reputation it’s much harder to shrug it off as people will talk to others about it, potentially warning them away.
What is a Good Brand Reputation?
Let’s talk more about what helps build up a good brand reputation. Reputation includes so many different factors, but here is a list of some key things which help create a good reputation:
- High credibility and trustworthiness
- Positive social media presence and interactions
- A positive community driven audience
- Responding well to both compliments and criticisms online
- High quality of content
- Positive mission and values (that are visible for the audience)
- Postive word of mouth from others
- Loyalty of readers
- Blogger is a good person
How to Build Your Brand Reputation
Now this one is tricky, especially if you already have a brand and are known for certain things. So we’e going to start with what you can do first. If you’re just starting out you can guide your brand reputation by creating your brand and tone of voice based on the principles you want to be known for. Your mission and values are vital, as long as you know how to show them off in the best way.
Creating an about me page which includes your brand story can be a starting point to telling your audience exactly which values you want to be associated with. Setting out your values transparently and then living up to those values will immediately show trustworthiness, but at the same time stepping outside of those values would decrease your reputation.
The above values should also align with you as a person. Your blog’s reputation will often hinge around how people percieve you individualy, and therefore your personal branding should match your blog and be consistent. You should take online etiquette seriously, and if you’re using your blog as a professional platform you should stay professional.
Next up is to ensure you’re gaining your audiences trust and staying credible. Credibility could be it’s very own blog post, but the main emphasis is on high quality content that is the truth so your audience learns that you’re a credible source of information.
High quality content is also a factor of reputation, where the type of content you create can be how others percieve you. Creating useful and unique content is key to build up an audience that knows you’re going to deliver on content they will want to read.
Then last but not least, you should conduct yourself and your blog on social media in a way that aligns with your values, but also aligns with audiences expectations. I see people often risk their reputation because of social media posts that are misread by others, so you do need to be mindful of what you post.
Protecting Your Brand Reputation
After you’ve spent time building up a reputation, how do you protect your brand from possibly going downhill? Well first up, don’t be a dick. I see so many bloggers fall from grace because they’ve been rude or started drama for no reason, and then get upset when others are annoyed at them. But as with real life, if you don’t like someone online just don’t put yourself in a position where you have to speak to them. Social media has both mute and block buttons to help you remove people from your space if needed.
Build your community to be a postive and healthy audience. If you have loyal followers, them doing bad things can also negatively affect you. For example, Pedwdiepie has a shooter name drop him before the horrific act – this negatively impacted him as a creator and he took steps to distance himself from the person immediately after. The backlash was bad, but if the community had been more positive in the first place, the shooter probably would not have joined.
Protect yourself and your blog. Ensure you have strong passwords, use 2FA and take steps to ensure your blog or socials won’t be hacked. Whilst for the most part, accounts being hacked are obvious it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
Plus, all those things you were building – you still need to do that work too. For example, you work hard for a year on your content being the best it can be, you build up credibility and your reputation is that you write great posts. If after that year you stop writing great posts… you’ll lose the reputation.
Improving a Bad Reputation
Now onto the hard part. If you have a “bad” reputation, how do you go about changing and improving it?
First, for whatever you have done wrong, apologise and truly take ownership of the mistake you made to give you a bad rep. I want to emphasise that if you’re not actually sorry, and you don’t see what you’ve done wrong… I can’t help you and this step will probably fall flat. Take the time to educate yourself on why what you’ve done is wrong, and then apologise if you truly feel this way. This will be just the first step, but without an apology often any next step will feel hollow. Please note, an apology does not count if it’s an apology that someone feels X after your actions. Apologise for the action itself, and show actual remorse.
Take time after the apology to do some self reflection and get to grips about why you’re percieved negatively. Whilst I’ve said in the first step to apologise, this recent negativity could be due to other people’s gossip or personal feelings towards you. Unfortunately, there’s not much to do if the negativity is false allegations but you should evaluate your relationships and reduce the circle who may be feeidng them.
If the negative sentiment stems from a blog post or social media post, take the time to remove the part that has caused hurt or anger. If it’s a blog post in particular, you should take the time to edit the part to display factually correct and non-offensive content. If you edit a blog post, I would recommend making an edit note at the end of the post, detailing the chnage and the reasonings why. This will show that you’ve both learnt from the mistake, and own up to it.
If your blog’s bad reputation is a reflection of your personal morals then people won’t believe you’ve changed for the better if your morals don’t also change. Education is your friend in these situations.
Genuinely take action to change. Second chances are often given to those who need them, but third and fourth chances shouldn’t need to be the case in most situations. If you’re gaining a bad repuation because you’re doing something wrong, take the time to learn about the issue and to correct your own behaviour.