How WordPress.com helped me build my brand and get to work with the GRAMMYs 

Written by Harun Momanyi, CEO of Tranquil Media Group. He has bylines on leading publications worldwide and has been a WordPress user and advocate since 2012.

This article contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. 

Back in September 2024, I got tonnes of messages from my friends and strangers. I was published by GRAMMY.com, and they shared the article on their official Instagram, X, and Facebook feeds.

My name was written all over; I had just achieved a major milestone in my career. The article was about the Amapiano music genre, its 10 years of evolution, the pioneers behind it and the new talent worth checking out. 

I reached out to big names in the African music industry, from Diamond Platnumz to Uncle Waffles, and they all agreed to be interviewed for the feature.

I didn’t reach this level of collaboration by accident. It took years of hard work and intentional brand building to the point where these big celebrities and their teams responded to my emails. They recognized my personal brand.

Where it all started

Back in 2012, I started this journey by launching my personal blog, where I interviewed my favorite celebrities. One of the earliest people I interviewed was Congolese pop star Innoss'B, who has become a force to be reckoned with in the African entertainment scene. His song “Yope” has over 340 million views on YouTube (original and remix combined).

My first ever international singer to interview was Nyanda (of Brick & Lace), someone I grew up listening to, and their song “Love Is Wicked” is a classic in my playlist. It never leaves.

All of this happened on my WordPress blog. My biggest interview on the blog was with Hollywood music video director Hannah Lux Davis, who is known for working with world-famous stars like Ariana Grande, Drake, Nicki Minaj, Demi Lovato, Kehlani, The Weeknd, and many more.

Some of the biggest music videos you’ve ever watched have been directed by her; think of “Good Life” by G-Eazy and Kehlani for the Fast and Furious franchise, “The Night Is Still Young” by Nicki Minaj, or “7 Rings” by Ariana Grande.

Why it worked

When I approached her, I explicitly mentioned that the interview was for my personal blog, and she gladly accepted – at the height of her career. 

I had already made solid steps in building my personal brand. We discussed interesting stuff, from how she keeps in contact with her clients for better project outcomes to her career beginnings.

The interview would open even bigger doors for me. I still maintained the WordPress blog and kept going, to the point where I interviewed Apple’s original voice of Siri, Susan Bennett, and Rihanna’s backup dancers for the 2018 Grammys.

Whenever I pitched to international publications like Business Insider Africa and OkayAfrica, I used my personal blog as my portfolio. See where I am headed with this? As of 2026, this has translated into a robust social media presence (over 30k+ followers on LinkedIn, for instance) and citations in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. My Google Search presence is also solid. 

Most of the reputable publications I wrote for also used WordPress, and that made it easier for me to navigate digital publishing.

Now, let’s get to the steps to building a strong personal brand, as I did.

Start small. When you launch your blog (I’ll get into the technical steps in a bit), be ambitious but be willing to start with small projects, and incrementally aim higher.

I did this by interviewing celebrities who were within my reach in Kenya. I remember interviewing Elani, a popular band, back in 2014. I also interviewed Anita Nderu, who is a public figure in Kenya; at the time, she was regularly on NTV, presenting on Teen Republik.

These talented people graciously agreed to be my interviewees, long before I interviewed Hollywood A-listers. 

Media outreach

The next thing you need to do is also pitch to be interviewed by publications you admire. When I started my company, Tranquil Media Group, I was interviewed by Nation Media Group, The Room Worldwide, and even Kenya Airways’ Msafiri Magazine to talk about my brand. When people search for me on Google or ChatGPT, they can easily find out who I am… What I stand for and my career journey.

The key thing you need to do is to maintain momentum.

Maintaining momentum means publishing consistently, even when nobody's watching yet. Nobody saw my blog for the first year. I kept going anyway because I knew the body of work would matter more than any single post.

Now let's get into the actual setup, because none of this works without a place to publish.

Picking your platform

I built everything on WordPress.com, and I still recommend it to anyone starting from zero. It doesn't matter if your niche is entertainment, fashion, tech, fitness, or finance. The platform itself is niche agnostic.

What matters is that you own a space online that's entirely yours, something a LinkedIn post or Instagram caption can never give you. Algorithms change. Platforms shut down features. Your blog stays exactly where you left it.

Head to WordPress.com and sign up using your email. You'll be asked to choose a domain. Use your actual name if you're building a personal brand, not a business name or a clever handle.

Mine has been harunmomanyi.wordpress.com since 2012, and that consistency is part of why people can still find that early work today.

Choosing your plan

You can start on the free plan to test things out, but if you're serious about this becoming a portfolio that pitches editors on your behalf, I'd recommend moving to a paid tier early.

The Personal plan gets you a custom domain and removes WordPress branding from your site, which matters more than people think. When Hannah Lux Davis or any publication's editor clicks through to your blog, you want it looking like a real outlet, not a hobby project.

If you plan on growing an audience and want better analytics to track who's reading and sharing your interviews, Premium is worth the upgrade. It also unlocks payment buttons, which becomes useful later if you start accepting tips or running paid features.

Setting up your first posts

Don't overthink your first few pieces. My first interview wasn't with anyone famous. It was someone reachable, someone who said yes because I asked. That's the whole game early on. Reach out to people one or two steps above your current network, not twenty.

Structure your posts simply. A short introduction on why this person matters, the interview itself, and a closing thought. Readers and editors alike respond to clarity, not flourish.

Use categories from day one. Mine eventually became things like Interviews, Music, and Industry Features. This matters more than it seems, because it shapes how your site reads as an archive, not just a scattered collection of posts.

Protecting your work

Once your blog starts getting traction, spam comments and bot signups follow. I run Akismet in the background on my sites, and it quietly filters out the noise so I never have to think about it. For a blog that's meant to represent you professionally, that kind of housekeeping matters more than people realize until they're buried in junk.

The honest trade-off

WordPress.com isn't the only way to build a personal brand online, and it's worth being honest about where it falls short.

If your ambition is eventually running a full media company with custom functionality, like advanced membership systems, complex ad networks, or heavy third-party integrations, you'll eventually hit the platform's ceiling and need to look at self-hosted WordPress.org instead.

The free plan also still carries WordPress.com branding and ads, which can undercut the professional image you're trying to build with editors and brands. For me, the trade-off was worth it.

I needed something I could maintain consistently without fighting technical setup every step of the way, and WordPress.com gave me that. But if your goals are more ambitious from day one, go in knowing you may eventually outgrow it.

The part nobody tells you

Your blog won't open doors on day one. It took me years of consistent interviews, most of them with people nobody outside Kenya had heard of, before an editor at GRAMMY.com saw enough of a track record to trust me with a feature on Amapiano's biggest names. The blog wasn't the achievement. It was the proof.

Whatever your niche, the same principle holds. Publishers and brands don't take a chance on people with no body of work. They take a chance on people who've already been doing the work, visibly, consistently, somewhere they can verify it.

Start your blog this week. Pick someone within reach and ask for ten minutes of their time. Then do it again next month. That's the entire strategy. I just had a fourteen-year head start.