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- How to Write in a More Personal and Engaging Tone
Have you ever felt a personal connection with a blogger who you’ve never met and have no real reason to feel connection with?
You read their blog day after day and in time come to feel like you know them—as if their blog posts are almost written as private messages to you?
This has happened to me numerous times over the years. I almost end up feeling that the blogger is my friend, even though I’ve never actually had personal contact with them.
I’ve also been on the other side of that relationship quite a few times. I regularly meet people at conferences who come up and say that they feel like they know me despite my never having communicated with them directly. I still remember the day that a complete stranger ran up to me in tears at a conference and hugged me to within an inch of my life, because she felt she knew me so well.
It’s a slightly strange feeling having someone you don’t know share how connected they feel with you, but I’ve also noticed that it is those same people who become your biggest evangelists, buy your products, contribute to discussions in comments, and more.
That personal connection can bring a blog to life!
How can you foster this personal connection with readers?
I have a theory that some people are just more naturally able to blog in this way. However there are a number of tips that I think can help you to foster that personal connection—even if you’re not naturally wired that way.
1. Tell personal stories
I suspect that one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when it comes to personal connections is the use of personal story. Sharing your own stories on the topics you write about shows that you not only have a knowledge of your topic, but that you’ve experienced it also.
Stories makes you more relatable to people, too—instead of being some lofty, untouchable expert a story makes you someone who’s also still learning, and experiencing what your readers experience.
2. Write as you speak
This won’t suit everyone’s style of writing, but it’s what I always aim for in my writing. I’m pretty casual when talking to friends or even doing a public presentation, so I aim to bring that same tone and style into the writing of my posts. As a result, it’s rare that I get too formal.
3. Use personal language
A little technique that packs a lot of punch in terms of fostering connection is to incorporate language that makes the reader feel you’re talking to them.
An example of this is to use the word “you” as you write. Instead of writing, “here are ten tips for improving a blog,” write “here are ten tips you can use to improve your blog.”
Doing this moves what you say from the realm of theory, making it something that’s very applicable to the reader and their own experience.
4. Picture a person while you’re writing
A simple way to change the tone of your writing is to actually write your post with a person in mind. Chris Garrett talks about this a lot and encourages bloggers to visualize a person as they write. Similarly, I like to develop reader profiles, which I find helps me avoid writing for a nameless crowd of readers. It enables me to pitch my posts in a more personal way, based upon people’s actual needs and situations.
5. Base posts upon reader needs
Perhaps this is a little obvious, but the more you write about the real, felt needs and problems of readers, the more likely you are to connect with them on a personal level.
The fact is that you’ll be more likely to have people feeling connected if they feel that you understand what they’re trying to overcome. For this reason, I find that getting reader feedback through surveys, polls and by inviting questions can be a great help.
6. Using social media
I try to keep the vast majority (if not all) of my blog posts inline with the actual topics of my blogs. ProBlogger is about blogging, Digital Photography School is about photography … it’s rare that I get off topic.
However I do use my @ProBlogger Twitter account to talk about my life in the mix of talking about other topics. This seems to help with showing myself as a real person—a dad, a husband, a football fan, a geek … things people seem to relate to. Whether it’s Twitter or some other form of social media, or perhaps something else, if you have an outlet where you can share on a more personal level, it does seem to “humanize” you a little.
7. Multi-media
Similarly, using different forms of media has the potential to humanize you.
Using a picture of yourself on a blog puts a face to your name, and your writing.
Podcasts give your name a voice.
Video can not only put a face and voice to your online persona, but can also communicate a lot via your body language.
While it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, multi-media can certainly add something when it comes to building personal connections.
8. Attend events
One of the most powerful things I’ve done when it comes to building relationships with readers is attending events. These include conferences that relate to my industry (as well as blogging conferences) but also online events—whether they’re my own or other people’s.
For example, I semi-regularly try to do a Ustream chat session where I sit in front of a web cam and answer reader questions. I also participate on Twitter in the #blogchat hashtag weekly chat. All of these things build personal connections, and give people a chance to “meet” me in some way.
9. Get a reaction
I spoke with one ProBlogger recently at a meetup and she told me that she’d been reading this blog for a while, but never really felt part of things until the day she left her first comment. She reflected that there was something quite powerful about actually taking that step in terms of feeling a deeper connection.
That’s a story I’ve heard quite a few times over the years. It’s not always leaving a comment that does the trick—but any kind of action that a reader takes brings them a step closer to feeling some kind of sense of belonging. It could be subscribing to your blog, joining a forum, signing up for a notification, leaving a comment, voting in a poll, entering a competition, emailing the author, sharing a post on Twitter … any of these actions deepens the engagement at least a little.
What else deepens personal connection for you?
That’s enough of me talking. What has your experience been? Whether it’s your experience as a blogger reaching out to readers or as a blog reader feeling connected to other bloggers, what deepens that feeling of personal connection for you?
