Blogging 201: Day Two- Audit Your Brand

Still trying to catch up. The assignment for Day 2 (though I’m actually so far behind it’s really already day 10) is to ‘audit your brand’. The assignment is to look at everything you put on your blog and make sure it’s consistent with your ‘brand’.

I’m having a little bit of a hard time with this one. I’m not really sure of what my brand IS. Is it ME?? Since I don’t have any sort of product I’m trying to sell here, I guess in a way it IS me.

I’m trying to interest readers in my content which consists of my interests. It includes my photography, my opinions, my choices on what to share here, etc.

I’d really like to get people to get excited about the things that I am so passionate about, so I try to present those sorts of things here but I’m not really sure how that relates to ‘my brand’.

I’m trying to look at my blog with a critical eye. I still like the theme and think it works well for me.

I like the font and colors for my posts.

I definitely like my title and tag line.

I could probably tweak the titles of my widgets a little bit but I can’t come up with anything better right now to change them to.

I think I’ll probably move the awards to a separate page eventually and clean up the sidebar a little bit.

And MAYBE I might want to change my header photo. I’m not sure yet. I really love that photo and the feeling I get from it, but I think I might like something more in line with the coloring of the rest of my blog. That orange is just really glaring. It’s very attention grabbing, which was my purpose when I chose it for the header and I still like it for that. So I’ll leave it as is for now.

I did manage to create a new email account just for this blog (captjillsjourneys@gmail.com). It took me a while so I have NOT managed to change the settings yet (but I’ll get to that soon). I think it will probably work better for me if the email notifications re: the blog don’t keep on getting mixed up in my personal email. I lose a lot of them that way. 🙁

I also changed my ‘comment prompt’. I hope it will make people feel better about communicating with me here. 🙂

Does all this carry through to other places I’m online? I only use Facebook, Twitter, and now Pinterest (tho I’m still pretty confused as to what to do there). I’m sure the content concentration carries through.

I use the same gravatar on Facebook so it’s a good marker there. I do have one of my pictures for my Twitter gravatar but it’s actually one of me instead of one I took. I don’t see anything on Pinterest to do the same sort of function. Is there something like that on there?

I’m so far behind with the assignment that I’m not having much luck trying to look at the Commons, the computer just won’t allow me to go back that far. Does anybody have any feedback or suggestions relating to “my brand”? I’d appreciate any comments. 🙂

 

Zero to Hero- Day 2- ‘About’ Widget

Todays assignment for the Zero to Hero challenge is to add an ‘about widget’. It took me a long time to figure out how to do that and I’m still not sure I got it right.

I fiddled around with it all night. I finally got it to look a little bit like what I was going for (but I’m still not happy with it). I used an image widget instead of a text one and added some text as a caption to the image.

I took the photo on the way to work a few months ago. It was on the way out of Fourchon LA when we had to ride the crewboat instead of the helicopter. I thought it conveyed the idea of searching through the fog, which is how I feel sometimes.

The idea was to make a quick descriptive widget to show people what your blog is all about. Why would they want to take a longer look?

I already had an ‘about me’ widget and also an about page. I added this new widget just to try to do the challenge for the day. I’m not really sure if I should keep it. I almost think it makes my sidebar look more cluttered.

Anybody out there have any comments? I’d appreciate any feedback.