Although you might have created your blog to make money, whether from advertising, affiliate marketing, or other, your blog should still represent you. This is an important idea that a lot of blog owners miss.

It’s easy to tell the difference

You can tell between a blog written by someone who wants profit, or a blog written by someone who just loves what they do.A lot of aspects can lead to your conclusion on this matter. The appearance of the blog can be very personal, or it can be a generic blog layout used a million times on the web. Your blog theme should be personal. I’m not saying that you should go out and buy a professional blog designer, even though that would help a lot, but you should do your best to make your blog personal. The quality, and standpoint, of content can have a lot to do with it. There are blog posts that are informative and well written, and then there are blog posts that are information, well written, and personal. You are allowed to use the word ‘I’ in your blog posts. You can talk about youself, your experiences, and what you have learned.

A good example

A good example of a personal blog is http://yoast.com. The main author of yoast – Joost de Valk – does a good job making his blog personal but also very informative. Think of it this way. Would you be more likely to click Read More… when you read this: (taken from one of Joost de Valk’s posts)

I’ve recently had some fun with developing the TwitterCounter API (to which we’ve added Twitter Rank yesterday) and my first Mint Pepper for it, and I decided it was time to add another milestone to my development career.

Or this:

The TwitterCounter API has been released! Twitter Rank has been added to it. A Pepper for Mint has also been developed.

Most likely, you would rather read the first one. This is because this post opening is personal and it grabs the attention of the user. The user will feel like you are speaking directly with them.

Get to know your users

Another important part of making your blog personal is getting to know your users. You can communicate with users on comments or with Twitter. There are lots of other ways, but these are both very easy to do. Getting to know your users can help you learn more about what users want to see on your blog and more about why users use your blog. This will help you make your blog better and increase the number of users. Also, anyone who you get to know will probably come back to your blog. Having a group of frequent readers is important to having a good blog.

I’m at fault

I am writing this article because I am now, after around 40 posts, noticing that my content is lack luster. My articles aren’t very personal. I am getting a good amount of traffic (~100 hits a day, this is good on my standards), but not a lot of comments or user interaction. I think that if I make my blog posts more personal, people will be able to connect to what I am saying and will then leave comments. I can then get to know them, and the cycle repeats. :-)

Tags: Creating Websites, Personal Blog