We’ve been working this week on some of the blog consultancy packages that people elected to buy as part of their purchase of Beyond Blogging. And one issue I’ve seen a few times is quite a common one for bloggers – a lack of brand consistency.

It’s particularly hard for many of us, as we often end up representing or promoting several brands across the web. In my case, I’m generally know as Mike CJ, but I also represent the Mike’s Life brand, then there’s the Beyond Blogging brand, and behind it all I have two companies as well. And I suspect most bloggers face a similar dilemma: Which one is the key brand and how do we promote it across all the various media we use?

You can see this all go wrong in some cases – I know of a blogger (not one of our consultancies) who actually has a different brand and a different name on his blog, his Twitter profile and his Facebook account. It’s just confusing! In fact, I recommended his services to another friend, but used his Twitter name. My friend contacted him via Twitter, and it later turned out they knew each other already via their blogs!

So what’s the solution? I think you have to choose one overall brand, and duplicate that across all media. By all means promote others from it, but stick to the one and people will recognise you wherever you appear. Once you have a good recognition factor for your key brand, then you can work on associating other brands with it, so that they become add-ons associated with the main one. An example of this would be the iPod – it has it’s own logo, it’s own marketing, and everybody knows what an iPod is, but it’s also inextricably linked to the core (!) brand of Apple.

What about you? What are your thoughts on branding?

I mentioned we did the Gary Vaynerchuk interview the other evening. I was just listening to it again and I was laughing out loud! Not to the interview, but to the 5 or 6 minutes when Nathan and I were on the conference call before Gary burst onto the line.

You can hear the nerves in our voices. Remember Gary has been interviewed by some of the biggest names in show business, and here we were, waiting for him to come on the line to be interviewed by a couple of rank amateurs. So we babbled away about all sorts of rubbish, just to pass the time! Fancy a laugh? Want to hear it? Nathan needs a few of you to persuade him to post that section of the interview, so get commenting below and he’ll put it up.

The interview? It was awesome. As always Gary was excellent and terrific value. Nathan did a fantastic job asking the questions. It dawned on me that he talks Gary’s language and I don’t. I can’t use phrases like “Dude” and “Man” and “Awesome” when I speak because I have this upper class English accent, and frankly it sounds lame when I try to do it!

Anyway, get commenting. Hint: If he leaves that part in, you may get to find out what Nathan does in the military, and it’s quite interesting.

I’ve spent that last couple of days writing up the interview from Chris Garrett and also the case study for Darren Rowse for the book. It’s been fascinating, as they are quite similar personalities, but with a very different approach. Both are quite shy and diffident, neither is an “in your face” marketer, but they are both hugely successful. Darren’s secret has been to build blogs with huge audiences and make income via advertising, a few inexpensive own products and some major affiliations, whereas Chris has used social media to create business for his consultancy company.

I’v been able to take some solid lessons from this work, and I’m really looking forward to pulling them together with Nathan, when we create the “Blueprint for Success” part of Beyond Blogging.

I’ve also been listening to the audio of our interview with Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s a fascinating guy and a massive contrast to Darren and Chris. Nathan is starting to put Gary’s section of the book together at the moment, and I know that one will be full of interesting facts and ideas, and I suspect several things that may come as a real surprise to readers!

This is an exciting journey, and we’re well into the hard work phase now, but I feel everything is starting to come together.

We’ve decided to keep you all up to date with what we’re doing for the book, so that you can share in it’s creation and evolution. I’m going to post here every day with an update – they will only be short, but they will give you a flavor and some interesting snippets.

So please join the RSS feed so you don’t miss anything. And please register on the site – we’ve got some amazing special features coming up for people on that list, including gifts, prize competitions and information about our featured bloggers.