Originally published in 2008. Updated in 2025 as part of the Personal Branding Blog relaunch under Brown Brothers Media.
This is the third post in a series about blogging your personal brand. I’ve written a post for beginners and one for intermediate users. Please review those posts before indulging in this one.
By the time you reach the advanced stage of blogging, you’ve already mastered consistency, clarity, and audience engagement.
Now the challenge is to transform your blog from a strong personal platform into a true brand asset — one that drives opportunities, influence, and long-term growth.
Advanced blogging is about precision and leverage. It’s knowing which content builds authority, which metrics matter most, and how to turn your online presence into real-world credibility. It’s also about systematizing your efforts so that your blog works for you, even when you’re not publishing.
The following ten steps will help you elevate your blog from a well-run project to a high-impact brand engine that attracts attention, builds trust, and positions you as a leader in your field.
1) Host your own blog
Instead of borrowing someone else’s space and redirecting your domain name to that space, you have the ability to install Wordpress on your own host. I recommend owning your blog entirely so you can have full control over page elements, monetize effectively, and build a larger property over time.
Advanced personal branding bloggers should strive to make the switch and not freak out about losing content or subscribers. As long as you are using a reliable email or RSS delivery tool such as Substack, ConvertKit, or MailerLite, and have exported your content, you should be all set. The only issue you’ll have is that you will lose some search ranking to your previous site.
2) Select or design a unique theme
There are literally thousands of Wordpress themes across the net built by some savvy professional designers and programmers. You might not have the funds or expertise in order to get a custom blog template made, but there are free themes floating around as well.
When you start researching and discovering themes that you enjoy, remember that some themes are geared for specific purposes. For instance, there are “magazine themes” for people who have teams of content contributors, covering various categories. You want to not only select the best looking theme, but one that you can handle using.
If you perform a Google search on “top wordpress themes,” you should have more than enough to choose from.
3) Choose plugins
After selecting a theme, you will want to install a few necessary plugins. They will help enable people to share your content (more traffic and subscribers), as well as make your blog more interactive. Here are my favorite plugins:
- Akismet is a spam filter that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, and also checks trackbacks for spam.
- Rank Math SEO is an all-in-one optimization plugin that helps you manage titles, descriptions, and rich snippets to improve your rankings.
- WP Rocket speeds up your site through caching and performance optimization.
- Social Warfare adds clean, modern sharing buttons for social media platforms such as LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Reddit, and Facebook.
- Jetpack gives you site stats, security, and backup features.
- MailPoet lets readers subscribe and receive email notifications of new posts.
- Uncanny Automator or Zapier integrates your blog with tools like X, LinkedIn, and Threads to automatically share new posts.
4) Integrate your social networks
As an advanced user, you better be on social networks. Since everything in social media is considered a list, you’ll want to leverage your blogs success to increase the readership of your other properties.
This may include your accounts on LinkedIn, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Threads, TikTok, or Medium. There are thousands more, and you should promote only the top 5–10 that you use the most often. If you include too many, people will completely tune them out, and if you include too few, it will seem like you aren’t a power user.
Use either text or graphics to promote these profiles.
5) Search engine blog optimization
Search engine optimization for your blog is critical for a number of reasons.
First, everyone uses search engines to learn about new things. Second, search engine ranking showcases authority. Finally, having individual posts ranking high can help build the brand of your blog.
Your goal is to rank number one for your name, as well as your topic.
Think about the keywords that reflect your topic and use them throughout your headline, subheadings and body. Use links within your posts to link to other posts you’ve written and try as hard as you can to write good enough content that people will link to it.
There’s also a WordPress plugin called Rank Math SEO, which will help you optimize your posts for search engines. It helps to own a domain name with the keywords you want to rank high for, as well as a blog title that reflects those same keywords.
6) Try a few different types of posts
There are many different types of posts you can have on your blog. Experimenting with a variety of posts keeps people guessing and interested in your blog.
You could scrape the blogosphere or a traditional news site for an interesting fact or article, then quote it and respond to it in a post. You could also email a few bloggers, asking them all the same question, such as “what is your prediction for 2009, and formulate a blog post around their answers. You could become the aggregator of news for a specific topic and links your five favorite blog posts of the week. A series of posts around a theme, such as this post, tends to work well too.
7) Allow someone to guest blog
As an advanced blogger, you are given the right and hopefully the authority, to reach out to other bloggers and give them the opportunity to guest post. As your blog becomes more popular, people may just come to you and ask to guest post, but when you are in infancy, you will have to be pro-active. The benefits of a guest post on your blog are that you save time from writing a post, it’s a great way to network with other bloggers and it’s a new voice on your blog.
8 ) Interview your favorite blogger
I’ve interviewed close to 100 people on this blog. It’s the single best networking tactic I’ve used in my entire life. I couldn’t have done it until I was a more advanced blogger though because I needed a promise of value to other people. You’ll want to interview people who are more successful than you are or that can provide some knowledge in an area where you aren’t an expert. You can do the interviews by either phone, through email or in-person (video). It’s really up to you and depends on your schedules.
9) Get ranked
A great way to gain visibility for your blog is to get ranked. There are a number of different sites that rank blogs out there, such as Feedspot’s Top Blogs, LinkedIn Top Voices, Medium Top Writers, and Substack Leaderboards.
There are tons more, but these are among the most widely recognized and commonly used in the blogging world. The purpose of submitting your blog to these lists is that you get added visibility and there’s an opportunity cost if your site isn’t on them.
10) Form content partnerships
If you don’t have partnerships with other websites, you are really missing out because your content will be isolated in one specific area.
Many of my posts ended up in Reuters, Hoovers, Chicago Sun-Times, Forbes, Brazen Careerist, CollegeRecruiter.com, HRM Today, Social Media Today, Marcom Professional, Sign-on San Diego, The Examiner, and Packets Online. Obviously forming these relationships took a long time, but they give my blog more credibility and my posts more movement.
Just like submitting byline articles to magazines, you want to start small and work your way up. Aim to have your posts featured on platforms like LinkedIn Articles, Medium Publications, Flipboard, and industry newsletters to expand your reach and credibility. Research your topic area to find websites that might want to syndicate your blog and reach out to them accordingly.
Conclusion
Mastering advanced blogging for personal branding means owning your platform, diversifying your content, and building meaningful relationships. The tools may evolve, but the core principle remains: create valuable content that reflects your authentic expertise.
When you approach blogging as both an art and a business, you turn your ideas into lasting impact and your name into a trusted digital brand.
This article is part of Personal Branding Blog’s Legacy Series — highlighting timeless insights from our archive. Learn more about our story here.
