Juice, Juju, Karma, and The Business of Blogging: Part I

Guidelines: Self Promotion, Friend Promotion, and Brand Promotion

Here are some significant considerations that influence how I allocate link and ad juice:

• Many people in my writing circles have been puzzling over the FTC disclosure guidelines released mid-March of this year.
• When my friends thrive, I thrive.  When I thrive, my friends thrive. When companies thrive, they pay me as little as possible and get what they can for free.
• I am a writer, blogger, author.  Because I live in the 21st Century I am also a researcher, publisher, and marketer.

But as someone with a background in the theory behind much of contemporary practice in marketing I seem to know what many overlook.  Branding taps the intangible asset of emotional connection.

“Brands are powerful entities because they blend functional, performance-based values with emotional values.”
— De Chernatony 2006
 

And as a woman writer, a womanist writer, I also know about the context we carry with us, acknowledged or not, that shapes the current iteration of women’s writing:

From the Wikipedia article about:  A Room of One’s Own

“In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, (Alice) Walker writes: “Virginia Woolf, in her book A Room of One’s Own, wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself. What then are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?”

Ownership

Owning our selves, our bodies, our words, and directing the use of our efforts is a big ol’ freaking deal!  The paths we women writers chose to walk in relationship to brands, corporate entities, government regulations, and community, networks, and personal lives is transfiguring an industry, or two, or three.   WE have power, trajectory, and a changing world at our disposal so that we may wield an influence over how things can look in the future.  Of course we are also working in a world experiencing a global extinction, the 6th major extinction in the history of our living world.
We own our words, we own our world in partnership with every other living creature and system, we own our humanity.  As women we have a special view of creation.  We must be careful how we allow our creations to be used.

The Big Picture

Because the big picture can be so easily lost, we must be careful.  The picture is no longer a photograph, or a moving image.  We have entered the territory of the holographic image, losing track of the hologram can suck us into an alternate universe in which I think none of us want to live.  As I believe Public Enemy said, “Fight the Power.”  Now I may disagree with fighting – I am of the persuasion that putting any energy into a system, even energy used in opposition to it, only strengthens it – but I am totally supportive of speaking truth to power.
I see lots of friends creating successful businesses, and more power to them, but I would really love to see more women stretching the envelope beyond relatively safe topics into the expansive area of how to do business in a world that realistically will be almost unrecognizable well within this decade.  News, politics, and tech often got short shrift in the “ladies magazines” of the 20th Century.  I really want to see more high level writing, not just good writing, but more writing that diverges into exploration of topics that are not traditional, safe or predictable on women’s blogs and publications.  Almost all the women publishers I know are pushing boundaries, but they have to push even harder if we are not going to all turn into pabulum so as not to alienate the corporate advertisers who have the money we all so desperately want.

Types of Strategic Promotion

So I’m writing a series of posts on self, community, and brand promotion.  Since tomorrow is #ff day on Twitter, and that is the day I feature a writer or business friend on my #ff board on Pinterest, I will focus on community promotion or friend promotion as the next in this series.  So do set a reminder to check out part two in this series on types of promotion and branding that will consider such riveting topics as juice, karma, networks, and name-dropping.