Gender Blogging and Personal Branding: Khmer Style

Beth Kanter — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:55:15 -0500

Now that I finished the campaign to raise the money to get myself to Cambodia to attend the Cambodia Bloggers Summit, I've been very busy preparing instructional materials. I'm very excited to be teaching Web2.0 and video blogging to Cambodians and a delivering a keynote! I am also so excited that the there will be a breakout session titled "Gender Blogging" facilitated by Srei Saat and Sopheap Chak. (I can't wait to share what I learn back with the Blogher Community)

Since I am a supporter of the Cambodian Bloggers Summit, one of the organizers, Virak,
emailed me with a question, "We need a copy of your personal branding
and logo for the conference flyer and t-shirts?" Ah, no logo. Virak
said, no problem, "I will make you one." I love it!

I've been incredibly busy trying to prepare for international travel, get the kids ready for school, and finish up work-related responsibilities that I hadn't gotten around to posting my notes from one of the best sessions I attended at Blogher - Personal Branding. So, now I can bring together these two disparate threads. Here are some notes I took:

Take time to ask yourself, "What does success look like?" This will help you think strategically about what you need to communicate.
Don't establish a personal brand that you can't be true to.
Ask yourself what you bring to a particular conversation area that is unique.
One of the speakers, Penelope Trunk, told a great story about she learned to deal with email overload that may result from writing a popular blog. She said that spending four hours a day answering email is better than being a garbarge person and to see how popular bloggers handled their email she left comments on the blogs of "a-list" bloggers. They answered her with one-liners and she suggests doing the same.
There were a lot of questions about how to build traffic on your blog. I learned that posts that drive a lot of traffic tend to be those that sit on the intersection between two topics. In other words, pick your niche and blog in the center.
Be interested and interesting to other people

I visited the blogs of the speakers to discover additional resources for this post. Penelope Trunk has a useful post about how to be better at self-promotion.

Nextsteph - Stephanie Cockerl, mentioned how important it was to listen and see who was linking to you. She offered three excellent resources on how to do this:

Nina Burokas handed out a 5x8 card that listed some personal branding dos and don'ts. I went searching online to find it, but was not successful. However, I did find a post on Nina's blog pointing to some additional resources from the session.

;My Logo, Cambodian Style by Virak

Beth Kanter, BlogHer's Contributing Editor for Nonprofits and Social Change, writes Beth's Blog.

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Gender Blogging and Personal Branding: Khmer Style