Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

Blogging about yourself is easy. It encourages you to give personal opinions and open up about your feelings. Unfortunately, this means less time spent talking about facts that you know for certain, or that are useful for the readers. Furthermore, it can easily detract from your sense of authority. There’s a reason scientific papers don’t start out with “In my opinion…”

A balance should be maintained in blogging, between the personal perspective and the businesslike perspective. Not only in writing style, but in your overall attitude about the blog. If it’s too personal of an object in your life, you may shy away from trying things that are risky, daring, or dumb to some of the readers. These may be the very things that you need to do to make good money, and even increase the stature of your blog.

When viewed from a business perspective, you look at the blog as a vehicle for wealth to arrive at your door. One of many, perhaps. If you sell your blog, your wife is not going to divorce you, nor are your children going to starve. In fact, the money can be invested in better equipment and you may easily go back to blogging, or to something bigger and better.

If your blog were to leave your control, whether because you sold it or because you couldn’t keep up with it, you would simply have lost a particular business resource. It’s a whole different category of emotion and reality. Readers may feel that this is letting them down, but as a point of fact, the service they receive is a luxury in life, not a necessity — and they can certainly find a replacement. As a blogger, you are replaceable.

However, there is a line to walk. Get too businesslike in mindset and you lose that feeling of passion, together with friendliness and rapport with readers. These are incredibly valuable for building a following in the blogging world — essential, in fact. In academic or business-only environments, you can get away with the pretense of being completely impersonal. But for blogging, it is simply not enough to be an authority — you must be an interesting authority.

One way to retain some personality in writing is to use the second-person more liberally, first-person conservatively, and third-person in moderation. The first-person usually comes across weaker, as it invites the reader to question the statement. It furthermore invites the writer to speculate more wildly, as they no longer have to back up their statement as rigorously. Third-person is much less personable than second-person. A professional blogger should probably use third-person less than second-person, but not so rarely as first-person.

Using the first person can emphasize the fact that what you’re writing is opinion only, and not necessarily fact. It shows humility and willingness to negotiate — admirable qualities in day-to-day social interaction. However, the fact is that most of what shows up on your blog is going to be opinion regardless of how it is phrased. And if you really are convinced that an earlier article is wrong, you can retract it later, no matter how authoritatively you phrased it. In fact, you will probably get more respect for retracting something stated authoritatively than something that was merely an opinion to start with.

Another strategy for retaining personality is to use first-person more in certain types of communication where establishing authority is not so essential as evoking a positive emotional connection. Good examples are comments, forum posts, and direct personal communications with readers. This is where readers have the most right to take it personally — when you are dealing with them one-on-one. Friendliness and humility are always a good thing there, and lacking it will almost certainly get you in trouble.

In the long run, even if you care deeply about your readers, it’s important to bear in mind that they have lives outside your blog. They are independent human beings, and you don’t have the same monopoly on their time that their real friends do. They are business contacts, leads, clients, or customers. They have no really deep-set duty to you, or vice versa — it is all motivated by profit and value received. If you provide value to a customer, they provide you with profit.

That’s about all there is to it.

Related posts:

1. What Do I Owe You?
2. 3 Good Ways to Title Your Post

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under blogging, business, philosophy of success, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.