One of the biggest challenges we face at Ghost Blog Writers is personality.
It’s important for content to have a personality.
Something that’s bland and monotone comes across in the writing. When that happens it seems that people are quicker to tune out and move on to something more interesting.
Growing up, it seemed like kids were told to write the monotone, but everything we read, watched and consumed that was interesting to us had personality. The best books have emotion that is both relatable and fresh.
Our favorite movies have characters with flaws and struggles.
Those are the things that are important to include in writing and that includes blogging.
Personality Doesn’t Mean Acting Crazy
There are two sides to adding personality. Finding a balance between the two seems to be where you’ll have the best results.
First, injecting personality into your writing doesn’t mean that you need to act crazy. Yes, some people are crazy with really outgoing and outlandish personalities. They’ll say ridiculous things all the time and it’s fun and funny and enjoyable.
But not everybody is that way and you really can’t fake it. And people don’t want you to fake it. And they don’t want to read from people that are crazy all the time.
The other side of things is removing your personality. This is the one that’s a challenge for us at GBW and for me personally. When we write something we’ll try to stick to the facts, which is good and it gets results, but we always feel that we could add more to the post.
This is the feeling that people usually get when they’re blogging for a business. They remove emotion. Or they remove emotion early on and then hear that they should add personality and they go too far and act crazy.
Embrace Your Natural Personality And Language
I’ve tried to embrace my own weirdness more and more recently. Instead of hiding in the background and sticking to the facts with blog posts I’ve tried to let my personality come out naturally.
And it seems to have worked out pretty well. I’ll get more emails about specific posts or when new inquiries come in it seems like they already know me because they’ve read posts or read something on social media that I’ve posted that has included a little of my personality.
I’ve found that telling stories seems to work well. I might share a few details about my recent wedding or my love for golf. I find that when I share these stories that my natural language comes out. I’ll use words that I use in real life when I’m talking to friends and family. That language helps sell the story and it makes a connection with the reader.
And we’ve started doing this with our clients. We’ll write posts with the idea of making sure we have the right research and facts, but we’ll talk to the clients and read their emails. We’ll ask them for a story or something that we can include in the post.
For example, it might be a post for a software company. We’ll ask for a story about how they’ve used it or maybe a story about what a client has told them about it.
We listen to that experience and share the story and the language in the post. It seems to work out well.
Final Thoughts
Adding personality is good, but you don’t have to take it too far by acting crazy. That’s the normal for some, but not for all. Embrace your normal and your weirdness. Tell stories from your experiences and let your natural language come out in the writing. Damn writing rules and use the language your normally use.
This shows the real you and that connects with people. They get to know you. They get to trust you and that, we’ve found, is what leads to sales when it comes to business blogging: Trust.