In the sea of content, competing for the attention of your audience, your blog needs to sizzle with personality in order to stand out and make a lasting impression.
Remember even if you offer the best suggestions and advice when delivered badly, is not going to make the slightest of an impression.
When a reader first visits your blog, they evaluate your content to see if you are worth their time. If you lack a blog theme, you will not be able to build a strong personality that can pass through reader’s screening tests resulting in your content being ignored and eventually forgotten.
So how do you add personality to your blog and how do you give it a voice? Here are some tips:
1. Don’t be Switzerland – take a stand
Well, the hate comments and reviews you receive when you take a stand can be demoralizing and so, often, it’s easy to take a neutral position and write content that is devoid of opinions. But what you are really doing is diluting your content’s potential and by extension, your blog’s personality.
In fact, strong and powerful influencers or brands always have negative judgments following them around. Taking neutral positions just to dodge them isn’t going to help you build a blog with a personality.
Your experiences, your perspective, and your learnings are your own. Present them to your crowd unadulterated and undiluted.
Additionally, the way you express your opinion matters too. When saying something that goes against the popular belief, instead of throwing a rude short statement at your readers, explain why you think the way you do.
One of the best exercises to get an understanding of the kinds of opinions your blog might generate – start from your own team.
Share your blog content with your team, collect and interpret the different shades of opinions that your team members might form after reading your blog. It helps to prepare arguments in advance to tackle potential criticisms. This gives a distinct personality to your blog of not only giving hard hitting opinions but also proudly standing beside them.
In the end, users might not agree with you but they will respect you and your opinions – that’s just damn good PR.
2. Build a niche audience
Many bloggers want to cater to a large ‘general audience’, instead of figuring what is it that they can best offer and what type of audience would resonate with their messages.
So the first thing to do is to understand what type of people you can and want to cater to. Figuring that out will help you discover your niche.
Instead of supplying vague generic content for everyone’s appeasement, provide super high-quality content that might interest relatively fewer people. This is your target audience and they are worth your time. Because these audiences are the ones that will get you real results be it through shares or profits.
To find your niche audience, carry out regular customer feedback surveys. They help you understand your target audience’ tastes and preferences better. Using the insights, you can come up with blog topics which are relevant to their taste.
Creating a blog personality or brand that resonates with both you and your audience is important; it allows genuine engagement among a niche audience, providing quality over quantity.
3. Write in the first person and offer narratives and anecdotes
Sentences like ‘One must never eat after 6 PM’, ‘One must sleep for 8 hours’ etc. sound very distant and preachy. Using objective language like that can put a barrier between you and the reader.
Alternatively, using ‘I’ and ‘You’ completely changes the tone of the content and is so much more engaging.
Also, writing in a narrative, conversational style is much lighter than a bookish style of writing. If your audience wanted to read white papers and newspaper pieces, they wouldn’t have come to a blog, would they?
Anecdotes are another powerful way to offer advice and connect with your audience. It can help you communicate who you are as a person and what your blog stands for. Plus, a good anecdote gives validity to whatever advice/tips/suggestions you are giving on the blog.
The only way to have a lasting impression is to get creative with your content and stories/anecdotes are the best way to do that.
4. Be shockingly authentic
If you take facts into your hands and add a pinch of your imagination to over-inflate them so that they will make for a good read, then not only will your blog have no personality but it will be considered a fake and will be filtered out as nonsense.
Spicing up your content so that the readers find it enjoyable is fine, but if you are blending facts and fiction to give advice and opinions, then your blog will become an inauthentic source of information or judgments.
Also, in another sense of authenticity, staying true to your original voice can help a lot too.
If being sarcastic and sassy is your thing, go for it, if you like writing formally then that is okay too. Just staying true to your style of articulation will most certainly lend your blog personality.
5. Incorporate emotions to give your content character
Exposing your vulnerabilities through your writing always lends character to your content.
For example, say you want to talk about a social cause that you deeply care about on your blog, telling your story and adding emotion to your writing will inspire your readers and motivate them to action, as opposed to bland articles with facts and figures.
When you can use your writing to trigger emotions in your readers, that’s when you are truly doing a great job at building your blog’s brand perception.
Instead of being wishy-washy, express emotions and opinions on a given topic. Clearly, demonstrate your attitude and complement them with personal stories if possible.
6. Practice writing hygiene
Amateur writing never gives a good impression. I don’t mean for you to use the most impressive sophisticated vocabulary when writing, but practicing well-learned writing is a good start.
Use punctuation, follow grammar rules to the best extent possible, and most of all proofread your work.
Reckless writing implies you are not as invested as you should be in your blog. Without practicing a hygienic writing etiquette, neither will you be considered a professional blogger nor a trustworthy source.
Often times bloggers get blinded by emotions and cannot access the tidiness of their writing. One of the ways bloggers can solve this problem is through getting a fresh point of view.
More fresh eyes, more new perspectives. But, make sure the number of people is ‘Just enough’ to give a great feedback and not ‘more’ which might change the entire essence of the blog because, in the end, it is still ‘your’ blog.
Once you have drafted your blog(s) share it with your entire team using collaborative tools – encourage other team members to fine tune the writing so it looks crisp and clean.
This helps give you new perspectives every time you write a blog which in turn reflects on your blogs as well, giving your blog a dynamic and engaging personality.
Wrapping up
Your blog’s personality cannot be built in a day; it is a slow brick-by-brick process and to succeed at it, you must incorporate your efforts to establish a personality in your daily blogging routine. for example, every time you write a piece, check to see if it resonates with your blog’s voice and if you stay consistent at it then before you know it your blog will become a brand of its own.