Should I Concern on Personal Branding More?

Since I jump into photography in late of 2013, I watch many famous photographers YouTube channel and I found interesting things they do to their branding.

I’ll give one of the examples, Matt Granger with “ThatNikonGuy” branding. If you watch his channel quite a while, then you’ll find this video that declares the branding is dead.

The question is, why would he do that? Even after the branding established and used anywhere including his community (forum) domain. I wonder why he is willing to take the risk to lose his audience by changing the brand? Well, I may experience his consideration today since I’m trying to do a kind of similar thing last year.

I bought a few internet domains and focus on different content to serve a difference audience. But what happens is that, if I’m the only one who maintains all of these domains, actually I couldn’t focus on any one of it. And I give more confusion to my audience about why suddenly I stop posting about my photography stuff because I posted on another channel for my photography audience.

At first, I thought it’s better to split my audience, i.e. those who are following my blog since 2008, they might know this blog as IT-related stuff. But for those who know me since I’m doing photography as my hobby, and those who met me in the photography session and discover my websites, they may expect my post related to photography stuff. I thought maybe it would be genius to split my audience to give them the convenience to follow my articles, and I was wrong …

It’s so difficult to maintain what I consider as a “corporate branding” (even though not a corporate yet :-)). I feel that I couldn’t manage all of those brands, and it’s better to focus on personal branding first. I think this is what Matt Granger is doing, instead of keeping his old brand as “ThatNikonGuy”, he is using his personal brand as “Matt Granger” because when the brand succeeds, that is his name. The name sticks to the person and the brand.

As part of the 10th Years Anniversary of this blog, I would suspend my other branding and focus back on my personal branding. I would suspend my “Journey Performed” and “Candid of Strangers” project so I can focus on this blog or channel and to concentrate back my audience into one channel. If you’re my follower on that channel, I would slowly move all of those content to one of the section in this blog. Wish me luck this year and hopefully, I can share more of my experience in the future through this channel.