Besides starting and managing a blog, in the six years I have been blogging, I learned that branding was the most important thing. A blog is not only the place where you publish your thoughts, photos and videos but instead, it is a real brand that can be built or not around one person.
The Blonde Salad built its brand around Chiara Ferragni who represents it like any fashion blog is represented by who founded it. For the Glam Observer, it is another story as it is not centred around one person but rather around its branding characterised by a unique mix of business, fashion, beauty, blogging and career.
After the profession of blogger – now influencer – started booming, more and more people began blogging hoping to earn a living from their passion. Nonetheless, many of them mainly saw it as a business. Be it for passion or business reasons, when someone thinks about starting a blog, the first thing that comes to mind is monetisation rather than branding.
If at first, the business of blogging worked around banner ads, nowadays the primary sources of income come from posts in collaboration with brands. More and more fashion, beauty, lifestyle and food brands are now getting a grasp of influencer marketing and consider it an even more efficient form of advertising, especially when it targets millennials.
Unfortunately, not all brands and blogs succeed in managing and taking advantage of this fantastic opportunity in all its capacity to obtain the best results.
Very often bloggers receive emails from brands asking them to sponsor products for free; or even worse, some of them receive proposals from brands which are not in line with the content of their site.
Most of the time, when opening a blog the first thing you want to do is securing collaborations with brands to prove yourself and others that you can earn money. Nonetheless, accepting any partnership with any brand is not the path that will lead towards success on a long term.
You should first select your collaboration carefully and only accept the ones in line with your blog. The same goes for brands. Contacting a blogger out of the blue is not the best strategy. Today, there are many blogs producing content of high quality whatever the niche. Instagram is a free tool that can be used to look and find influencers matching with your brand and then elaborate an influencer marketing strategy that works.
In the end, results are what matter. Contacting an influencer with a large following isn’t enough anymore, what counts is the fact that her followers match with the profile of the customers you want to reach.
Another mistake that brands often make is asking for a one-off partnership. It requires time and consistency to start reaping the fruits of a robust communication strategy. The idea of overnight success is a utopia, that is why one post from an influencer isn’t enough. You will see results in the long-term.
Revolve is an excellent example of a successful long-term strategy. The American retailer has been a pioneer in influencer marketing for years by inviting bloggers to trips all over the world. The brand can credit its status to a consistent strategy.
For bloggers, getting short-term partnerships always entail risks. It is better to have a limited portfolio of brands with which collaborate on the long run rather than working with many brands and not being sure of having any income the next month.
Try analysing the most prominent influencers, and you will discover that they always work with the same brands. Earlier these days, Dior Makeup brought renowned influencers like Chriselle Lim and Leonie Hanne to Shangai to celebrate the launch of Capture Youth – its new line of serums. The brand collaborated in the past with the founder of OhhCouture when she was invited to go to Paris and the South of France for a project around the perfume Miss Dior.
Use Leonie’s example for your partnership model to work on the long-term with few brands while developing a successful blog.
It is a strategy used by all the most acclaimed influencers.
If it is true that blogging doesn’t generate a regular income like any other job, it is also true that you need to create a strategy enabling you always to have different steady streams of revenue that should be superior to the last month. When contacting brands or the other way round, tell them short-term partnerships don’t help to obtain positive results for both parties – especially for them. Explain them, three months of collaboration is the amount of time necessary to reap the benefits of a partnership. It is only after that period a brand will understand if the investment was worth it or not and then decide to keep on collaborating with you or not.
