Blogging and paid work - The Value of a Micro Brand
by Rob Paterson
Hugh has been thinking a lot recently about the value of blogging and MicroBrands - not the least the MicroBrand that is Hugh himself.
If you have something to say, then a blog offers a cheap, easy global medium in which to express yourself. This is as true now as it was three years ago.
Whether you have the time and the talent for it, “i.e. the skill and the will”, is another matter altogether. Also, whether other people will want to read it, is something one has little control over. But in both cases, the same is true for all other media.
So whether the now-famous Mark Zuckerberg sells Facebook for $15billion or $5billion, the fact remains, we all have our own lives, our own bills to pay. And that means interacting in the adult world of commerce somehow. Everyone has to get paid.
And it’s much easier to do the latter if one is good at building one’s own personal brand, independent of one’s job title.
Me? I prefer my brand to be a “global microbrand”. It’s easy and it’s flexible. It’s not tied down to one geographical locale, which I’ve always found to be financially unreliable. So business is a bit slow around here in England. No matter. I’ll head over to Redmond, Washington, and do a gig for Microsoft if I have to. New York? Sure. Houston? If they pay me enough.
So that’s why I have a blog, I suppose. I like the control. I write something, I post it, it gets read, hopefully good things happen as a result, somewhere on this small blue planet of ours. Unlike a book or a movie or a TV commercial, there’s no waiting around for somebody else to greenlight it. The only light is the greenlight.
Sure, I hear you saying, “But the scale is so small.” I don’t know about that. At last count [and this was a couple of years ago] the “How To Be Creative” page had been downloaded a quarter of a million times. And Lord knows how many copies of the “ChangeThis” PDF version were printed out and circulated. Most hardbacks are lucky if they sell three thousand copies. Granted, movies get seen by a lot of people, but only for a week or two.Then they leave the cinema and are mostly consigned to a lonely life on the DVD rack. And they’re expensive and take years to make. They have a lot, I mean A LOT of downtime. Whereas a blog is constantly working, constantly growing. I like that.
I guess my point is, if you’re one of these people considering giving up on blogging in exchange for paying more attention to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, bear in mind you are giving up on something rather unique and wonderful. But I would say that.
I will be going public on Monday with a surprising new client. I became involved directly because of the relationships that I have developed from my own blogging. My earlier work with NPR had the same genesis. In fact nearly all my work is derived directly from the MicroBrand that is me, Rob. I can live in a beautiful place like PEI, walk the dogs, feed the fire, mow the lawn and still be in the wider world.
Nearly all the people I work with both as clients and as co workers on projects also come from my blogging community. My long suffering wife, Robin, has finally seen that all this time in my PJ’s is worth it.
I have also got something beyond price - a whole new group of friends that have become very precious.
So when people say they have no time to blog, they risk cutting themselves off from much good in the world. Facebook is fun, but with blogging, there is the opportunity to discover another person.
Transformation is possible - you don’t believe me - then look at Dave
Dave is passionately exploring how social media may shift another institution - the idea of an exclusive property based bond between only one man and one woman. I think that maybe an entire new site about social media may be needed to go there.
