There is no denying that the Internet is an incredible self propagating creation that has become an integral part of our society. Through it and all the services that live within it our lives have in one fashion or another been changed and continue to be changed. No more so has this change been seen that in the way ideas, information and news spread with sometimes brush fire speed.

At the forefront of that brush fire are the early adopters with their Twitter accounts and their blogs fanning the flames that spreads the news at an ever faster rate. Once any information hits those front lines of the Internet world there is literally no way to stop it from spreading around the world at this breakneck speed. It is the decentralized nature of the Internet that allows for the unfettered transmission of our words around our world and yet even within this total freedom we want to throw up roadblocks or place walls around our contributions.

While Twitter and social aggregators like FriendFeed are all about real freedom of information bloggers have found themselves coming to a crossroads. On one side we have those bloggers who are just happy with getting their thoughts out there without any concern of things like comment fragmentation or monetization of a brand. For others who have decided that this is a serious career path for them things like brand dilution and fragmentation have become important topics of conversation.

Many posts have been written across the blogosphere on both sides of the value and protection of a blogger’s brand and content. These post seem to fly about the most when topics like advertising are raised or when new services come along that threaten to take an author’s content and comments away from their blog. When these subjects come up the reaction can be anything from being okay with what is happening to rabid protection of what is perceived as a personal space being threatened.

For those of us that have made the decision that blogging is a career the idea of our blogs becoming our brand is a reasonable assumption to make. As such we believe we need to do everything we can to build, strengthen and protect that brand. Part of that building process is making sure you do whatever you can to get the eyeballs to your blog to read your content; and to do so on a regular daily basis. After all how can you become a TechCrunch or Mashable or ReadWriteWeb quality brand if you don’t.

The problem is that no matter how hard you try the chance these days of approaching that level of brand popularity and income is next to nil. You can very well come close but if you are thinking that this will all translate into a fat wallet because of advertising you’d better take a deep breath and think again. The reasons for this are many fold but these are some of the things that I think why direct income from blogs is a dead horse:

1. Dilution of the blogosphere - What I mean by this is that there are just too damn many of them out there. It isn’t just the A-List that you might be fighting your way into but you are also fighting to rise above the literally millions of blogs out there and more being started everyday. You can write as well as Shakespeare but for every excellent turn of phrase you turn out there is a blog that is either a waste of space or is a splog. This is who you are really fighting against.

2. Page views are dead - Unless you are in the top 10 of the blog brands chances are page views don’t mean squat other than making you depressed and cranky at your seemingly lack of progress. The problem is that any ad service whether it be some ad network or Google AdSense is all based around page views. For the average blogger who is working their way up or has even become successful within their niche this reliance on page views as a metric is a killer.

3. Overall metrics suck donkey balls - It doesn’t matter what stats service or plugin you use they are all as about as accurate and useful as tits on a bull. I have yet to see any two or three or even four stats come up with the same figures - most of the time they don’t even come close to each other. So if this is the case what use are they as a measurement of a blogs success - especially a niche or upcoming blog.

4. Our own fear of losing control - This is becoming an even bigger holdback as we go forward and leads to endless discussions about comment fragmentation and an unwillingness to try new things like Disqus or IntenseDebate for handling comment. It makes us reactive negatively to things like video comments or aggregators like FriendFeed and Shyftr. Instead of looking for new ways to advance our brand outside of our blogs we throw up walls around it.

So how do we get past this instinctive reaction to protect our brand that could in fact be holding it back? Well the first thing I believe we have to do is for the time being give up the notion that any type of economic return from the blog itself isn’t going to happen. As Tony Hung said on Deep Jive Interests when he talked about this

Blogging, as an activity in and of itself, rarely pays.

More to the point: up until recently, it has never really paid for anyone.

And by “pay” I mean that it the most mercenary, and yet, the most metaphorical terms.  Compared to whatever day job you hold or once held, on a per hourly basis, it will not compete (perhaps even within an order of magnitude) with that level of compensation and never will.

In order for any real economic return directly from your blog to happen there will have to be a dramatic shift in the models used by advertisers to spend their money; which I have written about before, but that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. That doesn’t mean though that one should give up on trying to promote their brand or their blog.

This also is where I think many bloggers on the we need to protect our brand side of the fence are missing a key point. While your blog may have come first and that is what has created your brand there came a point where your brand has surpassed your blog. After all in this day and age your brand is not a disembodied entity - it has become you .. you are the brand. So every time you twitter or post a comment on FriendFeed or share a post you like on one of the Shared Feed option your brand is being promoted.

Sure it is getting harder and harder to get people to come to the actual blog and read the post but that doesn’t mean that some of these new tools available to us don’t actually encourage folks to come there to read or comment. In fact I have seen an increase in comments since I started using FriendFeed and even more so since they integrated Disqus. Not to mention that even adding Disqus in the first place to the blog saw a slow increase in the willingness of people to leave comments.

It doesn’t stop there though because if there is one thing we should learn from old media and big brand companies it is that you need to sell your brand and that doesn’t happen by keeping it locked away because you don’t want to lose any control. The best example of this selling of your brand I can give is something that happened to me and it was as simple as making a comment on some-one else’s blog. That one thing resulted in over 30,000 hits in the space of two days and still sees residual hits to this day.

The fact is that your brand cannot grow if you are forever trying to keep it behind the wall of your own blog. Your brand is more than just your blog now and as such that is what you need to be out there promoting and using all the available tools to get that brand in front of as many eyeballs you can. We need to get over the fear of losing control of our content because the fact is that this is the Internet and information of any kind will at some point work its way free.

While advertiser will need to learn to understand that the game is changing and that they are not so much advertising on your blog but that they are in effect sponsoring your brand we also as bloggers need to realize that the communication rules are constantly shifting as well. Sure it will mean more work to an extent in order to promote our brand and blogs but that is the cost of doing business even if you are only blogging part-time or as a self sufficient hobby.

As hard as it might be for bloggers I believe that in order to keep growing be have to begin to believe in our brand; of which our blogs are only a part of, and do everything we can to promote it. Things change on an almost daily basis and if we don’t do our best to use the tools that are being given to us to grow then we deserve to fade away as the world changes around us.

The time has come to be willing to set our brand free and nurture it as it grows up in this new media world. If a cranky old fart can see that maybe you to should take a second look.