Hold My Feet to the Fire!

What ambiance does your blog create?  Do you plunge your readers into adventure with action photos or do you calm and sooth with soft colors and elegant imagery.  Is your blog matter-of-fact or is it a social gadfly?

As a new blogger it has been fascinating to me see the different looks and feels of the most popular blogs and compare them to other brands.  Blogging is entering into people’s already incredibly busy and chock-full of options lives.  If you want the reader’s attention, you have to let them knew what you are offering, and fast.  Your blog’s look is your 15 second elevator pitch, it conveys the basics quickly and efficiently, therefore the ambiance of the blog has to promote and communicate the content.  Viewers should, with only the briefest perusal, understand theme and thrust of the blog, who the viewers are, and why the blog is unique.

Think back to the magazines, brands, and catalogs that have most grabbed your attention.  The master of branding and creating ambiance is Ralph Lauren Polo .  Polo’s target clients are middle and upper middle class people who want to capture some of the aura of the leisured wealthy, or at least what they imagine the leisured wealthy must be like.  Its ads convey images of polo grounds, yachts, excess and luxury.  The niche is so lucrative, and  Polo has done it so well, that it has attracted massive imitation.

Among  the countless enterprises that flog clothes with high-end appeal to the middle class, one of my current favorites is The Territory Ahead.  The image they sell is of a rugged yet sophisticated sort of individualism, combining images of the American West with the Old World.  I like to think of them catering to the modern day Hemingway, although they don’t specifically bill it that way.  The Territory Ahead has taken narrowed and focused on a niche that overlaps Polo’s but in doing so have boldly differentiated themselves, creating a unique ambiance of their own and telling a rather different story, the Territory Ahead man or woman would feel at home at a Polo-type event, but they are just as comfortable at the rodeo.

If we move into the word of blogs, we can look at the ambiances created by some of the most successful brands in blogging.  I am mostly interested entrepreneurship, self-actualization, and the use of technology to enhance your productive life so that is where many of my examples will come from.  Nonetheless, whatever your interests are the next time you open up your favorite blogs look at them with fresh eyes and ask yourself, what is the feel you get just with looking at them for five seconds?  Can you tell who the target market is?  Are they people you want to spend time with?

One of the masters of the ambiance in a blog must be Brett McKay and folks at the Art of Manliness.  In fact, I came across his site while doing research for my own and I instantly thought “wow, this guy is onto something!”  The look of the site perfectly captured the spirit of the content and the 15 second elevator pitch tells you instantly what the site is about, who the intended readers are, and what type of world they want to live in.   That last point is the key, creating a universe that is at once comfortable and at the same time adventurous for its readers.  Its familiarity provides comfort, for it is the world of our fathers and grandfathers, but it is not ours, and that provides the adventure.  The editors create this ambiance through clever use of color, fonts, and the consistent application of imagery, in this case antique photos and graphics.

An entirely different but still very effective approach to is demonstrated by Ramit Sethi’s “I Will Teach You To Be Rich“   which uses bright, jarring colors and bold language to make its pitch to keep the casual browser.  Images on the blog tend to be simple and are not thematic as in the Art of Manliness above.  Sethi’s problem is that he is in a very crowded field, personal finance, and that he has to differentiate himself from all the others, which he accomplishes by focusing on a target group of young Generation X professionals without families and dealing with many personal finance issues for the first time.  His front page isn’t doused with visuals because many of his hip and young readers are going to access his content through RSS feeds or social media sites anyway.  To keep the reader, Sethi using brash titles in bold font and deliberately uses casual language and the slang that would be familiar to his target readership.  By doing away with imagery and only giving brief introductions to his posts, Sethi can maximize the number of titles he can put on a page and therefore emphasize the information he is offering his readers.

Compare “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” with “Get Rich Slowly” , which is another site about personal finance and economics, but has a very different feel.  It’s more traditional, eschewing brash colors for a soothing green, which of course also has connotations of money.  “Get Rich Slowly” also keeps its presentation simple and clean, with a minimal of photos and graphics, but the ambiance is very different.  One can see at a glance that J.D. Roth has a very different niche in mind than Ramit Sethi.  In addition, he has chosen to present it in a different way, following more the traditional style of the chronological blog with quite long introductions.  The idea one gets is that, while Sethi is providing information, Roth is telling a story.  I’m not saying “I Will Teach You To Be Rich doesn’t have a story, nor that “Get Rich Slowly” doesn’t have a ton of valuable information, but each blogger has chosen to emphasize a different aspect of their blog.  Remember, we are talking the 15 second elevator pitch here, you need to make the pitch that will most appeal to your intended niche.

Obviously, there is no one way to brand a successful blog or web site.  What is essential is to keep in mind the pitch your blog is making and the ambiance it sets for the new reader.  The use of imagery, color and the lay out are all essential to communicate to the new reader in the most efficient manner possible what the essence of your blog is and who are the people they will be interacting with on the blog.  Your blog is your brand, hone in and focus on the story that your blog has to tell.