Pagan Branding

So if your reading this from the blog and not google reader or email subscription, you will notice a pretty significant change. Yes, I felt a need to change from the cute Halloween theme to a more adult autumn look. I will probably change it again on Dec 1 for Yule lol. My friend Kelby Carr ( social media guru) will probably cringe at this because it can be mess with my “branding”.  But here is the thing with us pagan bloggers. I would imagine that we would expect these types of changes throughout the year. I mean we do this in our every day lives, why not on our blogs too? And in fact I would say that it is conducive with branding ourselves as Pagan. Now even though I don’t use my blog to educate the masses about paganism on a daily basis, I do educate on occasion. People learn both by reading and the visual aspect. Over time with my changing of themes to fit the season and some of the posts I put up….non-pagans can see how it all fits together (unless your like some of my non-pagan readers who already have a great understanding).

Now some of you may be wondering….branding? WHAT???? So here is the skinny on branding, it makes you more recognizable. On Twitter I am PaganMomBlog and I have a blog button that is specifically to brand me by having my name plastered on it. This is so if I go to a blogger social event, people mentally remember exactly who I am. Now some of you may not be branding for protection of your identity. That’s ok, we get it. Some of you have never thought about it, that’s ok too. It’s only important when you want to in effect sell yourself as an institution. I had personally never thought about it until I went to a blogger conference. I then set to brand myself and I found it worked well when I attended a recent local blog/twitter award Halloween event. My costume for that evening was a witch’s costume…..more branding! Lol! And surprisingly I did have someone recognize me even though we had never met. That felt cool. When I started blogging it wasn’t so much about putting it out to the world who I was. It was about for me, and it is still about me, but to have people come up and say “Oh I enjoyed your blog post about blah blah blah” is pretty freaking cool.

The downside of it is, you can expose yourself to a slew of scrutiny. I haven’t had any issue with that so far, but I am not immune to it and I know that. But I have seen and heard about bloggers who have come to near celebrity status. And with that comes alot of negativity. Some bloggers will put you up above where you respectively need to be. Some people forget that your human and your not out to please the masses.  So if you haven’t branded yourself that does need to be thought about. Perhaps it will never happen to me or you, but the possibility is there.