Starting a blog is both exhilarating and dread inducing. Getting your ideas out there is scary; friends will read, co-workers and complete strangers. One has to stand strong in their opinions when wanting to go public online. It also takes a fair amount of follow up to get some traffic. Always responding to comments, liking others’ posts, sharing your own posts on various social media channels, but once you get going, it’s all worth it. Finding your blog personality can be difficult; here are some tips on finding your blog voice.
There’s a big difference between a conversation voice, literature voice, celebrity gossip site voice or financial voice. It’s important to find your own voice and style because you want your blog to have as much personality as you do. It’s never a fun read when reading technical documents or bland books and a strong blogging voice helps you make every word count and helps readers to see your consistency across your body of work. Eventually the goal is to get readers to like your blog personality so much that they’ll ready anything with your name on it, as we all do with some authors that we love.
Design your blog for simple navigation and customize it to show your personality
- Background is important both because you want it to be appealing, but not distracting.
- A photograph of you and your family on vacation or of you and friends in a beautiful place
- A simple, unobtrusive pattern that provides texture but doesn’t take away from the words
- A map
- A literature object, such as a fountain pen, typewriter, or ream of paper
- A simple background such as your favorite color
Fonts, headliners and colors should all follow the same rules: simple, appealing and not distracting from the main content. Along with the design of the blog, name the blog to describe your main focus. Many blog titles bring humor or a fun play on words that make the readers chuckle.
Know who your target audience is.
It’s important to realize what demographic your target audience falls into.
Stay active in the blogging community. Make sure to connect with other bloggers, swap ideas and if need be even ask for advice. According to blogger, Srinivas Rao who wrote a guest post on the blog, writetodone about finding your blogging voice. A few examples of finding a voice:
- Steven@Human Explosion – started to draw caricatures of all the bloggers he knew. I loved that and now I actually will be reading his blog much more. He found his voice.
- Alex@Unleash Reality – started to go off the beaten path a bit when he wrote a really interesting article titledBuddhist Butchers and Adventures of Change
- Kelly Diels found her voice in this post on More On Mommy Blogging (or: Moron Mommy-Blogging)
Writing is like learning to write a bike, the more you practice the easier it will get and eventually your blog posts will be second nature. Blogging follows the advice we all get time and time again, just be yourself and they’ll love you. Now get out there and blog!
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