In a business, you always have to stay ahead and a big part of it is branding. I’m a lover of branding. I have studied branding ever since I was in high school and it was not because I had to study it (obviously, I didn’t have subjects on that in High School… haha!), but I was fascinated by it. I used to compete in aerobics marathons and I learned a lot about branding through competing. Since we were all judged and the winner was not determined by actual time spent on the aerobics floor, but by judge’s scores, how to stand out from your competition was totally up to you. You needed to get the judges attention. I had to wear really catchy outfits. I had to constantly keep that smile on my face. I had to get people to clap for me. A lot of weight on how I performed was dependent on how I ‘branded myself’ during the competition.

We know that in business branding is important, too. The likes of Nike, Starbucks and Coca-cola would not have gotten to where they are now if they didn’t value branding.

In blogging, a lot of the bloggers have asked me, how do you become a successful blogger. I wanted to share this with you in Blogopolis this year, but unfortunately, I am running Love the Leap, my entrepreneurship program this year and could not make it as a speaker. But this post is something that I would like to impart and share with bloggers who have that question still in their minds. How do you make waves and be noticed by brands? BRANDING, believe me, is a huge part of it.

1. Truly Know Yourself – I’m not a motivational speaker. Anyone who has attended my class or some of my talks know that I am far from being ‘motivational’ in any way. That is why undergoing the Yoga Teacher Certification Course for my RYT200 was difficult for me since I always thought yoga teachers needed to sound inspirational. So in this blog, you could and would actually hear me speaking. When I write, I write how I would converse with any one of my friends or family. I can’t appear or try to be someone who I am not. Do you know that readers can smell if you’re faking it or if you really mean what you say? So this thing about really knowing yourself is a big deal, because how can you communicate with others (readers) effectively, if you do not know who you are in the first place — if you keep on changing your personality from one to another? How can people truly get to know who you are?

2. Identify a Legacy that you want to Leave – You might say that this tip is so unreachable and so hard to do! Ang bigat naman! Legacy agad! I know that word Legacy sounds intimidating and it sounds like something that you would think of when you’re about to die (so morbid!), but your own legacy doesn’t have to be that deep and it doesn’t have to be something that you only think of in your deathbed. Come to think of it, I don’t think that there are any legacies that are ‘shallow’. For example, if your legacy is to be the best mom that you can be, oh my! That’s sound simple but that’s so hard to achieve. So for your blog, think of a legacy that you, as a person, want to achieve and keep in mind that your blog is there to help you. Use it as a tool to achieve that legacy.

For my blog, the legacy that I really want to leave is to help a lot of people jump into the life that they want and achieve a steady stream of passive income that helps them sustain their lifestyle through starting and maintaining a successful business. I know that becoming an entrepreneur is dream of a lot of people, and I want to help achieve this dream by sharing my own experiences and even sharing the experiences of other people. I am a believer in continuously learning about things and what I like about my role as a business coach is I get to learn more and more about business with the experiences that I get to hear from other people, too. My blog, I know, is a wonderful tool that I can use to reach this goal of mine faster.

3. Realize that only ‘YOU’ matters – When I was starting in the blogging world, I wanted to be invited to events, I wanted to know a lot of people in the industry, I wanted to hold contests and I wanted to hold contests that those more famous bloggers were holding. I wanted to be ‘in’! And then, as I got older and wiser (and more beautiful… haha! Just kidding!), I realized that in this industry, the only thing that matters is what YOU think and not what other people think. What matters is what you do and not what other people are doing. From the time that I realized this, that’s the time when I went my own way and started seeing the benefits of being unique. Of course I’m not as popular as other bloggers out there, but what matters to me is that each and every day, I get to take a step closer to my dream of helping the nation build a more stable economy with helping these aspiring entrepreneurs start their own businesses. Also, in my blog, I write about the journey of being a mom, because that’s my life and that’s who I am and SHE (my daughter) is my reason ‘why’ I’m doing all of these things.

So these are the top three things that I wanted to share with you in Blogopolis this year. I couldn’t, so I just wrote it down. I believe that bloggers are given such great power to create a lot of changes in our society today. The title of Blogopolis this year is Shifting Gears (by the way, buy your tickets na if you haven’t pa!) and is such an apt title for the environment that we are living in today. As bloggers, we are in the forefront of all of these changes and yes, although some of us may have been nominated to be influencers last year, I believe that we are all influencers in our own right.

To my fellow bloggers, thanks for nominating me for the Bloggers Choice Award for 2014. I am honored to be part of such a wonderful list of people. Guys, ano namang laban ko kina Patty Laurel (love you, Pats!), Kelly Misa at Divine Lee? haha! Picture palang, talo na ako! Anyway, thank you for those who voted for me. Please keep on voting! 🙂

Love lots,
Ginger