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
How to Write in a More Personal and Engaging Tone
Переслать - Improve Domain Authority for a Better Blog Ranking
This guest post is by R Kumar of dkspeaks.com.
One of the major sources of traffic for any blog today is organic traffic. While SEO is one of the major factors influencing organic search engine results, there is another aspect to this whole story which is often ignored. All of the efforts go into building links, and in doing that, we ignore this critical aspect.
If you are wondering what this aspect is, it’s domain trust and authority. In order for you newer content to be ranked well on Google, it is important that you build both domain trust and domain authority. Otherwise, your already established home page will get a few rankings, but your new content will seldom see good rankings.
For people who do not know what domain trust and authority is, let me explain these concepts.
Domain authority
Explained in simple terms, domain authority is about how many quality pages link to your domain, and how they link to you.
Improving domain authority can involve more than one task. You will not have to change the way you optimize your blog or, follow a different approach all together. Instead, all you have to do is change your process a bit.
Link juice
Like every other person working on building links, I used to comment, write articles, and exchange links with a link to my home page on the anchor text. Things didn’t move until I read an article on building diverse links to the same domain.
I changed my focus and started building links with relevant anchor texts to other pages in the blog. In doing so, I was building a lot of links to my domain name—not just to a single page. Results were good. My domain started to feature for a lot of high-search keywords on almost all the search engines.
When I mention linking and links here, it is not the number of links to a particular page on your blog that I’m talking about. Instead, it’s the number of links to your domain. So, how many links your domain gets as a whole is of extreme importance. At the same time, it’s also important that the links be from other domains and pages that have fewer outbound links from them.
Deep linking
When I built links to the inner pages on my blog, I didn’t realize initially that there was something else that I was doing at the same time.
I was telling the search engines that even the inner pages on my blog had valuable content, and that it should be ranked, too. Gradually I found that my inner pages were getting ranked on search engines. What this also did was ensure that my newest post was ranked much sooner that it was before I started this exercise.
It is not just important to build links. It is important to build deep links. The normal tendency when you build links is to build links to a particular page on your blog; usually it is the home page. We do everything including working on our anchor text, but we forget the fact that in order for us to build trust in the eyes of a search engine, we should have links pointing deep into the blog’s individual pages. Building trust into each of these pages will help build authority around your domain.
Diverse linking
Commenting on do-follow blogs is said to be a good way to obtain links. So people pick a handful of such blogs and keep commenting on them. I, too, did the same. But did this help? Absolutely not! I was creating links from the same domain again and again. Search engines were not impressed, because there was no diversity among those links.
I decided that I should deviate from the norm and do something different. I started building links from all kinds of domains—.org, .info, .edu, .net, .co.in, and so on. The domains were diverse and I did not restrict myself to the handful of do-follow blogs. It took a lot of hard work, but the results were slowly becoming evident. My blog moved up the search engine ranks much faster than I expected.
While the number of links to your domain is important, the kinds of domains that you’re getting these links from is also very important. The more diverse the domains, the better those links are for your domain authority. Hence it is important that you work on striking a balance between the number of links and the diversity of the domains that you are getting the links from.
Domain trust
It is important that the search engines trust that your domain provides value to visitors. It is only then that they will be interested in showing your latest content in their search results. But how is it that you will build this trust?
In order to build this trust, you need to ensure that you do not get involved in any kind of unethical practices. Unethical link building can prove disastrous to your blog.
Linking is one the biggest factors that influence how trustworthy your domain is seen to be.
The frequency of acquiring links, and the quality of the domains that are linking to you are, also equally important. If your new blog acquires a thousand links in just two or three days, it will not be difficult for Google to understand that there is something fishy going on. You can even be banned for spamming. At the same time, if the links you are getting are all from domains that are involved in spamming, the chances are that your domain will also be considered spammy.
You’ll likely receive emails that come from people claiming to be SEO experts for companies, requesting link exchanges. They would be ready to give you links from domains that they say have good PageRank. But It is important that you verify and check the quality of the domain and the PageRank before you accept the request—there are a lot of websites that can help you detect blogs and websites with fake PageRank. The fake page rank detection tool at http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/fake-rank-checker/ is one I use.
While the kinds of domains that you’re getting links from is important, it is also important to ensure that you do not link to any of these spammy domains. Since you have full control of your site and what shows up on it, linking to a spammy domain can be even worse than getting links from them.
If you can work on building domain trust and thus improve your domain authority, you will be able to get your latest content to appear on search engine results. What experiences have you had with these concepts as you’ve built links for your blog? Share them with us in the comments.
R Kumar is a blogger and Affiliate marketer. You can read more about Internet Entrepreneurship at his blog and subscribe to the RSS feeds to remain updated, or download his Internet marketing package.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
Improve Domain Authority for a Better Blog Ranking
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