He’s been ridiculed, laughed at and shunned by bloggers, talk-show hosts and fellow pop stars for his outrageous behavior. He’s an emotionally out of control, passionate lyrical genius, and he is a poster child for how not to act, at certain times.

And somehow, Kanye West remains one of the most interesting, influential, talked about, successful humans on the face of the planet. How does he do it? And what the hell can you possibly learn from someone like Mr. West. Well let me explain:

Kanye West Lesson #1: Be Yourself

I like hip-hop. Heck I’ll even go as far as saying that I freakin love hip-hop, which is why I’m writing a blog post about a hip-hop artist. I’m a huge music fan in general and am always analyzing how artists are using social media and promoting themselves. From Kayne’s intimate twitter feed, to his style of clothing, he hasn’t compromised himself even a little bit. He’s made it by being himself; by rapping about his mom and Jesus, by dressing like a preppy when most rappers were still wearing XXL everything, and by risking it all to express what he felt was the truth.

“When I did things like [the Taylor Swift episode] or the ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ moment, it wasn’t a matter of being selfish. It’s more like I was being selfless—that I would risk everything to express what I felt was the truth.” – Kanye West

Just like Kanye puts himself into everything he does, bloggers should also put more of themselves into their writing. For starters, you’ll enjoy blogging more about the things you like. An added bonus is that if you maintain a consistent personality, you’ll likely build a relationship with your readers and they’ll continue to come back. Content without personality is like skin blisters that are peeling. People can see it but no one wants to look at it because it’s dry and unappealing.

Don’t be like that. Be the amazing, weird, smart, quirky person that you are in real life, but also do it when you write.

Kanye West Lesson #2: Be Controversial

You need to have an opinion, dammit! There are millions of blogs out there today, millions! The blogosphere is too competitive to expect that your lackluster, (yet informative) blog will actually be read. There’s a reason why the Huffington Post averages 20-40 million page views a day, and it’s greatly due to sniffing out controversial, “viral” subject matters, like this, this and this.

There’s no need to rehash Kanye’s most controversial moments, but the guy gets people talking about him. The point isn’t to make people hate you, but being too safe with your ideas and subject matter will force your readers to bounce (or never come in the first place). Don’t be afraid of pushing the envelope a little bit, just as long as you can stand behind them. A big part of the reason why people don’t write about their opinions is because it requires additional work. Do the extra work, add your opinions and back your content up.

“… Everything is an opinion. The way you dress is an expression of your opinion. Your religious beliefs are your opinion. The music you turn up loud is your opinion. For most people it’s easier to just agree. For me the hardest thing is to ‘just’ agree and that is what sparks creativity. The feeling that something can be better, the feeling that something’s missing, the feeling that something’s needed.” – Kanye West

Kanye West Lesson #3: Stay Passionate

Writing, blogging— whatever you want to call it — is a marriage. Being a writer isn’t “till I make my boss happy do we part,” it’s “till death do we part.” It’s a full time commitment, and becoming exceptional doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes you’ll feel insecure about what you write and hate every single word, and sometimes *gasp* no one will even read it. But it’s all part of the game.

Despite all of Kanye’s mess ups his ability to remain passionate is what has made him a successful hip-hop star. The guy spit raps through a jaw that was shut with wires in 2002 after a brutal car crash, for crying out loud. If you’re not passionate about blogging, read Kanye West Lesson #1 and #2.

Kanye West Lesson #4: Be a Rockstar

My favorite Kanye quote is about how “underground” rappers with great amounts of talent are the only ones holding themselves back. “Everyone who could be a real rock star is just too scared,” he said. Kanye loves himself, and isn’t afraid to let you know. He’s his own number 1 fan and believes there’s no limit to who he can be in the world (producer, rapper, fashionista, record-label owner). It’s this, “the world is mine!” attitude that will help bloggers reach online stardom.  Share your content, push your content and promote yourself!

It should also be said that Kanye couldn’t have reached rock-star status by himself. He collaborates with the biggest names in hip-hop including, Jay-Z, Common, Alicia Keys, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Kid Cudi and the list goes on. On his latest album, “Cruel Summer,” Kanye collaborated with 22 other artists. It’s a two way street, and both parties benefit from the collaboration. Find the influencers in your industry, and share, promote and comment on their content. Heck, you could even collaborate on projects, like SEO.com’s Bryan Phelps did when he wrote, “Local Search Dream Team.”

Kanye West Lesson #5: Be Consistently Creative

Kanye’s ability to be consistently creative in every aspect of his life has been the main key to success. In additions to selling more than 10 million albums and receiving countless producer credits, there’s a reason why brands like Nike and Louis Vuitton have signature fashion lines. The guy is creative. How does Kanye stay creative? I like to think it’s because gets inspiration from his own life (in his latest song he talked about feeling suicidal after his mom died).

Bloggers can learn from Kanye West by staying creative by just being themselves, adding personality to their posts, staying passionate and learning from others in their industry.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a bit of a Kanye fan. I don’t think he’s the paragon of brand management. I think he’s anything less than a “jackass,” like President Obama once said. But Kanye brings an immense amount of passion, controversy and creativity into the world, something I wish bloggers would create a little more of.

Bloggers: Please start being a little more like Kanye and little less like a saltine cracker.

Feature Image Credit

5 Things Bloggers Can Learn From Kanye West is a post by SEO expert Rebecca Babicz. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

We get a lot of requests at SEO.com for reputation management services. Truth be told, they aren’t the most fun projects in the world, and often times it takes a few years to really clean up any negative results and keep them away from the first page.

I am a huge believer in starting a reputation management campaign in the initial phases of launching your business, or even launching a simple website selling an affiliate product.

The purpose behind this strategy is twofold: One, it provides you an opportunity to fill the search engine results pages with relevant content about your business, your website, or even your executives, before anyone else can come in and dirty them up. Second, it allows you to take that content and strengthen it via backlinks and other methods so that if you do screw up or have a disgruntled customer posting negative online content, yours is aged, more authoritative, and is harder to outrank.

So, this sounds good right? Sure it does!

But how do you get started?

First

You need to identify certain properties you would like showing up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for the names you want to protect. Obviously, I want to make sure my website is ranked #1 for the search query. I will also set myself up to capture positions 2 and possibly 3 in the SERPs by having a blog and other authoritative pages on my site.

Next

Identify the basic Web properties you know that you can have full control over. These are sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Squidoo, and HubPages. You might also look at building a Wikipedia page, although it’s a bit more risky since you don’t have full control over the content of the page. I will then take the time to build out an optimized profile on each of these sites and begin interlinking them and building some external backlinks to them as well. For your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn profiles, you might also link to them from the footer of your website to help pass your site’s authority to those properties.

And Next

After you have the properties set up and optimized, you definitely aren’t done. The sole purpose of these is to keep any negative content from creeping up to page one of the results. To better your chances of success, you will continually need to strengthen them through different methods.

Building external backlinks will help, but often times they only get you so far. One way I like to strengthen these properties is by finding ways to build internal links. With just a few internal links from pages with a lot of authority, your company’s profile pages will quickly start to rise in the SERPs, and have staying power.

There are other methods and strategies you can execute to strengthen these pages, but this should help you get off on the right foot. The most important things to remember are that one: you need to be proactive and not reactive when it comes to reputation management. Start early and push hard to protect your what’s rightfully yours. And two: pick properties that you can control. Nothing is worse than putting out some content to assist in the reputation management process and finding out that you aren’t able to moderate comments and you just shot yourself in the foot.

How to Start Reputation Management BEFORE You Have Problems is a post by SEO expert Greg Shuey. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.