Blog Tips

It is quite common to have an opinion on many subjects e.g. cricket, entertainment, politics etc. Instead of trying your hand at everything, try and develop an area of expertise. This will help you gain high readership and brand loyalty.

Readers come to a website for a specific interest – could be you, your choice of topic, your writing style etc. Now, if you write on subjects which are not your areas of expertise, your loyal readers might shy away.

That said, should you shy away from writing other subjects where you think you have an opinion ?

No, definitely not.

While you have to satisfy your creative urge, you also need to take care to avoid brand erosion

To avoid personal author brand erosion and solidify your expertise in front of the target niche that you write about, you must come up with a strategy to separate your various article topics.
A solution is to create multiple versions of your name or pen-names that you write under so that each one is locked in on a particular area of expertise.

Here’s a fictitious name I picked out of the air to illustrate an example as to how many separate author names could be created out of a single person’s name:

Rahul Dutta

R Dutta

Rahul D

Or any other pen name that you like – totally unrelated names..

In my case, I write by two pen names for India Special

· Kandamangalam – General articles, issues, updates etc

· Suraj – Finance, Timepass etc

You get the idea, right ?.

Each of these author names is STILL the same person, yet you can choose to lock each variation of the name to a separate topic to write your articles about. When using this strategy, a person reading your article may attempt to read others that you’ve written, but they will only see your other articles about the same topic.  There will be no author brand erosion.

In the offline world, this multiple author brands issue is also a factor, but it is even more important for the online world where a reader can quickly identify other articles you’ve written when they are hungry for more. Give them more of the same quality original articles that they are already reading, but isolate their attention by only writing about one topic of expertise under one single author name or variation of your author name. This will strengthen your message and your author brand at the same time.

Additionally, it will be easier to track your articles by each unique variation of your author name that you used, instead of finding all of your articles of every topic under one author name.

On a different note - We at India Special highly recommend using your pen name. This is to avoid any backlashes from your employment contracts, if any. In the following tip - I will give you some suggestions about finding good pen names…

Hope you found this useful…

kandamangalam Writing brand erosion, brand loyalty, Branding, fictitious name, India Special